By Ben Harris The other day I headed out on a neighborhood stroll, the cloying heat of the apartment behind me and dissipating with every step. I’ve taken to listening…
By Elizabeth Reaves and Hal Hamilton Regenerative agriculture – a term covering a broad range of sustainable farming practices, many of them as old as agriculture itself – is…
By Elizabeth Reaves & Hal Hamilton Within a food and beverage company, climate risk affects each function in different ways – and each of these functions can help farmers…
Culminating in this report and accompanying resources, the Food Lab and Midwest Row Crop Collaborative led a group of ten companies and The Nature Conservancy to develop an exciting and…
The stakes are rising because systemic risks have huge financial consequences by Hal Hamilton I’ll use ocean fisheries as a quick example of the scope of sustainability strategy.…
By Hal Hamilton The Sustainable Food Lab has two objectives: 1) deliver impacts in the ways that supply chains affect people and nature, and 2) increase the capabilities of “system…
PFI has observed benefits from diverse rotations with small grains, including GHG reductions, roots in the ground year-round and yield improvements, from farmers like Tom Frantzen pictured above We are…
By: Hal Hamilton The most important book I’ve read in years is Rebecca Henderson’s Reimaging Capitalism in a World on Fire. It’s the right book for this moment during which…
By Elizabeth Reaves In the context of COVID, I am finding the tension between current reality and systems transformation to be paralyzing and I came to the concept of…
By Stephanie Daniels The concept of living income of farmers allows us to consider if the combined effect of various farming practices, voluntary sustainability standards, productivity investments and premiums prices…
In 2018, the Food Lab (in our role with the Living Income Community of Practice) supported the Ghana cocoa sector to establish a sector wide living income benchmark and publicize…
In 2016 the Food Lab joined an USAID Feed the Future program focusing on private sector engagement in climate-smart agriculture. The program became three linked initiatives (shown below), and to…
In a case study produced for the USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience, the Food Lab features member Ben & Jerry’s and their effort to increase cocoa…
The USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience is happy to share the launch of a new website aimed to provide coffee companies with the resources they…
Looking to ensure that coffee farmers continue to invest in coffee in ways that enable them to grow production and quality in the face of climate change, Olam, a global…
The cocoa industry has taken bold steps to preventing deforestation in the Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI), a public private collaboration between 33 cocoa and chocolate companies (85% of the…
The Sustainable Food Lab has worked with the beverage company AB InBev and its Uganda subsidiary Nile Breweries to explore ways to increase the resilience of small-scale grain farmers to…
In collaboration with the Organic Trade Association, the Organic Grain Collaboration has co-authored a new report, titled “U.S. Organic Grain – How to Keep It Growing“. The report includes information on…
The Sustainable Food Lab is happy to announce the publication of The Climate-Smart Agriculture Papers, Investigating the Business of a Productive, Resilient and Low Emission Future. This book is a collection of…
In collaboration with partners Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung (HRNS) and Sustainable Agriculture, Food and Environment (SAFE), we are happy to share a new report, Investing in Youth in Coffee Growing Communities,…
Food Lab partners have some great tools that are open source. The Academy for Systems Change has made available A System Leader’s Fieldbook that includes tools from many leading practitioners,…
The demand for organic grains is growing. Aroostook County, Maine is a region that could help to meet this gap in supply, but organic grain farming as a standalone business…
This paper presents an aligned yet customizable framework of indicators for measuring farm-level sustainability in smallholder agricultural supply chains. These indicators are proposed primarily in the context of performance measurement,…
Small-‐scale farmers—whose output supports a population of roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide—manage roughly 85% of the world’s farms. And every day, companies trade with these farmers in a wide variety…
In 2012-2013, Food Lab company members of the Values Based Sourcing group supported a study on smallholder sugar in Paraguay to to pilot a performance measurement methodology while collecting data to…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Practitioners’ Guide for the Sustainable Sourcing of Agricultural Raw Materials, SAI Platform Back to Resources
SFL Champion Peter Senge, co-director Hal Hamilton and FSG director John Kania team up in the lead article, The Dawn of System Leadership, followed by Hal’s article on System Leaders…
Peter Senge, long time friend and colleague and author of the The Fifth Discipline and other bestselling books, has come out with a new book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals…
Agriculture is a source of livelihoods for an estimated 2.5 billion people globally. It provides jobs for 1.3 billion smallholders and landless workers. Thus, it has enormous potential to reduce…
French-style green beans flow every day from remote farmers in Guatemala to Costco stores throughout North America. They pass through the Cuatro Pinos Cooperative and the Los Angeles Salad Company, who…
Indicators of Poverty and Hunger in Coffee Supply Chains When Green Mountain Coffee Roasters decided to measure the impact of their CSR programs, they asked the Sustainable Food Lab and…
Small-scale farmers, who form the bedrock for global agrifood supply, are faced with agrifood markets in an unprecedented state of flux. Domestic markets are undergoing rapid but uneven modernization,…
Review of the role of commodity exchanges in supporting smallholder farmer market linkages and income benefits Recently the government of Ethiopia mandated that all of the navy bean trade is…
Food and beverage companies are facing a rapidly changing world. Consumers everywhere are growing more knowledgeable and concerned about the ethics of where and how their food and drink…
Under What Conditions Are Value Chains Effective Tools for Pro Poor Development? Understanding the benefits, costs, and risks when connecting small scale producers to formal markets is critical to supporting…
