Dr Christian Reynolds is a Reader in Food Policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City University, London; and is the Senior Tutor for Research at the Centre for Food Policy.
Christian is recognised as a global expert on food loss and waste and sustainable diets. He has worked on these issues in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, the UK, US, and Europe. He is the lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Food Waste (2019); he has also co-authored over 50 peer reviewed publications, as well as multiple reports and book chapters. Christian has given evidence to UK and NZ parliaments on FLW and contributed to the Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard. In 2022 Christian led and supported rapid reviews of evidence for the Food Standards Agency and Defra on topics including citizen science; sustainability in the UK food system; and the environmental impact of public procurement. Christian also researches sustainable cookery; food history; and the political power of food in international relations.
Christian is currently the Principal Investigator of the NERC Sustainable Plastics Packaging project: "Reducing plastic packaging and food waste through product innovation simulation." This project expands and enhances the Household Simulation Model to focus on plastic food packaging to help manufactures provide the right type of packaging to reduce both food and plastic waste. the Household Simulation Model is currently used by WRAP and industry to reduce food waste in many food products.
Christian is currently a co-investigator on the HEALTHEI (Health Economic Analysis incorporating effects on Labour outcomes, Households, Environment and Inequalities) (Oct 2022 – Mar 2025). A collaboration between the University of Sheffield and Teeside University and is funded by the The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). This project looks at the way food taxes might affect the whole food system, and will estimate the effects on health, NHS costs, employment, the economy and environment.
Christian has previously been Principal Investigator of 1) AHRC US-UK Food Digital Scholarship Network, which provides a platform for US and UK cultural institutions, and researchers to network around the topic of food. 2) The Alpro Foundation funded project: "Communicating the environmental impact of plant based recipes". This project produces a tool that calculates the calories, the biodiversity, economic, and climate benefits of plant-based recipes.
From 2017 to 2020, Christian was employed WRAP as Technical Specialist in international food sustainability. In 2017-18 Christian worked on integrating healthy sustainable eating and food waste reduction messages on a wide variety of projects including the EU-LIFE funded TRiFOCAL project. From 2018-2020 Christian moved to the WRAP Global team, working on Food Waste and Sustainable Eating, working on the REFRESH project, and with multiple global partners including the World Bank, NRDC, and WWF.
Christian and an adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Food, University of Sheffield, and at the Barbara Hardy Institute for Sustainable Environments and Technologies, University of South Australia.
From 2016-2020 Christian was a Knowledge Exchange Research Fellow (N8 AgriFood project) at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, and a STFC Food network+ Champion.
From 2014-2016, Christian was employed as a Public Health Research Fellow at the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Aberdeen, where he looked at healthy sustainable diets for high and low income groups using linear programming and agent based modelling.
In 2020, Christian was awarded the Alpro foundation, Scientific Paper award for Young Scientists for his research on Affordable, healthy and sustainable diets for all income groups in the UK.
In 2019, Christian was awarded "best presentation" at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery for his research on sustainable cookery.
In 2014, Christian was a finalist in the PhD Research Excellence – Life or Environmental Sciences category of the South Australian Science Excellence Awards; and was the Waste Management Association of Australia, Young Professionals NSW 2012 Scholarship recipient.
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland