Rosie Brown

The ready-meal boss on keeping the business in the family, helping offenders back to work and why ethical practices pay dividends for society.

- By Sarah Butler

Rosie Brown, the boss of Cook, never planned to be a chief executive. First, she trained as a nurse, then tried her hand at politics; then banking. But having struggled at first to find her niche, Brown now leads a ready-meal business ranked as the country's best place to work in food and drink, and is looking to help others find their way in the world of work.

Last year, the co-CEO of the ethical frozen food business took over from shoe-mending-chain boss James Timpson as chair of the Employment Advisory Board network, a government-backed programme started by Timpson which works with more than 90 prisons.

She says she "grew up thinking it was entirely normal to employ people with barriers to employment".

Brown's parents were entrepreneurs who employed ex-addicts in their small cafe and bakery business. So when she joined Cook in 2000, three years after it was set up with one shop in Farnham, Surrey, by her brother Ed Perry (her co-CEO) and his chef friend Dale Penfold, she wanted to find a similar way to "make an impact" and approached three local prisons.

"There's great talent in prison, and great people. There's a lot of trauma and difficult lives that have led people into prison in the first place. The rates of reoffending are too high, and employment is the best way to stop [that]. So it's great for society. It's great for communities. It's great for everybody, if we can do this." She wants the government to incentivise more businesses to bring in ex-offenders through tax breaks, such as on employers' national insurance contributions (Nics) or using apprenticeship levy funds to support extra training. "At the moment, companies that are doing it, like us, are doing it out of our own back pocket," Brown says.