Clare Otridge, Director of Grounded Research and operational lead for the Women in Food and Farming (WiFF) network, has been named the Market Research Society’s Sustainability Changemaker of the Year for 2026. The award, presented at the MRS Excellence Awards, recognises individuals across the research, insight and data analytics sector who are driving tangible progress on sustainability from within their organisations and beyond.
From marketing to market research
Clare’s route into research was not a conventional one. A farmer’s daughter with a degree in geography, she spent over a decade in marketing before discovering a pull towards research and its capacity to drive real change. That shift led her to pursue MRS qualifications alongside a postgraduate degree in behavioural science, and eventually back to the family business, Grounded Research, which she now runs with her mother as co-director. It is a seventh-generation arable farming background put to work in service of an industry that, as Clare has often pointed out, is notoriously hard to reach and easy to overlook.
The combination of lived experience, behavioural science training and commercial grounding has shaped Grounded Research’s approach ever since: research built for the people it is meant to represent, not around them.
Building the feedback loop farmers were missing
Much of the case for this award rests on Five Bar Gate, the farmer community and research panel Clare founded after spotting a gap that ran right through the agricultural supply chain. Farmers were being surveyed, consulted and talked about constantly, but rarely given a proper route back into the conversations that shaped policy, product development and industry standards. Five Bar Gate closed that loop. It has since grown into a panel of more than 2,500 farmers and underpins research for organisations including Red Tractor, John Deere, Case IH/New Holland and AIC.
Alongside Five Bar Gate, Clare has spent recent years growing the Women in Food and Farming network into a community of around 2,000 members, running six to eight events a year and helping put more women into visible, senior roles across an industry where they have historically been underrepresented. She has also supported colleagues through sustainability certifications, on the principle that responsible practice should sit with a team, not rest on one person’s shoulders.
Recognition built on substance, not visibility
The Changemaker award follows a run of recognition for Clare over the past two years, including MRS Research Hero 2025, a finalist place for Woman of the Year at the British Farming Awards 2026, and a finalist place for Innovator of the Year at the Farmers Weekly Women in Agriculture Awards 2025. She has also completed the Windsor Leadership Programme, supported by a Farmers Club bursary, and sits as a Trustee of Sacrewell Farm.
What ties these together is not a single project but a consistent thread: making sure the people at the sharp end of food and farming, often the ones least likely to be asked, get a genuine say in decisions being made about them. It is a strand of work that rarely produces a single dramatic headline. Instead it shows up in panel numbers, in event attendance, in the standards work behind the scenes, and now in an industry award that has caught up with what colleagues and clients in agri-food research already knew.
What it means for the sector
For a sector where sustainability work can sometimes stay at the level of statements and pledges, the Changemaker award is meant to spotlight the people actually doing the work of embedding it. Clare’s win puts a spotlight on agricultural research specifically, an area of the market research industry that gets far less attention than consumer or corporate sustainability work, despite sitting at the centre of some of the most pressing questions about food, land use and climate.
Congratulations to Clare Otridge on a richly deserved award!