‘More than being green’: Consumers driving sustainability agenda

GLADSTONE, Mo. — Sustainability for the food system is difficult to define.

“Sustainability is more than being green in today’s world,” said Charlie Arnot, CEO for the Center for Food Integrity. “It includes health and wellness, animal welfare, worker treatment, food waste, packaging, impact on local communities and many more issues that impact people, animals and the planet.”

CFI is a non-profit organization that is focused on helping today’s food system earn consumer trust.

“We’ve identified more than 250 different issues or topics that food system organizations are addressing under the broad umbrella of sustainability or corporate social responsibility,” Arnot said.

“There’s a growing appreciation for the role consumer-facing brands are playing in trying to drive the sustainability agenda,” he said. “There are interests in sustainability and different groups are trying to harness that interest to capture an opportunity or promote a specific agenda and at times they do so by focusing on a single ingredient, process or practice without accounting for impacts or tradeoffs.”

This can be a challenge, Arnot said, because you can’t impact one variable without having an impact on the overall system.

“The challenge is finding that balance between economics, environment and social interest while being able to work in the sustainable domain,” he said.

Arnot discussed different aspects of a sustainable food supply with Marty Matlock, executive director of the University of Arkansas Resiliency Center, and asked him the following questions.

How would you describe the evolution of sustainability in the food system over the last decade?

“When we began this work about 28 years ago, the focus was reacting to a special interest group demands or concerns, and we evolved since then to where sustainability is now a strategic focus on safety, security and stability of company supply chains.

“Sustainability is now a boardroom issue and not just a corporate reputation protection or risk mitigation issue. It’s really about how you put products on the shelf that have value and meaning to the consumers.”

From the consumer perspective, what’s the current understanding as it relates to sustainability?

“The consumer is difficult to define, but in general the consumer is reacting to the consequences of food production being the most essential and expansive of all human activities. Production of food dominates almost all of our biomes, and it’s such a big and expansive endeavor that the impacts are evident and unavoidable.

“The consumer has to trust their food supply and rebuilding of trust has occurred over the last decade with sustainability as a critical, transparent, science-driven process to tell the story of the agricultural production process and distribution in a way consumers understand.

“With the 250-plus attributes we identified, how do consumer-facing brands sort through that to develop a sustainability strategy for their organization?

“Consumer-facing companies are in business to put high-quality, high-value products on the shelf at a price consumers will pay. Safety, security and stability of the supply chain are the key characteristics, so anything that supports those characteristics of the business proposition should be front and center in the decision-making process.

“The 17 sustainable development goals from the United Nations creates a framework for corporations to map their strategies for each of those goals and by doing so even if you’re not working on biodiversity issues or water quality issues, you’re likely working on food security or other goals that support the sustainable development goals that allows you to tell your story in a way that doesn’t look like a cookie-cutter reaction, but much more honest to your enterprise and the values of your enterprise.”

What do you see as the current pressure points that are most relevant to agriculture?

“Scale in the U.S. and Europe is our biggest challenge because we’ve experienced 100 years of economies of scale driving aggregation. De-centralization of production is less efficient and less cost effective because we have more redundant processing, packing and distribution systems around the nation.

“We have some production systems in the U.S., like dairy, that are struggling with the pressure to aggregate and increase in size. We’re in this moment of dynamic tension between centralization and de-centralization and between concentration and distribution of our production systems.”

What do you see on the horizon as the specific challenges related to sustainability and what is the food system doing to prepare to address those?

“Our biggest challenge is knowing what’s going on out there because it’s a big, complex supply chain. We have everything from specialty products that are identity preserved all the way through to the consumer to commoditized systems where we have difficulty with point of origin identification because of the level of mixing. It’s not unusual for a consumer product to have over 100 ingredients, so understanding that complexity is one of the challenges.”

As large companies make sustainability commitments they often count on their supply chain back to the farmer to meet that commitment, so how are food companies working with their supply chain to plan for the changes needed to achieve the metrics?

“Rarely is a price premium on the table to support changing practices and behaviors to differentiate the supply process. Therefore, there has to be other motivations in the market.

“Most of the decisions that affect the sustainability of food and agricultural systems are made across the 700,000 to 900,000 producers in any give sector, and they have local to global consequences. It is impossible to mandate a process that is uniformly affective across that complexity.”

For more information on the Center for Food Integrity, go to www.foodintegrity.org.