Coffee Republic’s chief executive Steven Bartlett is to stand down at the company’s forthcoming Annual General Meeting.

The coffee bar chain’s current executive chairman, Peter Breach, will take over the role temporarily while a permanent replacement is found. Bartlett will remain on Coffee Republic’s board in a non-executive role. It is expected that he will be appointed vice-chairman, and will continue to hold shares in the company.

Bartlett has been chief executive since October 2006, after he set up a shareholder pressure group, which helped to oust founder Bobby Hashemi from the company. In a statement, the company said: "Bartlett has accomplished a notable turnaround and has established Coffee Republic as a major coffee house brand in the UK while also establishing the foundation for a strong international brand."

Coffee Republic’s like-for-like sales for the first three months of the 2008 financial year were up 2.5%, due largely to "strong growth by franchises".

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=== Green Watch ===

== Waste saving ==

Food and drink manufacturers prevented more than 0.5m tonnes (t) of food waste being created in 2006, by sending food by-products for uses such as animal feed, according to a survey published by the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) and Defra. Of the waste that did arise at the sites surveyed, 82% was recycled or recovered.

The survey found that of the 835,000t of food and packaging waste produced at 236 production sites of FDF members in 2006, 686,000t were recycled or recovered and 138,000t were sent directly to landfill. The results will help FDF’s work with the government’s Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) to continue improving food and packaging waste prevention.

The FDF sent questionnaires to all of its members to survey their food and packaging waste output and food production sites in the UK for 2006, along with disposal and recovery routes. A copy of the full report is available from [http://www.fed.org.uk].

Last October, the FDF published its five-fold Environmental Ambition, which pledges to eliminate packaging waste to landfill from 2015.