Sustainable Food Laboratory

By Chris Landry, September 2007

If you don’t know where the ingredients in your food come from, or what the impacts of your production processes are, you don’t care.

That’s how Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund framed the question of how we develop healthy value chains that allow businesses to source environmentally sustainable and ethically traded products. Clay was speaking at the inaugural Healthy Value Chains Community of Practice retreat presented in August by the Sustainable Food Lab, World Wildlife, and the Society for Organizational Learning.

Some forty business, academic, and civil society leaders gathered in Boston for two days to share best practices, pressing questions, and inspiration. Most participants were from the food industry, but several non-food companies such as Nike and IKEA attended as well.

Clay’s challenge, and the questions it raised – how does business assess, and improve, value chains according to environmental, economic and social criteria? – were at the heart of the meeting. Four reports from the field provided material for discussion.

Sherri Flies of Costco and Mark Lundy of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture shared their experience trying to determine whether or not Costco was paying a fair price for green beans grown by Guatemalan farmers. Their personal story concluded with advice about the importance of bringing together both solid methodology and a sincere regard for all actors in the chain.

“We have to be personally vulnerable and transparent,” said Flies, “And seek the teachers we need in order to succeed.”

Suzanne Apple of World Wildlife (WWF) and Dan Vermeer of Coca-Cola followed with an overview of how the two organizations are working together to address water concerns around the world. The relationship began as philanthropic (Coke funding WWF projects), but they said it had become a  transformative partnership that would use the skills of both to achieve results in water conservation.

As in the Costco story, Vermeer said he and his colleagues were more interested in inviting full and open discussion within Coke than they were in following standard protocol regarding who gets invited to meetings. The result of their inclusive approach: the water issue has become deeply embedded within the culture of the company. This is critical because, Dan said, water cannot be addressed at the country or regional level, but must be worked on within every watershed, by every Coke plant and bottler on the planet.

Two other presentations – one about a partnership between Rainforest Alliance and Chiquita, another about IKEA and World Wildlife – raised additional issues, including the risk of developing business/NGO partnerships that an organization’s supporters might initially perceive as selling-out to an adversary. Businesses had to build up trust before interacting with NGOs. Vermeer said when Coke’s work with WWF first started he would get calls from employees asking whether it was permissible to respond to WWF staff.

One of those needs identified by meeting participants – the need to connect with people from other organizations working on the same problems – was met throughout the retreat, as ideas, questions, and solutions were shared.

Many of those in attendance shared the observation that society is at a point when discussion about how to move toward sustainability is translating into real action and into change that is permeating whole companies — not just the people in the CSR and sustainability departments.

Clay, a veteran of bilateral and multi-stakeholder partnerships, said he saw a healthier future for collaboration between businesses and NGOs, noting that companies are increasingly seeing NGOs not as threats but as partners, while NGOs are shifting from telling businesses what to do to working with companies to pursue common goals.

Outcomes and next steps, include:

• creating an online set of tools and methods for value chain work;
• mapping value chain projects around the world, so practitioners can find out who is working on water, for example, in a particular part of India;
• writing journalistically compelling and factual case studies of value chain partnerships; and
• reaching out to the Institute for Supply Management to explore adding sustainability content to their training program for procurement officials.

Dave Rau of Monarch Foods, a division of US Foodservice, summed up the meeting by saying, “I was amazed at the passion and level of work being conducted, not to mention the thrill of being able to contribute to the overall body of work. We all have a long way to go to achieve our goals, but the actual potential for sustainability was very motivating.”