Projects
The Sustainable Food Lab incubates partnership projects, sometimes manages those projects, and always collects and shares learning. Shared work has included responsible fishing, framing, institutional food procurement, and biofuels standards. New efforts are developing around water quality and healthy nutrition.
Presently, we are focusing most of our attention on the following three priorities:
- Poverty and market access. The Food Lab and its members are facilitating new market connections between multinational food companies and small-scale farmers in Central America and Africa. We have developed and are implementing new business models that distribute risks and rewards more evenly across the supply chain, improve the flow of market information, and increase access to credit and technical assistance.
In Africa for example, with support that the Gates Foundation is providing Rainforest Alliance, we are creating new market opportunities for bean farmers in Ethiopia, cocoa farmers in Ghana, and produce farmers in Kenya and Uganda.
- Climate change. The Sustainable Food Lab has assembled a team of member companies, university researchers and technical experts to develop and test ways to measure and incentivize low-carbon agricultural practices through the food supply chain. Increasing soil organic matter, improving fertilizer application, and capturing methane from livestock are turning agriculture from a problem (accounting for one/sixth of global GHG emissions) into a solution (by enhancing the capacity of crops and soil to store carbon).
- Regional food. In the US, The Sustainable Food Lab is facilitating new market connections between a select number of companies (retailers, food service and distribution firms) to “re-regionalize” fruit and vegetable production and distribution. The local food trend is at an all time peak, with every sector of the industry clamoring for local supply. In addition to key drivers such as transportation costs, climate change and growing consumer demand into account, we have identified specific points in the chain—from product specifications to Quality Assurance to post-harvest-handling to contracting and financing—where new procurement practices can be put in place.
What you can do:
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