Meet the Team

Name: Kevin Ramm

Job Role: Head of Sustainability

Length of Service: 2 years and 5 months

What attracted you to Muddy Boots? The impressive list of customers served for a modest-sized organisation - covering major brands and the essential, but less recognised, food businesses that supply them. I was also impressed by the expansive coverage of the products - spanning the entire value chain and addressing the key needs of farm and food businesses.

Tell us about your work history? I've been lucky enough to work with some great organisations - Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, SAP, and Carbon Trust - implementing enterprise digital solutions across 3 different continents. My earlier career was as a business transformation consultant in supply chain and manufacturing - engaged in or managing multi-million projects for multinational businesses. For the last 16 years, I’ve been working as a sustainability professional focussed on the food and beverage sector. I had followed environmental issues during my time at university and in my forties made a big decision to find a path into sustainability work. I was fortunate enough to be accepted onto an amazing MSc course in Environmental Change and Management. On completion I successfully made my career change into sustainability, working with food businesses on tools to measure sustainability impacts and find reduction opportunities.

What does your typical working day look like? Full and varied! With so many angles and opportunities for sustainability at TELUS Agriculture and Consumer Goods, every day brings something different. The core part of my work is on product strategy, solution innovations and customer proposals. I'm passionate about sustainability and the work I do, so I often end the day with a quick reflection on each bit of progress we made to contribute to a set of hugely important issues.

What's an interesting fact about you? I once ran a start-up social enterprise called Crocodile - we were prize-winners in an international competition enabling and promoting active travel choices for the school commute.

Who would be your ideal dinner party guest and why? Sir David Attenborough - a British broadcaster who is somewhat of an institution in the UK known for exceptional nature documentaries. More recently he has proven to be an ambassador for climate change and biodiversity campaigns and policies. I’d love to get the opportunity to hear first-hand about the many fascinating places he’s visited and animals he’s encountered, and to congratulate him for the impact he’s making in educating people, governments and businesses about the risks that we face and need to act on.

What's your favourite food? That's a tough question - I enjoy so many different types of food having lived in a few countries and travelled fairly well. Cashew and veggie stir fry features a lot in our home cooking repertoire. My wife is of Indian descent, so I’ve been fortunate enough to experience a lot of delicious home-cooked authentic Indian food. Ultimately though, my favourite food has to be food that is certified sustainable.

What makes you passionate about food/farming? The importance of food to society - clearly it's essential to life, but food means so much more than that to most people. Meals are where people most often commune and something that brings pleasure. For sustainability, food is an area where many of us can bring clear signals and regular influence on protecting the planet - through the day-to-day choices we make on what food we purchase.

With farming, I see the significance of agriculture on our landscape and society. Half of the earth's habitable land is used for agriculture and a quarter of jobs globally are in agriculture. What makes me particularly passionate about the sector though is the range of impacts food and farming have on natural systems and the exciting opportunities for new practices and technology-enabled improvements.

Any skills or talents that people don’t know about? I represented the UK in international hang gliding competitions.

What advice do you wish you had been given early in your career? Follow your passion. I chose my first degree based on what will give me the best chance of a good job, not what I really felt excited about spending my life doing.

Finish this sentence: on Sunday mornings you usually find me…Making waffles for our family breakfast and then either taking my daughter to a sports fixture or doing one of the many outdoor activities I enjoy - surfing, cycling, running, or walking.

What is one item you can’t leave your house or apartment without? Hug from my wife.

Describe yourself in three words…Energetic, adventurous, egalitarian - being kind to myself here.

What publications do you regularly read or what book are you reading now? I read a lot of articles on LinkedIn and other sources on food and farm sustainability. There's so much material these days that I can't keep up. I'm currently reading Brave