Meat Business Women and Cande Group renew partnership to support next phase of growth beyond 2026
Industry Events
Meat Business Women (MBW), the global community for women working across the meat and food industry, and creative agency Cande Group have renewed their strategic partnership for a further two years, to drive continued growth for both organisations.
The partnership builds on two years of shared growth across the businesses. Meat Business Women’s global membership has expanded to 57 Corporate Partners & 2500 members worldwide, while Cande Group has strengthened its offer with the launch of its dedicated studio, enabling enhanced content production and livestream delivery.
To date the organisations have worked closely to deliver global creative campaigns that aim to drive equality in the meat sector, working with MBW’s partners across the UK, Ireland and Australia.
Recent collaboration highlights include the launch of The Food Business Charter at the House of Lords in 2025, and International Women’s Day at Tesco HQ.
Cande’s role as a specialist in the agri-food sector continues to underpin the partnership. The agency was selected as video partner for the World Meat Congress 2025 with International Meat Secretariat and Farmers Guardian, and works with organisations across the supply chain including Red Tractor, NFU Mutual and Defra’s Livestock Information Service.
Meat Business Women’s focus is to continue working closely with Partners to deliver on the ambition of the Food Business Charter, which set out the aim of reaching 40% female representation by 2035. They’ll continue to work with businesses to build sustainable talent pipelines as well as delivering on the ground benefits for individuals, such as mentoring, strategic networking, conferences & personal development.
Ben Coates, Founder and Director of Cande Group, said:
“We’re incredibly proud to continue our partnership with Meat Business Women as we look ahead to 2026 and beyond. Alongside our shared focus on the agriculture and food supply chain, there’s a real alignment in values and culture that makes this collaboration work so well. We’re excited to build on that momentum and support the next phase of growth together.”
Joanna Parnell, Managing Director of Meat Business Women, added:
“It’s really important for us to have trusted partners that understand the sector, but also understand what we’re trying to achieve, and Cande are exactly that. There’s a lot of exciting things to come over the next 12 months as we look to continue raising awareness and infl uence through our campaign work with Cande.”
Meat Business Women is the global professional network for women working across the meat industry. It is aligned to the United National’s Sustainable Goal 5. It was created to improve the sustainability of the meat sector and grow the pipeline of female talent in this male dominated arena.
IBC Camera Convention
Industry Events
Personal Development
It’s of vital importance that Cande Group keeps up to date with the latest technical developments in our industry and that each member of the team pushes their personal development forwards.
Trade shows such as IBC are a prime example of this, the largest trade show for our industry in Europe, where we meet suppliers, clients, and network to keep abreast of the latest product improvements so that we can include them in our offering.
It’s all about keeping on top of emerging trends and tech, something we do as a company, plus investing in the team to experience all corners of the industry, which IBC gives us
All the gear
Visiting a world-renowned show such as the IBC enables us to get demonstrations and early access to beta versions of new software, masterclasses and have an opportunity to get hands-on with new equipment to test before we potentially invest.
One challenge for Cande is, due to our rapid growth in recent years, the need to store and back up large volumes of footage and data has grown exponentially. In order to ensure multiple members of the team can access it as required, plus have an offsite back-up securely protected so that we keep our clients’ work safe, has been a huge storage and security quandary to solve. At IBC24 we spent a lot of time speaking with wide ranging suppliers about kit options, which was incredibly helpful to have them all there onsite and in person, to really get to grips with their offerings.
Watch this space
Looking ahead to IBC 2025, since we recently moved to a new premises and are building a studio, the 2025 show will be a chance to look at ways to kit it out for our clients’ work for whoever goes!
Olivia, our Production Apprentice, summed up her highlights of visiting IBC:
“This year I had the amazing opportunity to go to the IBC in Amsterdam with Ben the Director of Cande and Toby, our camera operator. It was an early flight and we headed straight to the IBC to get a lay of the land, plan out the weekend ahead and the key stands that were top of our hit list. The plan for a power nap on the flight was dashed, since a plane full of creatives meant the networking began the moment we set foot on board!
The IBC is one of the biggest industry events where different companies from the industry present all of their new updates and upcoming equipment that is being released. There were different deals that were specific to the event and only ran over the weekend, so there were tough negotiations and decisions to be made. Like a true entrepreneur Toby put his best foot forward to try to convince Ben to buy a wide variety of kit.
There were lots of different competitions and giveaways to take part in, offering a variety of different prizes to win. Atomos were offering the chance to win new monitors and Aperture UK were giving away £7000 worth of lights to one lucky person. I had the luck of the tripods on my side and managed to win two prizes!
It was great to be able to get hands-on with the new equipment and test out a variety of kit. For me personally, it was great to see the full range of the Blackmagic cameras, since these are the cameras we use at Cande and it was really beneficial to see how the different models vary, plus being able to experience an in-person demonstration. We all visited the Adobe stand where we were given demonstrations on the latest updates coming to Premier Pro and After Effects. It was a really beneficial experience to have that first-hand presentation and insight to the programme update capabilities, details of which could easily be missed and now means we know how to make the most of them for our clients.
Overall it was an unforgettable team experience, not only fun getting to know everyone better and interesting to share stories about what we’d each highlighted at IBC, but also enjoy a bit of culture in very different surroundings.”
