Key facts
- Who: Worldwide Fruit Limited (WFL), a major UK fruit supplier
- What: Named Climate Champion of the Year at the 2026 FPC Fresh Awards
- When and where: Friday 25 September 2026, JW Marriott Grosvenor House, London
- Why: Its Model Farm approach — testing regenerative practices in working orchards, measuring progress and sharing results across the grower network
- Scale: During 2025, the Product Carbon Footprinting programme covered 35 sites across 25 key suppliers
Worldwide Fruit Limited has been named Climate Champion of the Year at the 2026 FPC Fresh Awards, the UK fresh produce industry’s biggest annual celebration. The award, announced on 25 September 2026 at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in London, recognises years of work to turn climate ambition into practical, measurable action in orchards and across the company’s wider grower network.
The FPC Fresh Awards bring together around 750 people from across the UK and international fresh produce industry each year and have become known as the “Fresh Produce Oscars”. According to the industry’s own account of the evening, this award honours more than a single project: it rewards a company that is showing growers not only why they need to change, but how to change.
A win for practical climate action
The judges praised Worldwide Fruit for its integrated, evidence-led approach to climate and regenerative agriculture. Rather than treating carbon, soil health, water, biodiversity, climate resilience and farm economics as separate sustainability issues, the company set out to understand how they fit together within a working farming system.
“Worldwide Fruit is showing growers not simply why they need to change, but how to change, how to measure progress, and how to share what they learn. This bold leadership is helping to create a topfruit production base that is lower-carbon, more nature-positive, commercially viable, and more resilient to the climate challenges ahead,” the judges said.
Nigel Jenney, chief executive of the Fresh Produce Consortium, also highlighted the practical nature of the company’s approach, noting that it makes climate action useful to the people who actually have to put it into practice.
Model Farms: testing change in working orchards
At the heart of the programme are the company’s Model Farms — commercial orchards such as Chandler & Dunn in the UK and Dennegeur in South Africa that serve as learning sites where regenerative practices are assessed under real farming conditions rather than on demonstration plots removed from commercial reality.
The approach starts with the growers themselves. Much of what the company now helps to measure, document and share began in orchards, with farmers experimenting, observing and adapting for years: looking at their soil differently, questioning how water moves through their farms, and learning how farming systems can become more resilient. A seven-pillar Regen Roadmap provides the framework for turning that evidence into action.
Measuring soil health on a Model Farm: Worldwide Fruit tests regenerative practices under real farming conditions.
Measuring what matters
The learning is increasingly backed by measurement. During 2025, Worldwide Fruit’s Product Carbon Footprinting programme expanded to 35 sites across 25 key suppliers, using a carbon footprinting platform to build a stronger understanding of emissions and hotspots across key fruit supply chains.
The same technical partnership underpins the company’s UK pome emissions and removals programme, which assesses farm emissions alongside selected carbon sinks. The aim is to build a more complete picture of carbon sources and sinks within perennial fruit production and strengthen the evidence base for future climate action.
Case studies, Model Farm learning, carbon insights and scorecard information feed into the company’s Resilience Hub and Knowledge Hub, designed to make grower-led learning more accessible across the wider supply base. The principle is simple: take what is being learned in one place and make it useful somewhere else.
Climate champion recognised across the board
The Climate Champion title was not the company’s only recognition at this year’s awards. Worldwide Fruit was also a finalist for Net Zero Impact, Sustainability Excellence: Ethical, and Sustainability Excellence: Supply Chain, as well as Best Marketing Campaign for its British Jazz apple campaign.
Reporting on the awards evening by industry publications including Fresh Produce Journal and FPC Fresh Talk Daily confirmed the win and highlighted the Model Farm approach as the decisive factor.
For more climate coverage, see Watan News International’s climate section.
