Alara, a former Grocer Gold Awards Sustainability Initiative of the Year winner, was founded in 1975 after Smith found £2 in the street – “the entrance fee to New Covent Garden at the time, and my opportunity to raid the bins for unwanted fruit and veg”. He started selling the discarded produce in a squatted shop near London’s Euston Road. The shop became one of the country’s first wholefood stores. And it was where Alara began to experiment with its first muesli recipe, which would set the company on a course to become the country’s leading organic cereal manufacturer.

The Grocer says the business that Smith started over 50 years ago “had sustainability firmly at its heart” from the outset. In a profile of the Alara founder, the magazine says the the company, which supplies brands and own label with muesli, granola and porridge along with its Alara branded cereals today produces about half of the UK’s organic muesli.

Alex Smith said: “I am honoured to be recognised as one of The Grocer’s ‘Organic Heroes’. Alara is the longest organic-certified cereal manufacturer in the world. We are a business that achieved a strong of sustainability ‘firsts’,  all of which were strategic steps along the way to becoming, I believe, the most sustainable food manufacturer on earth.”