Campaign Lead

The Food Foundation is an award winning charity with a vision of a sustainable food system which delivers health and well-being for all. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace where every team member feels valued and empowered. We believe that embracing Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) is fundamental to our success and the positive impact we make.

We are now recruiting a Campaign Lead. The job will play a leading role in driving forward and helping to scale up an exciting new three-year campaign and programme of work funded by the National Lottery working to boost consumption of beans, legumes and pulses in the UK. Beans are a win-win-win for health, environmental and affordability objectives, and yet despite this consumption is very low in the UK. The Food Foundation, alongside partners Veg Power, Kent Student Union and close collaborators Beans is How, University of Kent, and Birmingham City Council are working to change this and aiming to double UK bean consumption by 2028.

The programme began in May 2025 and encompasses the following workstreams, which together aim to change perceptions around beans and shift the food environment so that options with beans are more available and appealing:

1. A creative and impactful public facing digital campaign to drive demand, raise awareness of the brilliance of beans and get people inspired about cooking with beans. The target audience for the digital campaign is 18-35 year olds. We ll focus on chefs and other digital influencers given their role in shaping food trends and menus and create digital assets to share on social media and with community, membership and youth organisations to create a wider movement to boost appeal. We are working with ARK agency on the creative campaign.

2. Build a community of action among national food businesses by obtaining commitments to increase sales and servings of beans, working with businesses on evidence-based actions they can take to boost sales/servings of beans to support them to reduce their scope 3 emissions and hit healthy & sustainable diet objectives.

3. Run a schools programme to reach families and their kids. We ll focus on children in 750 primary schools in the lower half of the deprivation scale in England, Scotland and NI, working to engage caterers, teachers and parents to drive increased uptake.

4. We ll activate the campaign in two places, University of Kent and Birmingham, working closely with local partners to do so and scale the learnings nationally.

The role will be placed in our campaigns team, working closely with our comms team and food business transformation team to ensure the digital and public campaign is successful. You ll be working to enlist supporters and influencers to scale the size and reach of the campaign and create a broader community of action and support, engaging with community and youth organisations to increase awareness of our campaign and ensure our toolkit of bean assets is embedded in organisations across the UK, and building strong relationships with media partners, brands and platforms to expand our reach.

Main duties

- Supporting the Head of Campaigns with outreach to community and youth organisations to build a broader community of action on beans

- Attending meetings to pitch the campaign to new partners

- Supporting our Head of Campaigns and partner organisation Veg Power to enlist, manage and brief chefs and influencers supporting the campaign

- Working closely with our creative agency and comms team to coordinate, implement and evaluate the digital campaign, especially on social media

- Engaging and building strong relationships with media partners and outlets to ensure beans are part of the conversation and in editorial content plans

- Working with our Food Business Transformation team to explore opportunities for the digital campaign to support business engagement (and vice versa) and activation of the campaign at a local level

- Working with the Food Business Transformation Team to develop a way to monitor and evaluate the actions taken by stakeholders

- Coordinating with project partners and other supporting organisations to align campaigning and communication activities

- Exploring and creating opportunities to amplify the campaign beyond its core activities, with a particular focus on reaching our target demographic of 18-35 year-olds.