15 Years of Chilled Education: In Conversation with Karin

Chilled Education marked its 15th anniversary in September 2026. To celebrate the occasion, we speak to Karin Goodburn MBE Hon FIFST, CFA Director General, who founded the programme and has led it from the very beginning.

Q: Take us back to the beginning – how did CFA come about, and how does that connect to Chilled Education?

A: CFA was launched at the Chilled Food Fair at the NEC in May 1989. I joined 10 days before that launch, recruited by the Food and Drink Federation, through which a working group of chilled food producers had been formed to tackle Listeria monocytogenes. I’d originally been brought in to run the spice and seasoning associations, but on my first day I was given this new Chilled Food remit in addition.

The timing mattered. The previous year had seen a major listeriosis outbreak linked to imported Belgian pate – nothing to do with the sector we represent, but the political and media fallout was intense, with government inquiries including the landmark Richmond report. My job was to establish industry-wide standards for best practice in chilled food production, and get buy-in from retailers, distributors and government. We launched the guidelines and CFA’s associated factory accreditation scheme on 14 December 1989, with the then Minister for Food Safety, David Maclean (now Lord Blencathra), doing the honours.

Our accreditation scheme set up alongside the guidelines was the model used to become what is now the BRCGS global standard for food safety. CFA became a Company Limited by Guarantee in January 1991, to protect members from the liability of putting their name behind that safety guarantee.

Those early years were all about building standards and getting the industry to take them seriously. We had already in the mid-90s developed our handwash training posters in numerous key languages, which are still in use today. Chilled Education was then formed officially in 2011, since having all of our various guidance and standards requirements wasn’t enough – we also needed a pipeline of people coming into the industry who ideally understood them from the start.

Q: Chilled Education launched in 2011. What led to that?

A: We’d been running our first SUSSLE (Sustainable Shelf Life Extension) Project since 2008. As that first SUSSLE project drew to a close, I took the opportunity to seek the support of CFA’s Board for activity to help address my (and members’) increasing concerns about the chilled careers pipeline need. I put to CFA’s Board that without action, the sector would be left with a workforce problem nobody else was going to solve so we had to work together to address it.

With the Board’s backing, I began developing a suite of food science lesson plans for Key Stages 1-4, firstly with specialist teachers through Laura Jane Rawlings and subsequently the Design & Technology Association, drawing on my own background in microbiology from my first degree and having by then worked in food science for a significant period of time (more than 25 years as it turns out!). Our first public outing as Chilled Education took place in March 2011 at the John Innes Institute in Norfolk where we trialled early activities including Glo-germ handwashing kits, nanobug tattoos, hands-on demonstrations of correct fridge temperatures and food safety basics.

Q: How did the programme grow from there?

A: We built it out steadily – careers resources, science-driven food-focused lesson plans developed with subject specialists, and in the summer of 2012, Micro Trumps, a food-safety-themed educational card game I developed with a local designer, using licensed Nanobugs

Throughout, the aim was to build an essential repository of resources that CFA members and CFA’s Chilled STEM Ambassadors could take into local schools – creating local hubs of engagement between industry and education, including support for Big Bang Fairs. We had great in-person support from CFA members at events, with more than 30 becoming Chilled STEM Ambassadors over time. We won the FDF Education Initiative Award for the first time in 2014.

Charlotte Patrick joined to help deliver the programme around 2018. Not long after, COVID hit, and we pivoted the whole programme online – videos and store-cupboard science experiments families could do at home, curriculum-linked and designed to keep children both occupied and learning during lockdown. We won the FDF Education Initiative Award again in 2021 and 2024 – a hat trick!

Q: What are you proudest of from the past 15 years?

A: Two things stand out for me. First, the recognition: we’ve won the FDF Education Award multiple times. Second, something more personal – a meeting with then-Minister Therese Coffey, whose officials had picked up on our work distributing around 150,000 fridge thermometers in her briefing notes. Seeing that detail land in a ministerial brief told me the message was travelling well beyond the classroom. I still have fridge temperature performance on my list of things to sort out, with another round of research I’ve triggered currently in the offing.

More than anything, though, I think of the number of people I know of who are now in management roles across the industry who first encountered chilled careers and chilled food science as students through this programme. That’s the real evidence of a pipeline having been built, even as government curriculum changes have repeatedly put the wider pipeline at risk.

Q: What’s been the hardest part of building this?

A: Two things, for me. The first is reaching science teachers. There’s an informal hierarchy of perceived seriousness among school science subjects – physics first, then chemistry, then biology – and food often gets dismissed as “just cooking” rather than science. In practice, a lot of what we do is physics: thermodynamics, thermal processing, chilling. The Food Teachers Centre, run by Louise Davies, has been a key partner in reaching food teachers specifically, and Sam Holyman, an award-winning Chartered Science Teacher has been pivotal in reaching the broader science teacher community both through resources she’s developed with us and outreach.

The second is finding people in industry with the time to volunteer as Chilled STEM Ambassadors. Chilled Education was never designed for CFA to deliver alone – it was built around CFA member businesses giving their people time to go into schools. That’s harder in what I think of as an invisible sector: most chilled food carries a retailer’s own-label branding, so the businesses that actually make it rarely get public recognition.

Q: Looking ahead – what would you like to see over the next 15 years?

A: I’d like to see broader industry engagement, partly because of the scale of the challenge ahead: climate change is already affecting UK crop growing conditions, and a warmer, (and potentially) damper climate means faster pathogen and spoilage organism growth, with knock-on food safety implications as well as sheer ability to produce quality crops in quantity. I’d like to see far more food microbiology training built into food science degree courses, and food hygiene education starting earlier in school – something I believe is currently addressed only at Key Stage 1. The related A-level was scrapped roughly in 2016, severing part of the pipeline from school to university.

One specific to do on my list: a dedicated induction course for people entering the chilled food sector – a broader and deeper CFA initiative rather than a Chilled Education one specifically, aimed at ensuring people arrive in demanding industry roles with core food safety knowledge already in place.