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Sustainable Food Lab Annual Summit and Learning Journeys

March 14-19, 2010 in Costa Rica

The summit will provide the opportunity to see and discuss some of the most interesting efforts on the ground in Costa Rica through learning journeys as well as the chance to meet, discuss cases from around the globe in detail, and plan future work.  

• Learn more about market based solutions to the big issues, including climate, water and development;
• Meet producers of products such as pineapples, bananas, cocoa, coffee, vegetables;
• Hear how Dole and other companies are teaming up with partners to quantify greenhouse gas emissions;
• Learn about opportunities for agriculture to receive ecosystem service payments; and

• Explore partnerships in a safe space with best-in-class experts from businesses as well as social and environmental NGOs.

Two consecutive events:

• Learning journeys beginning Sunday at dinner on March 14 in San Jose, and then traveling in small groups throughout the central part of Costa Rica.
• A meeting beginning Tuesday at dinner on March 16 and ending with dinner on Thursday March 18.  Most people will plan to fly out early morning March 19.

The 2010 Sustainable Food Lab Summit will provide members and invited guests the chance to see how businesses are responding to the Costa Rica national commitment to be climate neutral by 2021 and learn about cutting edge efforts in sustainable agriculture, biodiversity protection, economic development, fairness of trade, and export of tropical products.  

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For further information on this event or Food Lab membership contact Susan Sweitzer (ssweitzer@sustainablefood.org) or LeAnne Grillo (leanne@reospartners.com).

Sustainable Food Lab and SAI Platform looking for Partners in Global Climate Project to help farmers Grow Greener

Why join the Global Agriculture Climate Assessment project?

The Sustainable Food Lab and the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform have embarked on a comprehensive global climate project to lower greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. The project will engage individual farmers to identify management options to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions. The goal is to enable food companies and primary producers to evaluate and improve the carbon footprint of their products in a joint effort that generates valuable information beyond individual product chains.

The project, coined the Global Agriculture Climate Assessment, will look at a portfolio of farming systems across the globe, each chosen by a sponsoring partner. Several food companies have already joined:

Unilever—tomatoes and dairy

Pulse Canada—pulse crops

PepsiCo—potatoes

Sysco/Superior/Oxfam—smallholder vegetables

Marks & Spencer--cotton

Yara—to be determined

Agroterra—to be determined

Climate change is high on the public agenda. Early adopters can help shape the solutions. Agriculture is itself vulnerable to climate change, and better practices on farms often have direct co-benefits in terms of efficient resource use and in making systems more resilient in the face of variable weather conditions.

The Global Agriculture Climate Assessment combines several aspects that set it apart from the many other initiatives in the area of carbon footprinting and stewardship:

• Farmer focused: The farmer is the focus of data gathering and information feedback, thus providing access to farmers’ knowledge on improvement measures, while at the same time providing farmers with the information to assess climate benefits;

• Context sensitive: The project will gather specific data for farming systems of your choice and tailor recommendations accordingly, providing much better insight into your product life cycle than the use of calculator estimates based on generic assumptions or averages for entire regions;

• Global in scope: The scope is global, rather than local or national, and will include a range of systems (annual crops, perennial crops, livestock), thus allowing a uniform and consistent approach for all your supply chains;

• Action oriented: The initiative goes further than just measuring, by providing an action perspective for both farmers and you as a supply chain partner. It will also provide an assessment of barriers that farmers face and the training and incentives that will most efficiently overcome those barriers.

Additional benefits of the Global Agriculture Climate Assessment are that overall results will be used to check existing estimates of (global) reduction potential for agriculture and analysed for policy implications. Special attention will be given to synergies between mitigation, adaptation and efficiency. Furthermore, you will be able to participate in the ongoing development of the Cool Farm Tool, managed by University of Aberdeen in partnership with Unilever, and have access to it for application to additional farming systems. The results for those farming systems in your supply chain can be used as input in carbon footprint assessments of your products and will be made PAS2050 compliant.

Each sponsoring partner selects one or more farming system to be assessed, helps identify and provide access to a sample of farmers, pays a sponsoring fee of US $15,000 per farming system, and contributes guidance to the overall project, in collaboration with a team of scientific advisors.

About the Sustainable Food Lab

The Sustainable Food Lab is a consortium of 50 businesses, NGOs and academic institutions from four continents that share a commitment to accelerate the shift of sustainable food from niche to mainstream in order to ensure a healthy future for the planet and its people.  The organization was founded in 2004 to provide a venue for businesses and NGOs to share information, develop strategies and manage projects in a “safe space” collaborative environment. 

About The Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI)

SAI Platform is a food industry initiative which actively works to promote sustainable agriculture as a productive, competitive and efficient way of producing agricultural products, while at the same time protecting and improving the environmental, social and economic conditions of local communities.

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Fine Flavors Found! Commercial Hurdle Passed in Ghana Fine Flavor Cocoa Project

Just as the world’s coffee farmers have enjoyed higher returns by growing high quality specialty coffees, cocoa farmers have begun to reap the same benefits from the increasing demand for high quality chocolate. Most of the fine flavor cocoa has come from Latin America, but change is now coming to the heart of global cocoa production—West Africa.

The Sustainable Food Lab has been working on cultivating high quality fine flavor cocoa in the Ghana Fine Flavor Cocoa Project. The project is a collaboration of Scharffen Berger/Hershey, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), a leader in specialty coffee research, AgroEco/Louis Bolk Institute, a Dutch/Ghanaian organization with expertise in sustainable agriculture and farmer training, and the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG). 

 The Food Lab brought together a diverse group of fine chocolate industry experts to the Scharffen Berger/Hershey facilities in December to evaluate 15 cocoa varieties selected for the Ghana Fine Flavor Cocoa project.  These varietals are well known to yield cocoa with fruity and aromatic flavor notes, highly valued by gourmet manufacturers.  To date these varieties have primarily been produced in Latin America and the Caribbean and the global supply of fine flavor cocoa has been on the decline for years.  The decline comes at a time when the premium and dark chocolate category is showing phenomenal growth rates of up to 25 percent. The project captures this opportunity for Ghanaian farmers by uniting world-class genetic researchers, industry partners and a professionalized farming system for optimal yields and quality. 

The flavor evaluation identified five cocoa varieties with aromatic and ‘fine’ flavors, of quality suited to make premium chocolate products.  This marks a major hurdle passed in the first effort to grow fine flavor cocoa varieties in West Africa, origin of the world’s largest volume of bulk quality cocoa. 

The Food Lab and partner staff shared the positive results with the Offinso Fine Flavor Cocoa Farmers Association in Ghana in January.  Thirty of their members have prepared 1 acre each of their existing farms for planting and grafting of the new planting material when the rains start in the spring. The farmer association is benefiting from the farm management training of the Sustainable Tree Crops program as well as targeted accompaniment by CRIG on planting and grafting these varieties.  The Fine Flavor project represents a promising farming innovation to bring increased income and a link to a high value market for these farmers. 

The Ghana Fine Flavor Cocoa Project is part of the 4 year, $5million initiative ‘New Business Models for Sustainable Trading Relationships’, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  The Sustainable Food Lab teamed up with Rainforest Alliance, IIED, CIAT and Catholic Relief Services to develop transparent and ethical value chains with smallholder producers in sub-Saharan Africa. The project includes 4 smallholder value chains: 

• Flowers to UK retail, Kenya
• Dried navy beans to Italian and UK processors,
• EthiopiaFine flavor cocoa to US specialty manufacturer, Ghana
• Rainforest Alliance certified cocoa to US, EU and Japanese mainstream chocolate industry, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana

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Taking the Local Route to Sustainability

The local food movement has grown by leaps and bounds in just the four years since San Francisco Bay Area food writer Jessica Prentice coined the term “locavore.” Public awareness is widespread thanks to public statements from personalities ranging from Michelle Obama to Michael Pollan. In addition, consumer demand is inspiring changes in the availability of local food — from multinational corporate retailers such as Walmart down to small-scale and direct-to-consumer farmers markets. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that the number of farmers markets in the United States has grown steadily from 1,755 markets in 1994, when the USDA began to track them, to more than 4,685 in 2008.

What is truly remarkable about the local food movement is that the concept is hardly a new innovation. Historically, food has always been about proximity, and local cuisine was a consequence of necessity rather than preference. “Even up until the better part of the 20th century, almost all fresh produce came from farms within a relatively close range of your local grocer,” says J.D. Grubb, director of procurement at C.H. Robinson Company, one of the leading providers of third-party logistics and a pioneer of fresh produce sourcing services. “If it didn’t grow within that radius, it simply wasn’t part of your regular diet.”

It wasn’t until the introduction of freezing and efficient temperature controlled transport over the last several decades that food, including produce, was able to overcome geographical and seasonal restrictions. These innovations helped diversify and extend the availability of food around the world. However, as industrialization paved the way for greater access and availability, freshness has sometimes fallen by the wayside, while the diversity of varieties and flavor have diminished. “Over the course of C.H. Robinson’s 100-plus-year history, we’ve witnessed firsthand how industrial and technological innovations have impacted the food and agriculture sectors,” Grubb said.

The challenge that the industry now faces is actually a cross section between the proximity and diversity of old, and the scale and availability of today. How can local food production continue to lessen environmental impact, reduce costs and improve quality, while at the same time maintain the scale and efficiency needed to meet the growing demand of today’s retail and consumer markets?

As American agriculture shifted to coastal regions in search of abundant and cheap labor, and resources like water, land and energy, these regions’ resources have become increasing stressed.  The modernization of the supply chain has likewise added barriers for entry into fresh produce production due to cost of modernized cooling, packing and harvesting equipment necessary to facilitate today’s delivery specifications and cold chain management.

Locally sourced food, however, has piqued the interest of farmers and consumers because it supports the environment by enriching the soil, protecting air and water quality, and minimizing energy consumption;  benefits the local community and local economy; and delivers what many believe to be a fresher product. “Local sourcing is revitalizing purchasing cooperatives and farmers markets as consumers embrace what they consider to be a more sustainable — and perhaps more economical — lifestyle,” Grubb said.

Amid today’s rising energy costs, markets plagued by economic uncertainty and growing public demand for environmentally friendly practices, C.H. Robinson set out to find just the right fit between local food supply and demand that will benefit both the grower and the retailer equally. The company recognized that many of today’s consumers, farmers and businesses have looked to the local sourcing methods of the past for solutions, but often find that the demand for local food far outweighs supply.

“The consolidation of customers created a demand for resources that small stakeholders cannot readily deliver,” Grubb notes. “The scales of most retail chains require large volumes of food and produce that simply cannot be met under the current supply chain model.”

Over the past half century, economies of scale have been an ongoing challenge among the farming community.  As farm incomes increasingly lag behind the increased costs of production, small farms with shorter production windows began to decline while large farms with access to ample resources, technology and capital became more prominent.  The increased use of information technology and precision farming techniques has pressured small and under-resourced farmers.  Even with the expansion of farmers markets and cooperatives, most small farms lack the necessary resources to find the most effective and most profitable means of getting their products to market.

Recognizing these challenges, C.H. Robinson leveraged the company’s long history and expansive network of more than 32,000 customers to better understand the diverse needs of growers and retailers, and, more importantly, where these needs overlap. C.H. Robinson has helped commodity growers shift toward local markets, and they have supported smaller growers to expand into these new market opportunities.

C.H. Robinson’s relationships with retailers gave the company insight into the crops and products of greatest interest and value to a particular regional market, taking a lot of the guesswork out of farming for local and regional growers. This insight is used to advise farmers on appropriate timing, quantity and production, and helps farmers to aggregate volumes and manage the supply chain in ways that they have never been able to do individually. Disparate transportation systems can now be consolidated, and sales and marketing efforts can be executed cooperatively since everyone has stake in the ultimate goal to attract more customers.

Through C.H. Robinson’s network of farmers, retailers gain local access to the volume needed for regional and national retailers to provide the quantity their consumers are accustomed to, while at the same time improving freshness and reducing cost. As a result, locally sourced food has evolved into a strategic business advantage for customers, and a means of differentiation from the competition.

“Moving production closer to the marketplace allows us to get fresher product into the stores more frequently, improving shelf life, reducing the risk of supply interruption, and supporting local economies that provide new jobs and economic activity” says Grubb.

As a result of C.H. Robinson’s innovative approach to locally sourced food, businesses and farmers are benefiting, consumers are receiving healthy foods at lower costs, and the environmental impacts are lessened through the company’s efforts to improve sustainability throughout the supply chain. This is a fundamental principle of the Sustainable Food Lab — working together to create sustainable solutions through strategic partnerships that are mutually beneficial to all those involved in the food system.

According to Hal Hamilton of the Sustainable Food Lab, “When I first met JD at a Sustainable Food Lab meeting, sustainability was a brand new concept for his company. Now C.H. Robinson has become a pioneer at using modern logistics to fill the critical gap between demand for local and the farmers who have lacked the capacity to meet that demand. Farmers across the South and in the Northeast have increased their income. Transport miles have plummeted and consumers have greater access to local produce. 

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State of Sustainable Food Lab

2009 was a year of growth and innovation in the Food Lab activities. Our mission, articulated by a diverse group 6 years ago, is to mainstream sustainability in the food system.  Among a proliferation of sustainability organizations and associations we’ve focused on a few key areas where the needs are greatest and where we can bring unique resources to innovations. We’re glad you’re on the journey with us!

--Hal Hamilton and Don Seville for the staff team

Please welcome Stephanie Daniels to the Food Lab staff team.  Stephanie has a background in sustainable supply chains and ethical purchasing in the food sector. Her expertise is in sourcing from low resource farmers in developing countries, with a core focus on cocoa.

Climate

The Global Agriculture Climate Assessment now has 7 companies agreeing to sponsor an assessment of 8 farming systems. The purpose is to quantify GHG emissions and identify optimum practices in each farming system, and subsequently to articulate needed incentives and technical assistance for better practice adoption and reducing the upstream carbon footprint of each supply chain. We’re firming up the MOU and Terms of Reference and will return to recruiting until we enroll sponsors for about 20 systems around the world. Each sponsor is contributing $15K per assessment. The project is managed by SFL with additional leadership from Christof Walter of Unilever, Peter Erik Ywema of SAI Platform, Jon Hillier of the University of Aberdeen, Marty Matlock of the University of Arkansas, and a growing list of scientific partners.

A new project to collect and benchmark carbon quantification methods and protocols for agriculture will be led by Keith Driver of Blue Source and funded by the Packard Foundation, with SFL managing the project and facilitating stakeholder workshops in the second quarter of 2010.

Livelihood

The New Business Models cluster of value chain projects includes Gates Foundation supported supply chains for Ethiopian beans, Kenyan flowers, and cocoa from Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire. Commercial deals have included Acos, Premier Foods, ASDA, Hershey/Scharffenberger, Kraft and others. NGO partners include Catholic Relief Services, International Center for Tropical Agriculture, International Institute for Environment and Development, and others.

Don Seville and his team of partners on these value chain projects have written a couple of papers to synthesize best practices. They have also drafted 17 case studies. Some of this will be shared at our meeting in Costa Rica, and the papers are available.

A new value chain project is developing with frozen vegetables from the highlands of Guatemala, involving Sysco, Superior Foods, SUMAR, ADAM, CIAT, and Oxfam. This project is symptomatic of an increasingly strong partnership with Oxfam GB in Latin America.

SFL and CIAT have a new project with IFAD (the International Fund for Agricultural Development) to build stronger links between IFAD development projects in Latin America and the private sector. IFAD funds many on-the-ground infrastructure improvements required for upgraded farm supply.

Piloting Innovation

We are working with the Clinton Global Initiative, the US Department of State, and the Agency for International Development to incubate new value chain partnerships. Some of these initiatives could increase SFL revenues as well as responsibilities to coordinate projects.

We’re deepening our partnership with the MIT Sloane School of Management and expanding that partnership to include the Harvard Business School. This partnership includes:

• Teams of MBA students available to do projects with member companies
• Research on efforts to operationalize sustainability in value chains
• Case studies that can be used in university and executive/practitioner courses
• Cross-case analysis
• Capacity building
• Peer learning network among those who are facilitating value chain projects
• Peer learning network among those who are leading sustainability inside businesses
• Train the trainer courses to support field-level capacity building among intermediaries and local NGOs.
• Courses on operationalizing sustainability targeted at supply chain executives
• Executive champion workshops for senior leaders

SFL contributes staff time and sometimes grant management to three sustainability metrics initiatives:

• The Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops—Hal serves on the Steering Committee to help get this through piloting. Daniella is coordinating the development of the farm level GHG metric.
• The ISEAL Alliance Code of Good Practice for Measuring Impact of Voluntary Standards—both Hal and Don have contributed time. SFL served as the pathway for Ford Foundation money.
• The State of Sustainability Initiative—this is a collaborative effort to analyze and rank standards, and Hal serves on an Advisory Council.

SFL hosted a Metrics in Action Workshop in November 2009. One output was a joint paper by Peter Senge, Jon Johnson (Univ of Arkansas), and Hal Hamilton on “Operationalizing Sustainability.”

We’re planning a joint conference with SAI Platform in Brussels May 10-12. We expect 200-300 business, farm, government and NGO leaders. This is one of a series of conferences that included the 21st Century Ag Revolution conference in DC last March.

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Upcoming Events

Please note the Sustainable Food Lab Save the Date details for a number of upcoming events.  You can find these and other news at: http://www.sustainablefoodlab.org/calendar/  

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