Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is the Sustainable Food Lab (SFL)?

The Sustainable Food Lab is a network of business, public sector, and civil society leaders from around the globe who are working together to accelerate sustainability in mainstream food and agriculture.

In 2004 a small group of leaders seeking bigger impact convened the first Sustainable Food Lab meeting in the Netherlands. In that group were managers of large businesses, leaders of social movements, entrepreneurs, and thought pioneers in the public sector. All had track records of success, and most were also frustrated, looking for ways to make more change faster. In that first meeting people frequently talked of wanting to “tip the system.”

Since the core group of 32 people from different sectors came together, a few hundred colleagues from more than 80 organizations have joined them in pilot projects and summits. Pilot projects work directly in specific value chains on responsible sourcing from small-holders and better environmental practices. Other initiatives include institutional food procurement practices and fisheries stewardship.

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What's the point?

At this moment in history humans face both risk and opportunity.

In the next fifty years our planet's population will grow from 6 billion to 9 billion people. At the same time, clean water sources are diminishing, fish stocks are in decline, soil is being lost or degraded and millions of farmers and farm workers live in poverty.

Simultaneously businesses are exposed to more scrutiny and being held responsible for impacts of their whole supply chain, consumers are buying more organic and sustainably produced food, and new markets are emerging for products that embody social good and care for the environment.

The Food Lab's purpose is to accelerate the sustainable food movement from niche to mainstream.

Good idea. How is this going to happen?

We're harnessing the power of market forces and help transform markets: to shift the rules, expectations, and incentives in the global food market so that all key players can align their financial goals with social and environmental goals.

Is SFL only for big business?

No—the diversity of SFL members is its greatest strength. The Food Lab includes major food corporations because business is an important force in the world. Nonprofit organizations, farmer cooperatives, and public sector entities are important members because of their expertise and influence. SFL creates a safe space for these stakeholders, who often have very different points of view, to work together on our common interest in creating a more sustainable world.

The food and agriculture system is structured by market relationships. People care about more than money, but business decisions drive changes all along the supply chain. At the same time, business leaders do not see, by themselves, with sufficient long-term and peripheral vision. They need other eyes. They need to understand farm worker needs, water conservation, soil fertility, and energy and waste equations. Intelligent decision-making requires collective eyesight.

So how are you getting to where you want to go?

We're getting there together. Even the largest corporations and governments admit that they have very limited ability to change the food system on their own. So—for the first time ever—competitors in the food industry are coming together with government and not-for-profit leaders to find new ways of working.

Our fundamental change strategy is this: Food Lab members test new ideas for tipping the balance, and through the sharing of the results of these pilot projects we build momentum that leads to system-wide change.

For example, SYSCO, one of the world's largest food service companies, has worked with the IPM Institute to develop standards for the use of pesticides and natural resources. Already more than 500,000 acres of produce are in improved practices. Unilever is contracting with Rainforest Alliance to certify all Lipton Tea production across the world. CH Robinson is pioneering regional procurement of produce in several parts of the United States. Oxfam Great Britain is teaming with several Food Lab businesses to develop market opportunities for small farmers in Central America. The International Centre for Tropical Agriculture has partnered with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Costco to develop indicators of farm community well-being and improve specific value chains for coffee or produce. WWF partners with many companies in the Food Lab as well as others around the world to help them incorporate carbon, water, and biodiversity protection into their value chains.

What does the Sustainable Food Lab do?

Our change strategy is built on four mutually reinforcing activity areas: leadership, implementation, organizational change and shared learning. Participants work on concrete projects implementing more sustainable food supply chains and in the process gain leadership skills and networks. Greater leadership skills in turn, lead to larger scale implementation projects and organization level change. Organizational change and shared learning also build leadership and the network even as they facilitate more change and diffuse the learning.

We build leadership by leading multi-stakeholder learning journeys to build concrete knowledge, a sense of shared endeavor and bridge what participants expect to see as a divide between the interests of various actors along the chain. Our Food Lab Summits provide members with case studies, opportunities for in depth learning and additional networking. Business Coalition meetings build the capacity of business leaders to think about their role in the food industry from a new perspective. And formal partnerships with the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform and a new Health Value Chains Network extend leadership activities to additional companies and NGOs w/I and beyond the food industry.

Here's more detail on each of the four areas of work.

  • We build a community of leaders. These are leaders  who are learning to manage across boundaries and embed sustainability inside businesses and embed business-savvy into approaches to social and environmental goals.
  • We implement living examples of sustainable food supply chains. New value chain models that address poverty and environmental sustainability.

Value chain projects bring together individual companies with stakeholders along their supply chains. NGOs and other partners help major buyers address persistent challenges such as poverty in producer nations.  In every case, our aim is to work from both ends of the chain – to ground the work in market demand while providing producers with the tools and information they need to be competitive in volatile markets with increasingly stringent specifications.

  • We facilitate organizational change. Corporations and non-business organizations collaborate to enroll an ever increasing amount of global food supply in verifiable sustainability programs. We support organizational change with in-house trainings about healthy supply chains for food buyers, our Call to Action and support for companies to identify and meat their sustainability goals.
  • We share what we're learning. We documented methods, practices, cases, and stories of collaborative projects and policy incentives in order to build the knowledge base that can transforms the Industry

Some projects are initiated within Sustainable Food Lab meetings, some are managed by Lab staff, some are funded through Lab relationships, and many are independently organized with learning shared at Lab learning journeys, clinics and summits.

Can you say some more about your vision?

We see an emerging agriculture and food supply that maintains and improves to the fertility of soil, protects the quality and availability of water, preserves the biodiversity of our planet and is stabilized by livable incomes at all scales. We see production and distribution, from farm to fork, in which the flow of energy and the discharge of waste, including greenhouse gas emissions, are within the capacity of the earth to sustain forever. 

The Food Lab’s Business Coalition wrote the following in a Call to Action in late 2006: “We, business leaders of global food and agriculture, recognize that we influence the way one quarter of the world’s population earns a living, half the world’s habitable land is cared for, and two-thirds of the world’s fresh water is used. With such influence comes opportunity and responsibility.”

Our goal is that the majority of the food bought and sold around the world is in a sustainability program in which environmental, social and economic impacts are benchmarked and measured.

Will market forces be enough to tip the balance?

Purchasing standards and consumer behavior have great leverage. New purchasing specifications by large buyers of food products, for example, provide incentives for producers to reduce pesticides and reduce energy consumption. But we believe policy changes are necessary as well, especially with regard to common resources (such as fisheries) where individual incentives do not always align with the common good.

Some of the SFL projects are aimed at small-scale farmers. Does SFL believe small farmers are more virtuous or entitled to farm?

No. SFL supports pilots to improve the social, environmental and economic performance of food systems at all scales; some involve the livelihood of small farmers, and others involve the practices of very large farms. If much of the agriculture in a place is based on small farms, then we support efforts to improve the farmers lives and farming practices. Where agriculture is based on large farmers, we similarly support improvements in the ways the farming affects both the environment and social well-being. 

Much about the food system depends on consumer choices. How are you approaching this?

One of the Food Lab's core objectives is to increase the demand for sustainably produced goods through public sector institutional purchasing practices and increasing consumer awareness. The Food Lab has conducted research in the US and Europe into how people think about food, and what metaphors, images, and messages can be most effective in communications about sustainability. We are seeing progress with large school systems and institutional buyers improving their scorecards and contracts for procurement.

What makes SFL different from other sustainability efforts?

The Sustainable Food Lab's uniqueness is in the influential diversity of its membership. SFL enables its members to explore solutions in a safe space with thought leaders in the industry. SFL members are committed to finding solutions, not in casting blame for our current situation. 

By engaging in a unique social technology called the U Process, SFL leaders are tapping into their potential for connecting to each other, bridging differences, and realizing their own deepest intentions. Here's what one member said about an SFL nature retreat experience:

“I found that being alone in nature for a long time allows you to tap into sources of innovation within yourself. After we went on the solo retreat in the mountains, we came back as a completely different group, in tune with each other. And within a few hours we merged 500 ideas into six initiatives.”

An SFL leader from Brazil wrote the following after a workshop:

“You have been able to put dogs and cats in a closed bag. Everybody got out alive and, more amazing, respecting each other's different points of view and agreeing that we could achieve something together.”

Who is behind the SFL?

Projects are led by SFL members and are supported by a professional secretariat. The following people serve on a Steering Committee:

The secretariat is managed at Sustainability Institute in Vermont, USA, and co-directed by Hal Hamilton and Don Seville.

Why are all these people investing so much in this work?

Here's what Larry Pulliam, Senior VP of SYSCO has to say:

“It's pretty unusual that fierce competitors like SYSCO and US Foodservice can come together and work for the higher good. That's what it's all about. The essence, the power, of the SFL is that we can do 100 fold, 1,000 fold, more together than we can do by ourselves. What we're doing is the right thing to do, the good thing to do—for the world. It's also good for our businesses. There's a competitive advantage for SYSCO to be involved, but we can't fully realize that competitive advantage without working together with others in this group to mainstream sustainability.”

Who pays for SFL?

All the participating organizations contribute time and money. The largest amounts of cash funding come from participating corporations, foundations, and government agencies.

How do I learn more?

To learn more about the SFL, please contact:

Hal Hamilton or Don Seville, Project Leaders
Sustainable Food Laboratory
Sustainability Institute
3 Linden Rd, Hartland, VT , USA

phone +1 802 436-1277
fax +1 802 436-1281

hhamilton_at_sustainer.org
dseville_at_sustainer.org