Professor Christine Tacon CBE

Background

Christine Tacon CBE is the Chair of Assured Food Standards who operate the Red Tractor Assurance scheme. She has decades of experience as a leader and advocate for the British food and farming industry and with an extensive background in change management, regulation and the food chain.

Christine started her professional career as an engineer and then moved into marketing working at organisations including Mars, Vodafone and Anchor (now Fonterra). For more than 10 years, she ran the Co-operative Group’s farming business- the largest of its kind in the UK and more recently was a director of the AF Group, a farm purchasing co-operative, for 9 years.  In 2004, she was awarded a CBE for services to agriculture.

She is also Chair of the BBC Rural Affairs Committee and Chair of MDS Ltd – a management training scheme for the food and fresh produce industry with nearly 100 trainees on the 2-year programme. And also is a Trustee of the Farmers Club Charitable Trust.

Until October 2020, Ms Tacon was the Groceries Code Adjudicator, a government regulator responsible for overseeing the implementation of the Groceries Supply Code of Practice by large grocery retailers in their dealings with direct suppliers.