News - Kelly Shields
Kelly Shields - Head of Technical & Agronomy
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Kelly Shields as our Head of Technical & Agronomy. You may already know or have come across Kelly as she has been our Technical Consultant for the last three years. Kelly is from a Lincolnshire farming family and is a well known and highly regarded Technical professional in the food industry. She has a degree in Agriculture from Newcastle University and her first job was as Technical Manager for the Oldershaw Group (Moulton Bulb Company). Kelly’s professional qualifications included BASIS (Vegetables) and Advanced Food Hygiene to Level 4. She went on to take an MSc in HACCP along with various teacher training courses which qualified her to become a part-time lecturer in Food Safety & HACCP at Lincoln University. The remainder of her time has been spent as a Technical Consultant for around a dozen clients in the food industry ranging from fresh produce to bakery and meat. We recently put Kelly through a Field 2 Fork course so she is now also qualified to audit our growers for this Marks & Spencer growing protocol. Kelly also has extensive experience in preparing growers/packers/processors/food-manufacturers for BRC, Assured Produce, M&S Field to Fork, Tesco Nurture, EurepGap, LEAF etc.
Over the past few years Kelly’s workload with us has increased considerably so she has now come on board and will be based at our Spalding office. Kelly has informed all her other clients that she now works for Nationwide with the exception of Lincoln University. We have agreed that she will continue to occasionally lecture in Food Safety & HACCP at Lincoln University which is a mutually beneficial arrangement as it will keep her abreast of developments in her chosen field.
At our Dutch division Vitaal, Melissa Coenradie achieved 100% score on a recent BRC audit for our packing & cold-storage facility at De Lier. Please note Melissa will remain the main point of contact for technical issues for our Dutch suppliers.
Kelly’s appointment is a further sign of our commitment to Food Safety and a welcome addition to the team.