Chris Bavin is an award winning green grocer, co-presenter of BBC1’s hugely successful series Eat Well For Less, Tomorrow’s Food and Truth or Scare. Chris is passionate about sharing his experience, knowledge and passion about food, flowers and plants, wholesale markets, independent retail, consumer issues, waste and farming.
Having left school with what he describes as “less than desirable” GCSE results he tried his hand at various unglamorous jobs before finally finding a job importing flowers for a small company.
He spent much of his working day at Western International Market which specialises in horticultural produce and found himself very much at home with all the colourful characters and buzz of the wholesale market.
After selling flowers wholesale for six years he took a side step into fruit and veg. He created extraordinary relationships with the small independent green grocers and florists and shared their passion to keep independent retail flourishing. With the odds stacked against the independent retailer this did not deter Chris from embarking on his own project and in 2009 he and his wife Millie opened the Naked Grocer. Chris and Millie ran the multi-award winning Surrey greengrocers for 6 years. They now focus on direct home deliveries, supplying fruit and veg boxes for home, fruits for offices and wholesale catering businesses.
Chris understands the inner workings of setting up a small business and is keen to help people looking to start up their own company. He is passionate about educating and raising awareness in children of where food comes from and what’s involved in producing it. One of his ambitions is to teach young people how eating healthily can be cheap and easy to achieve – taking the fear factor out of food by teaching people about the produce journey from farm to plate.
Chris was one of a team of presenters on BBC1’s primetime series Tomorrow's Food with Dara O’Briain, which looked into the awe-inspiring future of our food. Chris was able to explore his interest in the future of farming – he visited America to discover how our greens can be grown without sunlight, looked into whether British people will come around to the ideas of eating insects and visited the world’s leading robotic farm.