Strategy Development & Implementation

Part of the Sustainable Food Lab’s purpose is to directly support organizations in their sustainability efforts. Our vision is to see more and more of the global food supply in sustainability programs that support continuous improvement with measureable impacts.

Support services available from the Sustainable Food Lab include the following:

Sustainable sourcing programs ultimately need to connect the goals of buyers with the goals and practices of producers, suppliers and customers. The Food Lab brings years of experience organizing supply chain summits, helping embed sustainability commitments into procurement operations, and engaging diverse stakeholders upstream in supply chains. The Food Lab team’s work on value chain summits and projects has included Starbucks, Ben and Jerry’s, Unilever, Mars, Cargill, McDonalds, Walmart and Target.

Tools and approaches are in some cases more efficiently created in a pre-competitive collaborative process. The Food Lab bridges companies and resource providers, contributing industry-wide knowledge, skills with design and facilitation, and project management. The Food Lab team has helped create and lead industry collaborations for vanilla, beef, fisheries, organic grain, watershed stewardship, and climate resilience. The Food Lab also stewards communities of practice for those charged with measuring impacts, including the Cool Farm Alliance and a Shared Approaches Framework for Performance Measurement in smallholder farming systems.

Most organizations need periodic refreshes to align goals and execute across different functions. The Food Lab can lead your executive and management teams in a process to define priorities and set goals.  We draw upon our relationships and process expertise to ensure your strategic plan for sustainability will resonate in your operational culture, be relevant to your industry sector, and provide a coherent framework for action and results. The Food Lab team has supported strategy in organizations as diverse as Oxfam, Catholic Relief Services, Sysco, and Ben and Jerry’s.

The Food Lab specializes in events that maximize learning and quality relationships, drawing on the organizational learning, systems thinking, and Theory U community around MIT. Annual Food Lab summits are always preceded by carefully designed and facilitated learning journeys with diverse small groups. Creative event design and learning journey organizing has frequently been used by Food Lab partners, including Mars, Unilever and Cargill.