The Sustainable Food Lab
The Sustainable Food Lab is a unique collaboration of food system leaders on three continents that generates profound new understanding of the future of food systems by creating living examples of that future.The Sustainable Food Lab brings together leaders from more than 50 organizations representing a microcosm of the stakeholders in food systems. Current members include individuals from the following organizations.
- Companies including Carrefour, General Mills, Nutreco, Organic Valley Cooperative, Rabobank, Sadia, Costco, US Foodservice, SYSCO, and Unilever;
- Governmental organizations from Brazil, Canada, and the Netherlands, plus the European Commission, the International Finance Corporation, and the World Bank;
- Civil society organizations including Consumers International, the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers of Brazil, Oxfam, The Nature Conservancy, the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fishworkers, and the World Wildlife Fund, plus the Charles Leopold Mayer, King Baudouin, Shell, and W.K. Kellogg Foundations.
These organizations have come together to address the challenges of global food supply, described as follows by Hal Hamilton:
“Global food production is a classic case of a system without coordination. No one intends their decisions to result in a system that is unsustainable. No one wants polluted estuaries or impoverished rural regions. Individuals make the best decisions possible, but they are doing so in a system that is critically fragmented. The pattern of falling commodity prices and production consistently driven beyond environmentally sustainable levels is repeated again and again, from corn, to coffee, to forest products, to fish.”
The process of the Sustainable Food Lab, led by Adam Kahane of Generon Consulting, is called the “U-Process”, a unique methodology designed to foster break-through thinking and action on complex, cross-sector problems. The methodology has been developed over the last twenty years by a group of action researchers at the Society for Organizational Learning, Generon Consulting, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kahane told the Lab Team when its members first convened, “If we already knew the solution, then we wouldn’t need any of this. We would simply move from where we are to where we want to be. Many of you have tried to do that and you’re here because there’s something you’re trying to do that’s beyond what you can do by simply reacting within your own institutions. That’s the simple basis for this project: to bring together people from different parts of the system to try to understand the current reality and bring forward a new one.”
After five months of shared learning about challenges and opportunities, the original Lab Team members chose six initial areas for joint work which held the most promise to bring about significant change. Each of the teams leading these initiatives is recruiting additional collaborating organizations and testing practical innovations.
The six initiatives are Framing, the Business Coalition, Food for Health and Learning, Responsible Commodities, Sustainable Fisheries, and Latin American Sustainable Livelihoods.
- Framing –Researchers are using recent advances in cultural anthropology and cognitive linguistics to discover dominant frames through which people think about food in order to reframe “sustainable food” more compellingly.
- Responsible Commodities –Team members active in current efforts in palm oil, cotton, soy, sugar and other commodities are cross-referencing and benchmarking these efforts to provide guidance on the essential ingredients for credible standards to be adopted and improvements to them driven by shareholder activists, traders, retailers, wholesalers and producers, as well as bankers and financial asset managers.
- Sustainable Fisheries – A project in Iceland build on current best practices or innovate new ways to retail fish that is harvested in a way that replenishes stocks and supports fisherman, coastal communities and ecosystems.
- Food for Health, Learning and Livelihoods -- Team members are implementing pilot innovations in major US and European cities, disseminating best practices and exploring policy and budgetary changes to accelerate the movement of healthy, locally-produced, sustainable food to institutional settings including schools and hospitals.
- Business Coalition –Founding businesses in the Coalition, collaborating with other Food Lab initiatives, are working on more sustainable packaging, increasing market access for small farmers, raising standards for commodity procurement, improving integrated pest management standards, and marketing sustainability.
- Latin America Family Farmers –NGOs connected to small farmers are working directly with businesses and governments to create market access opportunities for small farmers.
The overall goal of the initiatives is to drive a transition to the production of a healthier, more sustainable food supply. The initiatives fall into one or more of the three overall strategies:
- Creating standards for food production so that buyers and the financial community can influence production practices;
- Restructuring supply chains to improve livelihoods for small and mid-sized farmers and fishermen, and
- Generating a “demand pull” for more sustainably produced goods, and for policies that reward sustainability.
In addition to fertilizing the growth of each of these initiatives, and connecting them to one another, the Sustainable Food Lab creates a safe space within which new, deep, open-minded and open-hearted connections can be made among leaders from across food systems.
Arie van den Brand, former Member of the Dutch Parliament, calls the Sustainable Food Lab a “free island” to develop new ideas and leadership. Van Brand says that, “When I see people who are involved, when they talk about the Food Lab, they have twinkles in their eyes.” Gene Kahn, Vice-President of General Mills, likes to say that the Lab is an “epicenter of innovation,” solving problems and achieving results for stakeholders up and down value chains.
Resource
- Sutainable Food Lab website
For information about commodity dynamics and the global food supply:
- Commodity System Challenges: moving sustainability into the mainstream of natural resource economies (pdf 420k), a Sustainability Institute Report, April, 2003.
For descriptions of the U-Process methodology:
- Peter Senge, Claus Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (New York: Doubleday, 2005)
- Adam Kahane, Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004).