Last month I had the pleasure of joining a panel at the Royal Cornwall Show, hosted by the brilliant Debbie from Wild Wine School, to talk about women in Cornwall's food and drink industry.

Alongside me were some women whose work I've admired for a long time: Rose, former Head Chef at Coombeshead Farm, Ruth Huxley from Great Cornish Food Store, and Rebecca Tonks from St Ewe Eggs. (Bit of a pinch me moment to be on a stage with these brilliant people may I add)

We started with a simple question: What advantages do women bring to the industry?

The answers were pretty similar. Multitasking. Communication. Emotional intelligence. The ability to juggle, adapt and build relationships. The sort of skills that often get labelled as "soft", despite being responsible for getting an extraordinary amount done.

Aside from being in awe of the women I shared the stage with, I really enjoyed speaking about a subject that's so relevant to what I do, but that I don't often stop to think about properly. Not just because I have a daughter, but because I've lived both the benefits and the frustrations of being a woman in food and drink. From the sexism I experienced in professional kitchens, to the occasional "So... who actually, you know, runs the distillery?" that Daisy and I still get today, there are moments that remind you we're not quite there yet.

What I enjoyed most about the panel, though, was talking about what we can actually do. The conversation turned to apprenticeship schemes, mentoring, training opportunities through initiatives like Great Cornish Food's Academy, opening doors for people coming into the industry, and creating workplaces where more people feel like they belong.

Forty-five minutes wasn't going to solve all the Big Issues of course, but making space for conversations like this feels very necessary in itself.

I think it's incredibly important that we name the problem. Women remain underrepresented in commercial kitchens, manufacturing, leadership and business ownership. Only around one in five chefs and head cooks in the UK are women. Women continue to be underrepresented in senior manufacturing and production roles across the food and drink sector. The gender pay gap persists across hospitality, and is widest in leadership positions. 14% of SMEs are founded by women. Female business leaders receive around 2% of UK venture capital funding. And according to the UK government's own research, if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men, it could unlock around £250 billion (🤯) of additional value for the UK economy. (the reasons for all this are, of course, are either that women just aren't as good at/don't want to these things- which I find hard to believe- or that there are some structural issues going on.)

In my little universe, exhibit A: People sometimes ask how I balance childcare with running a business. It's a perfectly reasonable question, and one I'm so happy to answer. At the same time, I can't help noticing that my male counterparts are rarely asked the same question.

Being a mum has undoubtedly made me better at running a business. I'm more organised, more decisive and probably far better at prioritising than I was before. It has also made things harder. Those kind of experiences shouldn't be hidden, but nor should they define us. 

Personally, I've think lasting change comes from acknowledging the barriers while remaining excited about the possibilities.

I don't believe a bottle of gin is inherently better simply because it was made by a woman. But I do believe that everything we create, whether it's a spirit, a piece of writing, a film or a business, is shaped by the experiences we've had and the way we've moved through the world. So of course a bottle developed by a team of women is likely to look, feel and probably even taste different to one developed by a team of men. Not because one perspective is better than the other, but because they're different.

That's exactly why representation matters. We need different people bringing different ideas, different references, different stories and different ways of solving problems. Our (and every!) industry is richer for it.

The food and drink one is full of extraordinary people. It's creative, collaborative, endlessly interesting, and I genuinely can't imagine doing anything else. If we want more women in kitchens, in production, in leadership and around boardroom tables, I think the answer is to keep making those careers visible. To mentor where we can. To create opportunities. To champion one another. To try to be the person someone else can picture themselves becoming- an empathetic, ambitious business owner. Breezily unbothered by any adverse expectations and assumptions we might encounter along the way (it's a work in progress people!)

At Loveday, we've often said that yes, we started a distillery because we love gin and rum, because we love making things, and because our backgrounds as chefs made us pretty confident we could make bottles of something delicious.

But there's another reason too: If what we're building makes one person question the idea that brewing or distilling isn't a place for women (In the UK beer industry, for example,  only 17% of board positions are held by women, and just 7% of CEOs are women.), if one person realises rum doesn't have to come wrapped in pirate clichés, or that gin doesn't have to be enjoyed in a certain way, or if one young woman walks into a distillery, brewery or commercial kitchen and thinks, I could do this, then I think we're doing something right.

I'd love to get to a point where we no longer need panels specifically about women in food and drink. Where representation has become so normal that it no longer needs celebrating, and where women-only grants, support groups and mentoring schemes have become unnecessary because the playing field is genuinely level.

But we're not there yet.

So for now, I'm grateful that these conversations are happening. I'm grateful for the people creating spaces for them, and for everyone willing to share their experiences so openly. Until the day we don't need them anymore, I'm very happy to keep having the conversation.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the panel, and especially to Debbie and at Wild Wine School for bringing us together!

Chloe, Loveday