The Sustainable Food Lab incubates partnership projects, sometimes manages those projects, and always collects and shares learning. Presently, we are focusing most of our attention on the following three priorities: 1) Poverty and Market Access; 2) Climate Change and Sustainability Metrics; and 3) Regional, Local and Sustainable Food.
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 Cote d'Ivoire, and both flower and produce farmers in Kenya and Uganda. For more information or to see if you can get involved, contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
The Ford Foundation has made a grant to the Sustainable Food Lab and the ISEAL Alliance to assess the current state of knowledge about how formal value chains can serve pro-poor development, and to subsequently design projects that will increase benefits to small-scale producers. Food Lab staff and their ISEAL collaborators will develop a screening tool to weigh the pro-poor opportunities of specific value chain projects selecting for high impact potential. Within each chosen project a suite of approaches will be pursued, including investments in infrastructure by government agencies and seed funding by Ford and other foundations. For more information contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Climate change.
The Sustainable Food Lab is developing and testing ways to measure and incentivize low-carbon agricultural practices through the food supply chain with a team of member companies, university researchers and technical experts. 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).
The Global Agriculture Climate Assessment supports more than 15 sponsoring companies to assess GreenHouse Gas emissions by engaging farmers to identify mangement options with help from the Cool Farm Tool GHG Calculator.
The Market Mechanisms for Agricultural Greenhouse Gases initiative aligns and develops methods to quantify carbon for markets. Sustainable Food Lab staff organize workshops and other forms of outreach for this initative.
Food Lab Member the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops is piloting a comprehensive set of performance metrics for measuring sustainable performance throughout the specialty crop supply chain. The project seeks to offer a suite of outcomes-based metrics to enable operators at any point along the supply chain to benchmark, compare, and communicate their own performance. Sustainable Food Lab staff help steer the development of the Index and faciliate the GHG on-farm metric.
The Sustainable Food Lab connects and facilitates collaboration among many sustainabiltiy metrics initiatives in the food industry through workshops, publications and projects. The most recent such publication is "Operationalizing Sustainability" by Jon Johnson, Peter Senge and Hal Hamilton.
Regional, local, sustainable food.
The Sustainable Food Laboratory, along with the James Beard Foundation, is facilitating a national dialogue on sustainable food and public health through the lens of food service. The initiative is convening regional 'salons' around the United States and a Washington, D.C. meeting in October 2010 to engage chefs, restaurateurs, and other stakeholders in the food system to identify practical ways to make the restaurant industry more sustainable.
The Sustainable Food Lab also facilitates and supports the efforts of a number of business members working on local and regional sourcing of foods. The local food trend is growing rapidly, and Food Lab member companies are responding in a variety of ways. Sysco, for example, has piloted regional procurement in a few different operating companies. CHRobinson has pioneered the adaption of their distribution expertise to supply retail with regional produce.
The early work of the Food Lab included responsible fishing, framing, institutional food procurement, and biofuels standards.
What you can do:
Search our Toolbox and Newsletter Archive for more information on these efforts.
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Learn more about membership and contact us about having your organization join the Food Lab on a journey to a more sustainable mainstream food system.
