Sustainable Food Laboratory

The executive teams from Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform (SAI Platform) and the Sustainable Food Lab Business Coalition met on June 29th in Atlanta at the Coke headquarters. With considerable overlap in the mission and purpose of the two networks the groups are considering what sort of coordination would best further their goals.

Each organization shared the mission and activities of their forum to see where the best collaboration could take place. The Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform was launched in May 2002 by Groupe Danone, Nestlé and Unilever to promote sustainable agriculture. Since then 17 other members joined: The Coca-cola Company, Consorzio Interregionale Ortifrutticoli, Danisco, Dole, Ecom, Efico, Findus, Fonterra, Friesland Foods, Kraft, McCain Europe, Mc Donald’s, Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Sara Lee DE, Tchibo and VOLCAFE.

SAI Platform focuses on the pre-competitive standards for the production of commodities. All members of SAI Platform are food processors, but commodity working groups include other stakeholders of the food chain including NGOs, IGOs, research institutes, policy makers, producers and consumer organizations. The general briefing says, “It is an action-oriented initiative for companies who wish to play an active role in the development, recognition and implementation of sustainable practices for mainstream agriculture.

The Sustainable Food Lab’s work is also aimed at increasing the sustainability of mainstream food and agriculture systems and the Food Lab Business Coalition was launched in early 2005. The more recent focus on work within the business coalition has been on (1) organizational change through the work of the Call to Action document and a self assessment process to show changes needed to build internal systems that support sustainability and (2) value chain projects that include partnerships with NGOs, researchers, and supply chain participants to improve specific value chains.

The executive teams reported that the outcome of the meeting was to propose to both organizations to keep the core operations of the forums separate, but to actively increase collaboration to strengthen the voice for sustainable agriculture and to increase opportunities for both sets of members.

For joint projects to increase the voice for Sustainable Agriculture, the two teams agreed to explore the viability of a joint open-source “e-library” on sustainable agricultural practices and to jointly hold annual conferences on sustainable agriculture. The conferences would alternate between the US and the EU and would be the premier forum for industry to gather and learn about sustainable agriculture. The executive teams also agreed to actively promote and open up opportunities in both forums to participation from both networks. Examples are, the SAI platform crop specific working groups on agricultural practices and Food Lab Meetings.