THE FRANK STITT AWARD FOR INDUSTRY EXCELLENCE
2024 RECIPIENT:
GLENN ROBERTS
Founder, CEO & Head of Research, Anson Mills
Birmingham FOOD+Culture Festival is thrilled to announce Glenn Roberts as the recipient of the 2024 Frank Stitt Award for Industry Excellence. FOOD+Culture started this prestigious award to honor individuals making a significant positive impact on their local community as well as the culinary industry at large. This year’s recipient, Glenn Roberts, was selected due to his dedication to preserving and enhancing Southern culinary traditions.
ABOUT GLENN: Glenn Roberts founded Anson Mills in 1998 in Charleston, South Carolina, to rematriate lost foods of the 18th and 19th century Southern Pantry. Today Anson Mills grows and produces artisan landrace grain, legume, and oil seed ingredients for chefs and home cooks worldwide and provides culinary research support for pastry chefs, bakers, brewers, and distillers through Anson Mills Research Lab. Anson Mills provides pro bono seed biosecurity for the growing community of Southern organic place-based identity preserved landrace crop farmers. Glenn is a recipient of the USA Artisan of the Year and National Pathfinder Awards, a founder of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, and the lead landrace seed biosecurity researcher for AM Research Initiative.
ABOUT THE AWARD
The Frank Stitt Award for Industry Excellence honors those making a positive impact on their local community and the culinary industry.
2023 Honoree and the award’s namesake, Chef Frank Stitt, often references an “integrated food system," referring to the other crucial components of the culinary industry upon which restaurants rely - farmers and producers, servers and sellers, mixologists and makers. It’s all these components that truly make a culinary community work, special, and unique while turning food and the places we eat into an economic engine for a region.
Each year, The Frank Stitt Award for Industry Excellence will shine a spotlight on a member of this larger, inclusive community: someone who is dedicated to craft, excelling at what they do, and fostering balance and appreciation for how food gets to our tables, on our plate, and the impact it can and does have on an entire community and region.
This award is named to honor a champion of local communities and local, farm-to-table food everywhere. A man who, throughout his career, has been dedicated to the foodways of Alabama and the American South.
FOOD+Culture Festival is excited to partner with Mr. Stitt and his family to present the Frank Stitt Award for Industry Excellence annually to one excelling at what they do today or an up-and-comer to serve as encouragement for taking a leap, innovating, and positively impacting the culinary industry for the future.