From Food Cardiff’s press release

At a summit held recently in Cardiff Bay, leading Welsh food retailers, caterers, suppliers and statutory bodies made pledges to increase our vegetable consumption. This was the latest achievement of Peas Please, a pioneering initiative that targets the whole food system to improve our diet and our health. It works across the UK and its Welsh arm is led by Food Cardiff in collaboration with Amber Wheeler, whose doctoral research focuses on boosting horticulture and vegetable consumption in Wales.

Companies that made Veg Pledges at the Summit included Castell Howell, S.A. Brains and Co, Puffin Produce, Lantra, Riverside Real Food, the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens and Penylan Pantry, the Soil Association, WRAP Cymru and Charlton House, caterers to the National Assembly for Wales. They each explained how they plan to change how they produce, manufacture, supply and serve their meals to include more vegetables, thus making an important contribution to public health.

Research shows that eating too little veg contributes to 20,000 premature deaths in the UK every year and that we should all be eating at least an extra portion every day. Data released by think tank The Food Foundation this summer showed that UK consumers are buying two-thirds less veg than the amount recommended by health experts.

Influential pledges were also made by Cardiff City Council, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, Cardiff University and Cardiff Metropolitan University. During Plenary that day, the First Minister Carwyn Jones AM welcomed the Veg Summit and what Peas Please is aiming to achieve to improve the health of the nation.

The Summit was sponsored by Jenny Rathbone AM, who leads the Cross Party Group on Food. It was attended over 80 multi-disciplinary representatives from the private, public and third sector, including the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Wellbeing and Sport, Vaughan Gething AM, the Minister for Social Services and Public Health, Rebecca Evans AM, Cllr Huw Thomas, Leader of Cardiff Council and Dr Sharon Hopkins, Director of Public Health with Cardiff and Vale University Health Board.

Katie Palmer, who leads Food Cardiff, said, “We are delighted that a number of Wales’ leading foodservice companies, universities, growers, food manufacturers and local food retailers have embraced the Peas Please initiative and we hope in doing so they will inspire others to make their own pledges. This is just the start of the journey to increase the production and consumption of Veg in Wales and we urge any organisation wanting to get involved to get in touch”.

A simultaneous event organised by The Food Foundation in London saw pledges from Lidl, Co-op, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Greggs, Mars Food, Nestle, Sodexo, Baxter Storey Interserve and Simply Fresh. These pledges will amount to millions more portions of vegetables being added to meals in the UK with potential to give a welcome spur to British horticulture at a time when the sector faces considerable uncertainty. Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Scottish Government have pledged a new Fruit, Veg & Potato Industry Leadership Group which will develop an action plan for Scottish horticulture.

For details of each pledge made from across the whole of the UK, read this Storify and the full pledge list.

All pledges will be measured and monitored by Food Cardiff in partnership with the Food Foundation, Kantar Worldpanel, PwC and Cambridge University annually until 2020.