In honor of World Soil Day, the Food Lab has created a soil health communications toolkit to help our partners talk to the business relevance of soil health. The toolkit includes: An open source slide deck that connects the importance of soil health to business, identifies best practices and showcases private sector actions. The deck is…
The brand panel set out to learn from companies addressing climate change and building resilient supply chains. How have they approached this? Are they able to make sustainability investments commercially relevant for both farmers and the business? What have they found? Two company examples provided fodder for discussion: Juliet Caulkins from Mars Petcare, who spoke about…
The Community of Practice convenes each year to better understanding the smallholder farmers we work with and to improve sustainable supply and livelihoods. Data alone is insufficient for learning. Exchange and robust dialogue is in efforts to use data to inform strategy and affect positive change. At the close of the meeting, we reflected on what…
The CEO Water Mandate couldn’t have stated it more clearly: “Water poses one of the most vital sustainable development challenges of our time.” Increasing pressures on water reserves and the effects of climate change underline the need for the food and beverage industry, along with public sector donors and governments, to prioritize practical solutions to…
The short answer to “Why sustainable food needs big business?” is that both challenges and solutions are driven primarily in the market. Food and agriculture globally account for more greenhouse gas emissions than all transportation, 70 percent of all fresh water use, and employment for more than a billion people. Small farms and small…
Nienke Stam from IDH, Simon Lord from Sime Darby, Richard Fox from Finlays, Juliana Lopez from Amaggi and Charlotte Cawthorne from Innocentdiscussed corporate commitments to zero-deforestation or water stewardship and what they are learning about operationalizing those commitments. In particular, as the focus broadens to include not only supply chain but also collaborations among different players…
The IDH Sustainable Landscapes Initiative (ISLA) is focused on six landscape level efforts to shift the agricultural system towards sustainable resource management and resiliency. Neinke Stam of IDH introduced three of these cases, with a few of the key points shared below: Richard Fox from Finlays described work around Kenya’s Lake Naivasha where risking population…
On April 1, the California Department of Water Resources hydrologists are expected to announce the smallest snowpack ever in state history. This will mark the fourth year of an unprecedented drought that has strained the capacity of residents, farmers, business, and government to respond to the immediate crisis and to think strategically about the future of water…
The shocking statistic that 33 percent of food is lost or wasted—one out of every three calories—begs the question, what can food and beverage companies do about food loss and waste in their supply chains? There is a long list of urgent and compelling issues that food and beverage companies are already grappling with in…
As multinational companies grow more sophisticated in understanding their supply chains, the research community is also getting better at modeling and predicting future weather patterns, diseases, water availability and other climate change impacts. The question is, how well are these sectors supporting and feeding each other? Is the science on shifting crop suitability reaching the…