Imaginative Teaching Resources & Inspirational Career Ideas from the Chilled Food Industry
Chilled Education marks its 15th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, we speak to Charlotte Patrick, CFA Operations Manager and lead of the Chilled Education programme, about how she got involved, what drives the programme’s approach, and the moments that have stayed with her.
Q: How did you first get involved with Chilled Education?
A: I ran trade associations back in the early 2000s, and that’s how I first got to know CFA’s Director Karin. When I finished running trade associations and moved to Northampton, we stayed in touch, including through the Ambassador scheme run by Northamptonshire Enterprise Partnership (NEP), where Karin was one of the ambassadors. I supported Chilled Education informally with events and resources for a number of years before I joined CFA formally.
Q: What led to your daughters becoming your “mini scientists”?
A: Morgan and Tilly have grown up alongside Chilled Education. It started with simple experiments at home, but they’ve since become properly hands-on – helping test new experiments before they go out to schools and joining me at events like our stand at the Cadets event, where they get stuck in with visitors. They started young, and they’ve grown to enjoy it – Tilly even helped me run a handwashing demonstration at her primary school for other students. They’re 15 and 12 now.
Q: You joined CFA formally in January 2023 -what does your role involve?
A: I work three days a week, and part of my role is progressing everything to do with Chilled Education alongside my wider CFA responsibilities. Since joining I’ve created further resources from our lesson plans, such as guides to help set up experiments for science clubs, put together leaflets and a calendar of themed events for teachers – so whenever they want to link science or food tech into what’s happening that week, whether that’s International Pizza Day or Hummus Day, there’s a ready-made way in.
Q: What is Chilled Education there to do, at its heart?
A: One of our straplines has always been to put the wow back into science, because for a lot of people, science doesn’t feel relevant to everyday life. We build every experiment around something you’d find in a store cupboard, so there’s a direct link to the food science and technology the industry actually uses.
Q: Can you give an example of how that works in practice?
A: Our marshmallow and syringe demonstration is the one people remember, and it’s still our most popular store cupboard science experiment – often the simplest ones give the biggest wow moments. You put a mini marshmallow in a syringe, seal the end with your finger, and pull back the plunger, and the change in pressure makes the marshmallow expand. For younger students that’s simply a great trick; for older students, we take it further and connect it to modified atmosphere packaging – the technology that keeps a bagged salad fresh. It works at every age, and it’s a perfect example of what we’re trying to do more broadly: bring the food into the science, and the science into the food.
Q: How do you help students understand the range of roles in the sector?
A: One activity we use is asking students to guess how many different roles it takes to make a chicken salad, from the farmer growing the ingredients through to processing, quality checks, logistics and retail. Nobody ever guesses correctly. It really opens people’s eyes to how many people and disciplines sit behind something as ordinary as a supermarket sandwich.
Q: What facts about the sector tend to surprise students most?
A: That it’s such a big employer – more than 100,000 people work in it, producing around 15,000 different chilled food products, worth over £10 billion. Most students I talk to have eaten several chilled products in the last week alone without realising it, because most of what’s on the shelf is sold under retailer own-label rather than the manufacturer’s name. Very few have heard of some of the largest organisations unless they have a relative working there.
Q: What’s been the biggest challenge in your work with schools?
A: Simply linking in with schools can be a challenge. We look at how our resources and presentations can be used across different themes and topics from Food Tech to Careers or Science to National Apprenticeships to ensure relevancy to students and teachers. We’re currently looking at how we can develop our resources to support work experience opportunities within a classroom environment.
Q: Is there a highlight that particularly stands out for you?
A: Watching that moment when a student realises they’ve just done real science, almost by accident, playing with a marshmallow and a syringe. We get queues at our stand at events purely from word of mouth, with kids bringing their friends over to have a go. Meeting Princess Anne (should it be the Princess Royal?) at the Conversation with Cadets event was also a brilliant moment for the team.
Q: What would you say to a student thinking about a career in food?
A: There’s science all around us, in everything we eat, and it’s genuinely exciting – new products, new challenges, constant change. You could have a fantastic career in the food sector without ever having thought about it as an option, and that’s exactly what Chilled Education is here to change.