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Mar142016

Barriers and Opportunities: The Challenge of Organic Grain Production in the Northeast, Midwest and Northern Great Plains

Organic grain supply is an identified bottleneck for value-added processes. Growth in grain production lags other organic commodities and remains a negligible amount of total U.S. cropland. An informal group of companies commissioned the Sustainable Food Lab to give them thorough background on barriers and challenges to organic grain production before acting to address the…

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Mar112016

Climate smart cocoa picks up steam in Ghana

A cross-section of more than 50 people representing the Ghana cocoa sector came together March 9 in Accra to review the advances of the Climate Smart Value Chain project being implemented by CIAT, IITA, Rainforest Alliance, Root Capital and the Sustainable Food Lab. This workshop builds on a kick-off workshop held in May 2015, field visits and joint work combining soil mapping with climate…

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Mar32016

Scope 4: How to grow sustainable sourcing to measureable impacts in regions and commodity systems

Seven years ago, Gene Kahn, then a VP at General Mills, hosted a boardroom meeting for business leaders in the Sustainable Food Lab. He described the environmental footprint of General Mills’ products, acknowledged that the largest part of that footprint was in agriculture, but urged others to join him in focusing on packaging because it…

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Mar32016

Cool Farm Alliance celebrates achievements and plans for future developments

As we prepare for the Cool Farm Alliance’s 2016 Annual General Meeting, we are also looking back to reflect on several notable achievements marked in 2015. Specifically, the Alliance: Was announced winner of the hotly-contested ‘Practice with Science’ Award Added new software features including data aggregation and a more flexible fertilizer interface allowing users to…

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Feb292016

The Collaboration Economy

Erik Lowitt’s The Collaboration Economy build’s a case for collorative approaches to sustainability. He interviewed dozens of global leaders and includes case studies from these interviews, focusing on Unilever, GE, Coca-Cola, Nestle Waters, and the European Parliament. One chapter was written with Jan Kees Vis of Unilever, who is also chair of the Sustainable Food…

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Feb262016

The Changing Vocabulary of Food Purchasing: a Guide for Foodservice Professionals  

Initially created by a collaboration between SYSCO, Unilever, US FoodService, Rainforest Alliance and WWF this guide provides relevant information about terminology in production, processing, preparation, serving and marketing of food. Click here for PDF

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Feb252016

A Short Guide to Sustainable Agriculture

The Sustainable Food Lab and Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) collaborated on the development of this guide. The intention of this booklet is to give an easy understanding of sustainable agriculture and its main issues. It will be useful particularly for people curious about the business case for sustainable agriculture. Click here for PDF Back to…

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Feb252016

Why Sustainable Food Needs Big Business, and Why Business Can’t Do It Alone

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…

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Feb252016

Why We Need Metrics and Why Metrics Are Dangerous

All learning involves assessment. Unless a person, group, or organization can gauge how they are doing relative to an aim, no learning is possible. Such assessment often is aided by quantitative measurement, especially when many people and even many different organizations are involved. But the goal is the learning, the improvement in outcomes achieved and…

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Feb242016

Practitioners’ Guide for the Sustainable Sourcing of Agricultural Raw Materials

Practitioners’ Guide for the Sustainable Sourcing of Agricultural Raw Materials, SAI Platform Back to Resources

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