Our staff

Meet some of our dedicated food and drink staff...

Finn Cottle, Trade consultant

Finn has spent more than 20 years within the trading departments of two of the major supermarket groups in the UK, running various buying departments across the fresh food sector. This has given her a wide range of experience within both food manufacturing, supply chain and category management for retail.

In 2006, she joined the Board of Noble Foods as Marketing & Strategy Director, giving her first hand experience of supplying food into supermarkets as well as bringing her closer to farming and animal welfare issues.

Just over two years ago, Finn took up the opportunity to work with the Soil Association as a Trade Consultant, using her knowledge and network to help build relationships with licensees and drive growth within the organic market. Her retail perspective has proved to be invaluable in considering the challenges which the organic sector faces: she has a specific focus on Dairy where she spent a big part of her retail career.

Finn really enjoys working with organic companies and the passion with which they approach their business. Her shopping basket is now much fuller of organic products as she has gradually been converted.

Emma Dawes, Senior technical officer

Emma has been our senior technical officer for over four years. She is our queen of chemistry with a background which includes experience in laboratories.

Emma is responsible for dealing with contamination in organic products. Emma also contributes to the decisions over which chemicals or products are suitable to be used under the health & beauty and textile standards.

If you want a chemical input approved, either send the details and MSDS to Emma or your certification officer and she will check to see if it meets all the technical requirements of the standards.

Emma also attends technical meetings involving licensees and other certification bodies.

Rachel Harrison, Processor technical manager

Rachel is our processor technical manager and has worked for Soil Association Certification for 13 years.

Rachel provides technical support to our processor licensees and also deals with a whole host of issues from questions regarding organic standards and regulations, pest control issues, importing, labelling, permitted additives/processing aids and packaging.

She has also become our guru on the EU logo. Regularly liaising with Defra over interpretation of EU regulation, Rachel is Soil Association Certification’s representative on the European Organic Certifiers Council. She also runs the Processor Technical Working Group and Processor Fresh Produce Packers Group.

Lee Holdstock, Relationship manager

Having been with Soil Association Certification for more than twelve years in both certification and business development roles, Lee brings to the team broad experience of the certification, technical and commercial needs of a wide range of symbol holders.

Jim Twine, Business development director

Jim has been involved in organic food and farming all his life. He was born on his parents’ livestock farm (after the vet came!) which has been organic since 1969. He has worked for the Soil Association in a range of business development, supply chain and marketing roles for over ten years. Jim is proud to be a Soil Association symbol holder, farming 500 acres in partnership with his lifelong friend Luke Hasell.