Teresa Wickham, produce doyenne and retail phenomenon, is the archetypal pioneer. In 1979 she declared war on French apples and co-founded the Women’s Farming Union, which ran a successful campaign to revitalise the UK fruit industry. By 1990 she was the first woman divisional director of UK retailer Safeway, where she developed the Strathclyde Food Project, bringing together farmers, growers, manufacturers and retailers to close the UK’s trade gap; and later became an adviser to Sainsbury’s board on their £1 billion corporate responsibility programme.
Since then, she has held numerous roles managing and developing areas of business, primarily in food, agribusiness and the retail industry, including governor of the Royal Agricultural College, chairman of the Oxford Farming Conference and non-executive director of New Covent Garden Market Authority. All culminating in the ‘Woman of the Decade in Food Farming and Innovation’ accolade, awarded in India by the Women’s Economic Forum in 2018.
Today, although no longer consulting and into her 70s, she continues to energise and influence the industry as president of the National Fruit Show (NFS), as member of the Harvard PAPSAC Committee, and as a regular broadcaster for the BBC on retail and consumer issues.
Wickham’s trail-blazing journey in produce began when she married Kent fruit farmer, Robin, at 21, having trained as a Cordon Bleu cook and just embarked on a teaching career at Le Cordon Bleu London. The transition to rural life in Brenchley in the late 1960s was nonetheless a joyful one for the young Wickham, the second-eldest of nine children to entrepreneurial Irish parents.
“A farm is such a lovely environment to live in. It was wonderful,” she says. “My husband worked for his father, growing every soft fruit and top fruit under the sun. My mother-in-law was Swedish and a fabulous horticulturalist. I worked on the farm and ran a 100-strong fruit picking team. It was idyllic, and my in-laws were hugely supportive.”
Women typically worked behind the scenes in English farming in those days, says Wickham. So, in 1979, when she and two female fruit-grower friends, Anne Humphreys and Margaret Charrington, decided to “declare war on French apples”, co-founded the Women’s Farming Union and organised mass protests in London and Brussels from her kitchen table, they hit national headlines.
“The UK had joined the European Common Market (EEC) and British apple growers hadn’t realised what impact that would have and were now under threat,” Wickham explains. “The large and well-organised French grower cooperatives could send their fruit to the UK without quotas, and Britain’s burgeoning supermarket sector was delighted to be able to procure such large volumes of homogenous fruit. The smaller-scale British growers, on the other hand, weren’t up on quality control and needed time to adjust. Meanwhile, British growers were convinced that French growers were getting financial help from their government, which under EEC rules was illegal.
“Anne, Margaret and I launched a campaign fighting French apples on several fronts,” she continues, speaking from her apple farm near Tonbridge that she helped save. “We gathered evidence that the French apple growers were indeed cheating and presented it to the MEPs; we set up a consumer campaign promoting British apples; we implemented two surveillance schemes – one at wholesale and one at retail level – where we recruited grower and consumer volunteers to monitor and report back on the quality and availability of British apples; and we organised [Women’s Farming Union] protests.
“Margaret was brilliant on TV, Anne had the ideas, and I led the demos,” Wickham adds with delightful nonchalance. “It was the early 80s, and people weren’t used to seeing farmers’ wives demonstrating, so we made The Nine O’Clock News and Not The Nine O’Clock News. We’d joke that, at school,...
