Fairtrade coffee brand Cafédirect has appointed John Steel as CEO.

He will join on 2 July, replacing Anne MacCaig, who left the company last summer. Finance director Richard Scanlon has been acting as CEO since MacCaig’s departure.

Steel was previously managing director and chairman of Cornish Sea Salt Co, which he helped establish as a provenance-led sustainable food business. He has also recently worked on marketing projects for Burton’s Biscuits.

Prior to that, Steel held senior management and marketing roles at Northern Foods, Weetabix and Premier Foods, where he helped grow the Loyd Grossman brand. He began his career on a fast-track graduate scheme at Nestlé Rowntree in 1989 and holds a first class business studies degree.

“Cafédirect is such an inspiring company both in terms of the mission of the business and the people and I’m delighted to be joining,” Steel said. “It offers a combination of outstanding sustainability credentials with a genuinely high quality range of products and I’m really excited by the powerful business potential.”

Jeff Halliwell, chair elect of the Cafédirect board, said Steel was ideally placed to lead the company in its next phase of development and to accelerate its recent growth.

“His outstanding experience includes both large multinational companies and leadership of entrepreneurial fmcg challenger brands,”Halliwell added.

Sales of Cafédirect coffee have grown 22% in the past 26 weeks and are up 17% year-on-year [Nielsen w/e 28 April].

Cafédirect was the first coffee brand in the UK to carry the Fairtrade label and sources coffee, tea and cocoa directly from 38 producer organisations across Latin America, Africa and Asia, representing more than 280,000 smallholder farmers.

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