Our commitment to sustainability: 
A collaboration with Creating Natures Corridors

The Irish Quality Food and Drink Awards are proud to be working with Creating Nature’s Corridors, a not-for-profit organisation restoring biodiversity by planting native trees and hedgerows across the UK and Ireland.

Brand new for 2025, we’re supporting tree planting efforts by encouraging our community to get involved too. By celebrating your involvement in the awards, and sharing our official social media graphics, you’ll be helping raise awareness and contributing to this important initiative.

Together, we can recognise outstanding food and drink and help grow something meaningful along the way!

Find out more about Creating Nature’s Corridors at www.creatingnaturescorridors.co.uk

Entrepreneur Vhari Russell had always enjoyed the great outdoors and loves nature. In October 2018 her brother tragically died of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome at the tender age of 37. Rory was a carpenter and created amazing structures from green oak. The shock of Rory’s death led Vhari to question what she would leave behind, what would be her legacy when she left this life.

Since they are a very close family it was a given that Rory shared Vhari’s passion for the natural world around him and time spent outside represented a big part of Rory’s life too. He was a keen surfer and loved to enjoy the freedom and beauty of the outside world with his wife, son and daughter.

Vhari’s vision is to plant oak trees to replace the ones used by Rory in his woodcraft. Other trees and hedging will also be planted to recreate the striking rural landscapes for which the UK is renowned.

Vhari lives in a village 25 miles outside Cambridge which was hard hit by the re-routing of the A14 and in addition was affected by the creation of a large number of residential developments. This is a plight being suffered by many villages across the country. The development work local to Vhari led to thousands of trees and hedgerows being destroyed, in one of the least wooded areas in the country. This combined with stumbling across a great read titled ‘Rewilding’ by Isobel Tree led Vhari to found the charity, with the sole purpose of planting trees to rebalance the natural habitat and provide a more appealing landscape for local communities affected by commercial developments. 2020…Rewilding Corridors was born.