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Leon Aarts
Leon Aarts is a visionary humanitarian and philanthropist who creates impact at scale. He is committed to helping transform people’s lives for the better through food. Chef, restauranteur, entrepreneur, author and TEDx speaker, he first founded Calais Kitchens feeding up to 10,000 refugees every day in ‘the Jungle’ refugee camp and then set-up With Compassion, eventually feeding up to 4,000 Londoners in need every day during the pandemic. Leon’s work has been recognised in the 2022 BBC Radio London’s Make a Difference Awards when he won The Fundraiser category.
About Leon Aarts
Leon Aarts is a visionary humanitarian and philanthropist, with a proven track record of creating impact at scale. He is committed to helping transform people’s lives for the better through food. Originally from the Netherlands, he grew up in a family where everything revolved around food, it shaped his lifelong mission that no one should go to bed hungry and the power of sharing a meal.
Trained as a chef, Leon owned a restaurant, then worked as the executive chef in Le Garage, the Dutch equivalent of the British ‘The Ivy’. He moved to the UK to set-up a fine food wholesale company.
In 2009, Leon stepped into his humanitarian-led philanthropy work, always influenced by the universal power of food. Since then, he’s founded three charities, helping feed and educate children in the Global South (Fill the Cup by Extraordinary Ones), being instrumental in the collaborative effort to feed up to 10,000 refugees daily in ‘the Jungle’ refugee camp in Calais (Calais Kitchens) and fed 4,000 Londoners in need every day during the pandemic (With Compassion). He then joined forces with The Felix Project, a surplus food distributor, to set-up Felix’s Kitchen which continued the work started by With Compassion.
He’s a TEDx speaker, written several books and was recognised in the 2022 BBC Radio London’s Make a Difference Awards when he won The Fundraiser category for his volunteering work during the pandemic. He regularly appears in the media, including being featured alongside actor and political activist, Miriam Margoyles OBE (Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter film series), in Miriam’s Dickensian Christmas, when he cooked a Christmas dinner entirely out of surplus food. He has also been invited onto BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen, where he cooked his signature banana peel curry whilst on air, highlighting volunteering in the run up to King Charles’ Coronation Celebrations and the Big Help Out, a one-day national volunteering initiative.
Leon is now co-founder of Ample, www.ample.shop. An initiative with he sees as his biggest project to help reduce the huge amount of perfectly good edible food we waste on farms and to ensure we pay farmers fairly.
To book Keynote Speaker Leon Aarts, contact The Speakers Agency on +44(0)1332 810481 or email enquiries@thespeakersagency.com
- The power of sharing a meal, stories from a refugee camp
- Leadership in challenging times
- How to live with your heart fully open
- What we can lean from our ancestors
- Discovering your purpose through your family linage
- Why human connection is so important
Workshop: The ancestor game -what are ancestors teach us
