We’re at the beginning of a new food revolution. COVID-19 has shone a light on the vulnerabilities across our food system and created an imperative to reimagine what is possible. In the face of the pandemic, eaters have begun demanding greater diversity, transparency, health, safety, convenience and accessibility in our food supply. This new reality is changing the relationship between retailers, brands and eaters, while also accelerating innovation and the adoption of technology across every part of the value chain.  

We are thrilled to be partnering with S2G Ventures to bring the best and brightest minds together to understand how this unprecedented moment in time might shape food retail over the next five years. Using S2G’s recently released The Future of Food: Through the Lens of Retail Report as a framework, we will be hosting a 4-part interactive conversation series exploring how innovations in commerce, content and community will transform the industry. Our goal is to create a platform for discussion and collaboration, a place for people from diverse backgrounds from farm to fork to come together to explore how we might create a more resilient, equitable, diverse, delicious, healthful and climate smart future.

How to Participate

We’re creating a platform for discussion and collaboration, a place for people from diverse backgrounds from farm to fork to come together to explore how we might create a more resilient, equitable, diverse, delicious, healthful and climate-smart future.

You can attend individual sessions or purchase an all access pass, which gives you access to our dedicated community Slack channel where you will be able to connect with others to discuss how to navigate the evolving grocery retail world.

All of our conversations are highly interactive and include 45 minutes of live Q&A with our speakers via Zoom.

Virtual Conversations

Walter Robb & S2G Ventures on The Future of Retail | December 10, 2020 |  2-3:30p ET [Free Event]

Join Walter Robb, former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market and executive in residence at S2G Ventures, Audre Kapacinskas, vice president at S2G Ventures, and Danielle Gould, founder of Food+Tech Connect, for a conversation about how retailers might leverage cutting edge technologies and stakeholder-focused business models to build a 21st century food system grounded in trust that better connects consumers to their food.

View the full video from the discussion here.

Content: Reimagining Discovery | January 21, 2021 | 12:00-1:30p ET

In response to the panic buying of March 2020, retailers began to rethink what they put on their shelves. They prioritized the essentials, and larger, established brands over smaller, emerging ones. In a pandemic era grocery store, demos and other tried and true in store marketing techniques no longer work, which has further hurt emerging brands. Today, brands are being forced to rethink how they find and attract customers. This conversation will explore the various new approaches emerging brands are taking for customer acquisition and discovery.

Speakers:

• Vanessa Pham, Co-Founder at Omsom
• Jeremiah McElwee, Chief Merchandising Officer at Thrive Market
• Katie Marston, Chief Marketing Officer at Once Upon a Farm
• Kelsey Formost, Director of Content Strategy at Tagger Media
• Tonya Bakritzes, SVP of Marketing at S2G Ventures

Community: Reimagining Grocery To Better Serve All Stakeholders | February 4, 2021 | 12:00-1:30p ET

The US’s top 20 grocery stores represent over 70% of the retail market. They are gatekeepers of our food supply chain and have had profound impacts on what food is produced and by whom, as well as the health and wellbeing of their staff and communities. This discussion will explore how retailers might better support all of their stakeholders (ie their customers / neighborhood, employees, brands, farmers, etc.) needs around transparency, equity, diversity, health and sustainability. We’ll also look at the ways digitization and digital storytelling are changing retailers’ responsibility to and their relationship with their stakeholders.

Confirmed Speakers:

• Errol Schweizer, Host of The Checkout Podcast, Co-Founder, Board Member For Natural Products Retail and CPG, Writer at Forbes.com and Former Whole Foods VP of Grocery
• Sam Polk, CEO at Everytable
• Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Key Leader at Coalition of Immokalee Workers
• Greg Asbed, Co-Founder at Coalition of Immokalee Workers
• Jessica Murphy, Business Development Manager at S2G Ventures

Commerce: Reimagining Grocery For Resilience | February 18, 2021 | 12:00-1:30p ET

The pandemic has expanded how and where we shop. Conventional grocery retail initially struggled to meet the demand shock caused by pantry loading. Consequently, many consumers turned to online grocers, meal-kits, farm e-commerce sites and other delivery services that were once seen as niche. In this discussion, we will examine how some of these food retailers have pivoted business models or adapted supply chains to enable them to be more resilient and better serve their customers’ needs around convenience. We will also examine what may have staying power as conventional retailers invest in omni-channel and smart fulfillment strategies to solve the last mile.

Confirmed Speakers:

• Jody Kalmbach, Group Vice President, Product Experience at The Kroger Co.
• Birgit Cameron, Head of Patagonia Provisions
• Rob Twyman, Executive Vice President at Whole Foods Market
• Moderated by Walter Robb, EIR at S2G Ventures

The post Introducing The Reimagining Food Retail Conversation Series appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Source: S2G Ventures’ The Future of Food: Through The Lens of Retail

This is a guest post by Audre Kapacinskas, Vice President at S2G Ventures

Food+Tech Connect and S2G Ventures are partnering to host Reimagining Retail, a series of conversations exploring how this unprecedented moment in time will shape food retail over the next five years. 

Why Now? How the Pandemic of 2020 is reshaping grocery retail, why today is different and what it will change about how and what we eat. 

The pandemic of 2020 is shining the brightest of lights on our present day food system and exposing both its resiliency and vulnerabilities. No industry touches more aspects of our lives than food – it employs 11 percent of our population, represents 10 percent of household expenditures, underpins our social fabric and directly relates to the health of our communities and planet. Over the last 100 years, we have developed a massive food supply chain that is efficiently humming in the background of our everyday lives – delivering food consistently, cheaply and without question. Over the last year, cracks emerged across our food system and showcased some of the tradeoffs we have made over the last century — efficiency at the cost of resiliency; scale at the expense of variety; price at the expense of value; globalization at the expense of our local communities. 

At the same time, Covid-19 accelerated trends that had been percolating for years – expanding digital footprints, refining e-commerce offerings, exploring automation opportunities. As Covid-19 persists and retailers continue to forge ahead, the pandemic is separating the leaders from the laggards. New technologies and behaviors are becoming engrained and we are crossing a chasm from which the industry will not return unchanged. 

Taking online grocery shopping as an example, the last 30 years have seen a slow evolution. Peapod was founded in 1989 – despite requiring customers to physically download software, the company had enough buzz to go public in 1996 but ultimately closed its digital doors in February of 2020 (ironically). Webvan received its first order in 1999, spent $1 billion building distribution centers in 2000 and closed in 2001. Instacart was founded several years later and offered a more accessible, hybrid model for consumers and retailers that connected physical and digital. Despite these fits and starts, online grocery sales remained low – 3-5 percent of total grocery in the US. As Covid-19 persists, it is influencing behavior and offering a real opportunity to make online grocery shopping a meaningful part of our food system – projections estimate that 1 in every 5 grocery dollars will be spent online in 2025. Today’s emerging digital models are underestimated in their ability to change how, what and why we eat what we eat.

While we have built a massive supply chain, when we compare the capital that has flowed into other sectors like pharma or technology, food pales in comparison. For decades, the food industry has been underinvested, under appreciated and under digitized. Today, we have the opportunity to reimagine it taking into account technology advances, consumer preferences and impact to our economy, planet and health. We are at a distinct moment in time where critical infrastructure is coming together, technology costs have decreased and consumers are open to behavior change. Internet usage reached critical mass in 2000 in the US; the iPhone was launched in 2007; falling sensor costs are driving the proliferation of personal and IoT devices which in turn are contributing to the exponential rise of data – we have 44X the amount of data today than we did a decade prior. As we think forward to the next 100 years of food and retailing, there is opportunity to reimagine sourcing and verification, go-to-market channels and market places and ultimately who controls access to the market and the products that will win in the next century. 

The increasing role of technology in retail transcends the growth of e-commerce during the pandemic. It will impact not only where consumers buy, but how and why they buy. It is within this context that we at S2G Ventures see opportunity to build a better food system by integrating content, community and commerce, which we outline in full in our Future of Retail Report. By leveraging cutting edge technologies with stakeholder-focused business models, we have an opportunity to build a 21st century food system grounded in trust that better connects consumers to their food.

Commerce: How emerging sales channels and new operational approaches are enabling 21st century business models and building a more resilient food supply chain.

In the early days of the pandemic, vulnerabilities across our food system emerged – from early stock-outs, to stories of infected workers to euthanized pigs. As consumers, we were confronted with the limitations  of supply chains built for affordability, consistency, efficiency and safety. Using the meat industry as an anecdote, in the last 45 years the number of meat plants has been cut in half; in the US three pork processors control nearly two thirds of the pork processing capacity and four beef processors control nearly three fourths of beef processing. In some ways, consumers benefited from the greater access to cheap, safe, abundant food that this vast system enabled. According to ERS, “the average share of disposable personal income spent on food by Americans fell from 17.0% in 1960 to a historical low of 9.5% in 2019.” In other ways consumers became increasingly disconnected from food producers and more exposed to highly processed and less nutrient dense foods. This supply chain made sense for grocery retailers who also faced consolidation and were often competing on price. In 1996 the 20 largest grocery retailers represented 42 percent of the market; in 2018 they represented over 70 percent. 

While today’s grocery retailers have more power than ever, the industry is concurrently becoming more complex as lines between physical and digital blur, new capabilities and organizational structures are required and relationships between consumers, sellers and producers evolve. Just as the television networks began to be disintermediated in the early 2000’s, the food system is beginning to experience a shift. Consumers are engaging across a variety of platforms and expectations are carrying over from other industries. If Netflix can serve-up content that is tailored to my tastes and preferences, why can’t the food providers in my life do the same? 

Customer expectations around convenience and personalization are forcing retailers to do more, carry more, manage more as they compete with a new set of players. As complexity in grocery retail increases, retailers are digitizing their operations and investing in robotics, automation and smart fulfillment to improve the economics of personalization and convenience. The omni-channel evolution is changing the supply chain and even organizational structures – overhauling existing divisions between “digital” and “store” teams to create a unified approach both internally with their teams and externally with their customers. In some instances, the physical world is mimicking the digital as stores are being reconfigured to reflect online organization and digital footprints.

In addition to increasing organizational complexity, there are also supply chain shocks to manage. In 2019 there were 337 food safety recalls in the US. This highlights an opportunity for retailers to add value and resiliency by moving up the value chain. To enable transparency across our supply chain, we need better data and interoperability. The FDA is actively working on refining industry standards and many retailers have taken it upon themselves to work with their suppliers to put these systems in place. As concerns around sustainability, climate change and resource availability mount, there is another path to explore resilience: controlled environment agriculture (CEA) or “indoor ag.” A number of partnership models have arisen between retailers and CEA farms, ranging from hub and spoke organic models to operational improvements to bring down the cost of indoor produce to hyper-local agriculture. These new approaches to food production reduce freight cost, better balance supply and demand, improve sustainability and can even repurpose under-utilized real estate. Technology advances have made this opportunity more real than ever before. Advances in LED lighting systems, IoT capabilities, seed breeding platforms, to name a few, continue to make the economics of indoor agriculture compelling. With more controlled systems, there is opportunity to introduce more variety, more nuance that could not withstand the traditional supply chain. Through initiatives like better data from growers and indoor agriculture, retailers can shape not only what food is on a shelf, but how and where it is produced. This is reimagining the fresh perimeter and unlocking a more nutritious, sustainable and transparent food system for 21st century consumers.

The competitive landscape is evolving quickly for food retail. Traditionally, grocers competed with grocers. In the last decade we saw dollar stores (e.g. Dollar General) and general merchandisers (e.g. Target) establish greater footholds in food retail as a means to drive store traffic. During COVID, the food retail space grew increasingly noisy. Restaurants, farmers and brands were forced to seek new sales channels as restrictions, SKU rationalizations and tightening supply chains disrupted previous paths to market. New sales platforms and technologies offered flexibility and matched consumers with their desired food supply – from restaurants becoming local markets to brands selling through social media platforms. The consumer is no longer limited to what is available at their local supermarket; they are expecting more and have never had easier access to products that fit their needs and wants. This enables much more nuance in demand and supply – from locally produced food, to methodologies of production, to subscription-based convenience and nutrition for toddlers, to managing health conditions, to supporting local economies. Niches that previously fought for a spot on a retail shelf, are forging their own path to their customer.

The last mile continues to challenge economics. To enable convenience, new capabilities are required to shift massive infrastructure into more flexible deployments. A recent analysis by Bain laid out various sample scenarios: traditional grocers doing their own picking in store experienced -15 percent margins; those picking from a warehouse experienced -8 percent, 3rd party services improved margins to -5 percent. Ultimately, to get to profitability, automation and micro-fulfillment are necessary. By proactively laying the groundwork from the bottom up of a distribution model that takes last mile delivery into account, the economics begin to look more reasonable long-term but require significant capital upfront to invest in automation. 

Target has been a leader in the digital arena, making digital a priority for the company. As CEO Brian Cornell stated in 2017: “We’re investing in our business with a long-term view of years and decades, not months and quarters. We’re putting digital first and evolving our stores, digital channels and supply chain to work together as a smart network that delivers on everything guests love about Target.” Target’s conviction around this strategy has been paying off: in Q2 2020 it reported a 24 percent surge in sales (their largest increase, ever) and 195 percent growth in digital. This paired with partnership strategies with players like Ulta Beauty to reimagine space and expand serviceable footprints both digitally and physically are positioning the retailer well. While the economics of last mile delivery are being sorted out, hybrid offerings like click-and-collect are providing convenience to consumers while maintaining economics for retailers. Kroger was playing catch-up in the e-commerce space early in the pandemic, but has successfully accelerated a number of programs. Kroger’s buy online, pick-up in store (“BOPIS”) program is currently offered across 2,100 locations; this has contributed to the 127 percent increase in e-commerce sales in Q2 2020. To enable this model, Kroger is leaning into a partnership with Ocado to enable automated micro-fulfillment and improve margins for click-and-collect and delivery. Tomorrow’s supply chain will be built from the ground-up, with last mile delivery and automation being core considerations. These changing dynamics offer new partnership opportunities around technical capabilities (robotics; data; AI) and financing (CAPEX). 

Join us on December 10 for a conversation with Walter Robb, former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, Audre Kapacinskas, Vice President at S2G Ventures, and Danielle Gould, founder of Food+Tech Connect, to discuss how retailers might leverage cutting edge technologies and stakeholder-focused business models to build a 21st century food system. RSVP here.

Content: How reimagining product discovery can unlock opportunities for true product differentiation across taste, nutrition and function.

How do your parents decide what food to buy? While brands have more ways than ever to reach their customers, the way retailers enable product discovery is not so different from the first self-service grocery store 104 years ago. Shelf placement, in-store promotions and branded packaging were pillars of product discovery and key to the success of products in a pre-pandemic grocery store. There have been improvements to this discovery model, for instance, Whole Foods offering a community experience in-store by highlighting local / regional products and a “third place” to gather, but the model has remained largely unchanged for the better part of a century. 

Today, we see two models at play. First, a legacy model that focuses on scale and volume. This top-down approach gives the broker and buyer control and positions the retailer as gatekeeper of shelf placement, which in turn determines brand exposure to consumers. The second model takes a bottoms-up approach and focuses on user needs and product attributes (verified organic, gluten free, etc). As the world continues to increase in complexity, centralized decision making will reach its limits. Keeping up with shifting preferences will require an open-source approach to curating products – retailers will need to think differently about category management, relationships with brands (including their own private label) and community engagement.

As consumers do more online, retailers must reimagine product discovery from the ground up, using data to better tailor products for consumer needs. Without granular data retailers will be unable to compete with digital platforms that understand user needs, wants and can begin to anticipate them. Amazon has written the playbook on this in other industries and is increasingly interested in the food space through its new grocery formats and delivery services. Data is critical because it enables the sales channel to add value to their consumers by reducing noise and surfacing content that is relevant to them in the moment. For those in the business of food manufacturing (branded or private label), it also offers an innovation path. As data about products and consumers improves, we will be able to better match attributes with needs. Companies like Thrive Market and Good Eggs are exploring new models that are built from the ground-up – aggregating data about ingredients, production methods, holistic product specifications –  and can offer nuance, discovery and specificity that traditional models cannot. There is a long way to go to scale these concepts for the mass market, but they offer a glimpse into an attribute-based system where a dad looking for peanut-free snacks is not reviewing the nutritional labels of 15 boxes, but rather can review a curated set of products based on his needs. These models are also more brand-friendly, offering them better data and discoverability.

The concept of retailer as gatekeeper is changing. As more digitally native brands launch and leverage new selling platforms (e.g social media channels and e-commerce sites), brands can understand their consumers at a level of granularity nearly impossible in-store. This will enable brands to emerge that are laser focused not only on selling their products to consumers, but on understanding their motivations and iterating on new products based on the data they collect. Whether it’s a busy mom trying to find snacks for her child with an allergy or a baby boomer managing a recent diagnosis of osteoporosis or a Gen Z looking to vote with their pocketbook around sustainability. As the grocery channel becomes digitized, there is an opportunity to move beyond the ‘buyer’ model in which a single individual determines what is made available to consumers, but rather an open source approach which can cater to the preferences of various communities and curate products based on function, authenticity and needs. This model is unlocked when we have a bottoms-up understanding of our products and our supply chain. In this new digital context, authenticity has never been more important. And for investors, it will be the brands who are able to develop these kinds of relationships with their customers that will be the most compelling investment opportunities. 

Another, longer wavelength variable to consider is the impact of biometric data being more widely available to consumers. Today, 21 percent of Americans use a smartwatch or fitness tracker. As this number expands, the intersection between food and wellness becomes more concrete at a personal level. The ability to pair personal biometric data (e.g. your blood pressure is 140 today, 10 percent higher than last week) with information coming online about ingredients and products will enable people to make more personalized decisions about what food they buy and why. Personal and IoT devices unlock new forms of engagement that enable the collapse of physical and digital worlds and offer bi-directional digital interactions between consumers, producers and retailers. This will create a feedback loop of information sharing that can unlock new discovery processes and product innovation.

As material science, genomics, food production and other technologies advance and we dig deeper into a treasure trove of better flavors and nutrition, we stand at the precipice of high throughput product innovation and true differentiation. We see some of this happening already – partnerships between retailers and heirloom seed breeders; cancer treatments paired with specifically bred plants; natural blue dyes that are price competitive with synthetic colorants; tomatoes that don’t taste like cardboard; more nuanced strains of cannabis. We have been living in the world of black and white television and we are about to go to HD Color. Just as the online world has gotten noisier, the food world is begging to experience the same, and it is the role of the retailer to help their customers navigate the 21st century food system. Retailers are poised to play a critical role in understanding customer needs, tailoring products that suit them and conveniently making them available. 

Community: Tomorrow’s business models recognize the ecosystem we are part of and are built on trust across customers, employees, suppliers, local communities and shareholders.

As we move deeper into an era where sales channels are more fluid and consumers have the opportunity to discover products and purchase them through a variety of means, customer engagement is more important than ever. Millennials and Gen Z, a demographic of 150 million, are overtaking Baby Boomers in their purchasing power and their values are poised to have an impact on the trajectory of business. According to a recent Deloitte study, 80 percent of millennials and seventy percent of Gen Z said they will make an extra effort to buy products and services from smaller, local businesses to help them stay in business post-pandemic. Sixty percent of respondents plan to buy more from large businesses that “have taken care of their workforces and positively affected society during the pandemic.” Tomorrow’s consumers are looking to spend their money with organizations they trust.

According to Edelman’s ‘Trust Barometer,’ ethics are 3 times more likely to drive trust in business rather than competence. In this context, engagement across a variety of stakeholders is more important than ever. In 2019 Business Roundtable redefined its statement on the Purpose of a Corporation – showcasing how engagement across all shareholders is imperative to long-term success. Key tenants to building a community include delivering value to customers, investing in employees, dealing ethically with suppliers, supporting local communities and generating long-term value for shareholders. Humana’s Bold Goal of improving the health of the communities they serve by 20 percent by 2020 is an example of supporting local communities.

“By taking a broader, more complete view of corporate purpose, boards can focus on creating long-term value, better serving everyone – investors, employees, communities, suppliers and customers,” said Bill McNabb, former CEO of Vanguard. Retailers are in a unique position; having been a cornerstone to local communities they already occupy a trusted position among their customers. While trust exists it cannot be taken for granted, it needs to be earned on a daily basis. Whether it’s the products a retailer chooses to carry, how they maintain the health and wellness of their employees, support of community organizations, or enabling the health and wellness of the customers they serve. In an era that is going to have more information and optionality than ever better, being a trusted participant in your community is critical.

In the march toward low-cost production, we lost sight of some of the upstream and downstream impacts of our food system. Today’s burgeoning consumer class is increasingly paying attention to those considerations. Given advances in technology, data, food production methodologies and e-commerce platforms, there is an opportunity to improve our food system, to think holistically about the communities we are serving and drive long-term sustained results for business. 

Looking Ahead: A 21st century food system grounded in trust

As 2020 draws to a close and we set our sights on a new year, we stand at the crossroads of what was, is and will be. New technologies are shortening the space between consumer and producer and as Gen Z and Millennials gain economic power and vote with their pocketbook, trust is more important than ever in what, how and why we buy what we buy.

Commerce

• Physical and digital worlds are blending together; integrated teams and systems focused on the holistic customer journey are key to providing consistency, flexibility and trust.
• Retailers are moving from gatekeeper to tailor; as digital sales channels become more common retailers can differentiate and add value to consumers by leveraging data and curating products.
• Food producers, brands and food service providers have an opportunity to sell in new ways to their consumers and benefit from better data and direct user feedback.

Content

• Online product discovery needs to be improved.
• Health and wellness are top-of-mind for many – as more functional ingredients come online, truly differentiated branded and private label products can build trust with consumers.
• Data is laying the foundation for tomorrow – having a data strategy is more important than ever.
• Complexity is increasing – in order to keep up, you need to decentralize and partner.

Community

• Trust is the currency of the 21st century food system. This needs to be earned through data, verification, consistency, transparency and authenticity.
• Long-term resiliency and value will be achieved through broad stakeholder engagement with customers, employees, the local community, and shareholders. 
• Values have never been more important – as Millennials and Gen Z gain economic clout, they are looking to align their spending power with their values. 

Channel digitization, advances in automation, new approaches to food production, the proliferation of data, new customer engagement models and the evolution of societal norms provide an opportunity to revisit some of the tradeoffs we made in the past century. Food is unique in its ubiquity. Everyone eats, and as the food supply chain evolves, we have an opportunity to build a system based on trust that is good for the health and wellness of consumers, producers, local economies and the planet.

Join us on December 10 for a conversation with Walter Robb, former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, and Audre Kapacinskas, VP of S2G to discuss how retailers might leverage cutting edge technologies and stakeholder-focused business models to build a 21st century food system. RSVP here.

Join us for future Redesigning Retail conversations here. 

Download S2G’s The Future of Food: Through The Lens of Retail Report here.

___________________

Audre Kapacinskas, Vice President at S2G Ventures

Audre Kapacinskas is a Vice President at S2G Ventures, where she focuses on unlocking value for S2G, its portfolio companies and strategic partners. Throughout her career, Audre has worked at the intersection of technology, strategy and operations to incubate new ideas and drive growth across organizations.  Prior to S2G, Audre was a Director of Sales and Corporate Strategy at a predictive analytics start-up delivering artificial intelligence and IoT solutions to the Industrial sector. She started her career at a boutique strategy consulting firm working with private equity firms and corporate clients with growth acceleration, value assessments and investment diligence. Audre is a Fulbright Scholar, holds an Honours BA from the University of Toronto and an MA from Vilnius University.

The post S2G Ventures on The Future of Food Retail appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

This is a guest post by Jomaree Pinkard, Co-Founder & CEO of Hella Cocktail Co.

Check out our Food & Ag Anti-Racism Resources.

Dear Colleagues,

As a Black Man in business, I have to be extremely careful in both professional and public settings. When I’m trying to make a point, I often have to decide whether I should be direct or performative in my delivery — because my decision, to be honest, can come across as too assertive or even intimidating in the workplace. There is an unwritten rule for black professionals that asks us to speak in a language that others might find more appealing to their sensibilities. In many settings I’ve often had to minimize thoughts to remain poised or what others might deem as “on point,” because my passion in presentation can be mistaken for aggression. If I am too assertive, I can pay the price — and that price can be all too real.

I grew up hearing that I would always need to work twice as hard to get half as much, and keeping these ideas to myself has been over time half the battle. Until today.

For many professionals of color, this sentiment — of minimizing what we know to be real about our lives in business — will ring true. But we also recognize that we can use this moment of societal inflection as an opportunity to actually pivot in business; we can redirect the course for black and brown talent, stories, and industry. We can disrupt how systems have been designed to keep black people in place, silenced, and positioned to avoid risk.

As a black man who grew up in an under-resourced neighborhood in the heart of New York City, I inherently faced nothing but risk and uncertainty daily. I know intimately how challenging it is to break the color barrier in school and at work, when and how I have to prove my worth — and carve out a path toward accessing socio-economic change. In order to find success, black professionals like myself have to put much more on the line to succeed by risking our opportunity to speak, our chance to present, our ability to grow, and our reputations all at once. However, in order to make progress, we must take risks, so here I am putting it all on the line one more time.

I want to state clearly that the system is not failing the status quo — the system is maintaining the exact operation it was designed to uphold. Black people have been maligned in American business for centuries, only given the opportunity to toil and labor, or tend to lower-wage jobs while industry grows more complex and advances. Still, and rarely are Black Americans able to find themselves the business owner. When asked if “my success in the food and beverage industry is the result of drive, hard work, and timing,” I answer “yes” to all three — however, I also recognize that several opportunities have come my way as a result of intentional and deliberate system navigation — challenging the status quo and finding a way in — despite being pushed out, omitted or overlooked, the color of my skin notwithstanding.

Now, in reflection as a successful black entrepreneur and business owner, I recognize that my life, my health, my education and the opportunities that have been afforded me as a result of schooling at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and The Wharton School of Business are not examples of triumph, but are holes in the system that was designed to hold me back. My success is its failure. American business and industry weren’t designed for me or my family to be healthy or supported, to be highly educated, or to establish an entrepreneurial career with Hella Cocktail Co. The system wasn’t designed for me to raise my family in a flourishing neighborhood, or to support and invest in other black business owners’ dreams and ambitions. It has actually been designed to hold us back, and only now because we are at this juncture in history — might we realize that we have an opportunity, or rather a duty to upend this appalling process.

So the questions I have been pondering and propose to you — the questions the system-owners are now being posed and have to reckon with are these: Will you continue to support a system that is designed to force others to fail? Or will you help to dismantle and redesign it to allow for black and brown people to enter in business unhindered? Will you assist in creating opportunities for black people to develop sustainable business models, create jobs, support families and livelihoods, and invest in black business owners — their dreams and ambitions?

If you are willing and haven’t already begun to explore concrete action items, here are four discrete practices you must do to ensure your platform or business is prepared to support black lives mattering.

Practice #1: Listen, Acknowledge Trauma, & Self-Educate

“The goal isn’t perfection, it’s presence!” “The first step is to show up.” ~ Ashtin Berry

There is no perfect playbook for standing face-to-face with inequity, injustice, and oppression while running a business or an organization. Talking about race, racial violence, racism, and the Black Lives Matter movement is the first step. Embracing the complex history of our country is necessary for us to better understand, heal, and change. There are many resources that can help you better explore the dynamics and the voices at play. Educate yourself on American history — the issues of people of color, women, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ communities, religious minorities, and other marginalized groups, and understand the compounding effects from challenges faced by individuals and communities who inhabit intersectional identities.

There is a shared trauma that impacts communities, our nation, and everyone’s bottom line. For an example of a business in action, Ben & Jerry’s has done its homework throughout the years while actively participating and taking strong social and political stances. As a leader in today’s world, you are grappling with complex change on many levels while trying to understand human dynamics that can feel untranslatable, conflicting, and often painful to your employees and your customers. We must each dismantle and rebuild the entire system together, or choose to do the work independently, and bring back that new knowledge to our companies to invite change.

Practice #2: Investigate Your Internal Impact

“Equity begins with representation.”

Grocery retailers demand door over door metrics, food and alcohol distributors demand minimum case per week turnover, bars and restaurants fiercely rely on the average cover per seat, and investors don’t even place their bets until they are able to verify any of this historical data to measure traction before investment. Somehow these metrics have been omitted when it comes to diversity and inclusion beyond gender. Our companies and organizations feel the impact of the world around us, whether it is apparent to each individual within our ranks or not. It is necessary for us to respond to the challenges of American history, as well as the current climate, and redesign systems and environments where our employees can not only survive — but thrive.

Large multinational spirit companies need to realize that it’s in their best interest to prioritize a culture that is not only equitable and inclusive — but also responsive to the pressing needs of the communities served with their business. From the busser to the boardroom, it is absolutely paramount that fine dining establishments and large restaurant chains seek opportunities to reflect the diversity of the communities served on all levels. Bon Appetit and Epicurious accepted the resignation of their former editor-in-chief, and admitted to being complicit in ‘tokeniz[ing] many BIPOC staffers and contributors” to make their brands appear more diverse; the company also acknowledged its effort in “dismantling the toxic, top-down culture” by “prioritizing people of color for the editor-in-chief candidate pool…and resolving any pay inequities that are found across all departments.”

Starting with the application and vetting process, and working with those that hold the door open or closed, companies must put themselves in a position to seek out and discover talent that has been left behind or that the organization hasn’t yet had the network to discover. The time to hold your company responsible for this task is now.

Practice #3. Scrutinize Your Community Impact

“Donate AND be active in the life span of your contribution.”

Statistics show that 91 percent of consumers believe brands should do more than make a profit; they should address social or environmental concerns, too. While it is intrinsically the right thing to do, this is also the precise reason why during the current pandemic companies have donated everything from free virtual meeting platforms and wifi for schools to contactless free food and beverage delivery. Communities support business because there is an implicit social contract that the community will patronize your establishment in exchange for you offering the best goods or services — with the condition that you continue to represent the best interest of the community.

But what happens after the special event or ribbon-cutting ceremony is over? Charitable donations to organizations such as Color for Change, The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Black Lives Matter, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture, among many others, are undoubtedly and immensely important. However, the reality is that we in the black community are hesitant to believe in these monetary postures because we know these are often one-time donations to clear consciences, and only uphold the status quo in moving forward.

Like all other business initiatives and investments your organization makes, community-directed donations need to be looked at through the lens of a business investment similar to launching a new product, or vertical or brick and mortar location, rather than a bottom-line optimizing tax write-off. In the past week, retailers Target, Walmart, Kroger, and H-E-B and spirits producers Pernod Ricard along with Diageo have begun to either donate or set up internal funds to address racial inequalities and injustice. We are hopeful that these social impact-driven funds won’t simply lean in the direction of one-time investments but will create self-sustainable business practices that facilitate growth of reinvestments in the community.

Practice #4. Provide Access and Investment

“Donations are icing on the cake. The CAKE is what’s most important!”

In the U.S. hospitality industry, 60 percent of the sector is made up of people of color, yet black and brown hospitality professionals occupy less than 7 percent of managerial roles. On the small business front of the food & beverage industry, many venture capital firms are onto their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th venture funds — which means they are only interested in companies that are already hitting the $10 million-plus revenue run rates to deliver on meaningful rates of return. What this really means is that there is truly no small business investing present. Overall, the venture industry’s track record on accessibility when it comes to diversity and race fares even worse: only 3 percent of investment partners and 1 percent of founders of venture capital-backed firms are black.

Each of these sub-segments of the industry has a systemic problem that starts at who is hired for entry-level positions and extends to the investors who serve as limited partners to venture funds. The reality for black talent in business is that barriers to participation emerge in every part of the marketplace: the requirements of an elite or private education, family lineage, pedigree, or upbringing are more important than a stellar resume or previous experience. This has always been the case.

While you must continue to donate to organizations that align with your values, now and more importantly, the primary method to change the systemic barriers to access for black professionals is to invest in black-owned and black-led businesses throughout the industry’s value chain with transparency and accountability. Although they are primarily tech investors, Softbank’s newly announced ‘The Opportunity Growth Fund’ to the tune of $100 million states that they will “only invest in companies led by founders and entrepreneurs of color,” meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz’ The Talent x Opportunity Fund (TxO)’ for underserved communities “are now looking for black, women, minority founders to invest in.” These moves are more in line with the direction the food and beverage industry should follow.

5 Strategies to Move Your Food, Beverage & Hospitality Industry Business to Equity

Once you’ve built in the basics in your practice, you have set the stage. Next, there are the 5 strategies your business can set in motion so that you are part of the movement, and not just responding to the moment:

1. Build a Continuous Diversity Evaluation Process: Being proactive in fighting racism and bias means creating structures and systems within our own ranks to ensure the voices of all members of our workforce are heard and that the needs of our employees are met. Avoid systematic jargon that checks off the diversity-box. If it sounds like “we will provide anti-racism/bias training” or “we will bring in a third party to help conduct company-wide diversity workshops,” you haven’t finished listening. The system — including how you evaluate and dismantle systemic barriers to participation in your business — needs to be built into the company and reassessed with frequency. It is not a person, it is a process.

2. Commit to Accountability: I propose that all organizations who are now publicly saying that Black Lives Matter demand a similar commitment to holding themselves and their peers accountable by being more transparent about where they are in terms of the diversity of their teams and portfolios, benchmarking themselves against their peers, explaining their strategy, adopting KPIs and milestones, and then sharing their progress in an open and transparent manner. From entry-level merchandisers and restaurant servers to the editor-in-chief and board seats; be accountable with respect to how you operate as a business and seek out opportunities to reflect the diversity of the community. Commit to equity on all levels.

3. Invest Your Donation: Investments create ownership, ladders for progress, and accountability throughout an organization’s entire value chain. Like all other business initiatives organizations make, donations need to be looked at through the lens of a business investment rather than a charitable contribution. Those steps include but are not limited to: cultural and historical research, consumer insights and how they impact your community, the alignment of team values, concept development, idea testing and fit, measurement of successes and failures, and, most importantly, reinvestment. Investments are sustainable and have growth metrics around them. You know the drill.

4. Update Your Investment Thesis: Your investment thesis is an inaccurate overestimation of how rational your investments are. In fact, the thesis is mostly built on the basis of the group’s collective trust. That lack of trust is why investments in black-owned businesses are so low, and why access is non-existent. I challenge VCs and strategic funds to alter their investment thesis, and then invest. Think outside the box.

5. Pledge 15% to a Timeline: Black people in the U.S. make up nearly 15 percent of the population. Commit to investment proportions that align with the population over a 1, 2, and 5-year time horizon.

• Media & Trade: Take a pledge to allocate a minimum of 15 percent of your coverage to black talent and businesses,
• Retail: Take the 15% pledge to allocate a minimum of 15 percent of retail shelf space to black-owned businesses,
• Hospitality: Take a pledge to allocate a minimum of 15 percent of bar and restaurant menu placement to black-owned businesses,
• Beer, Wine & Spirits: Take a pledge to allocate a minimum of 15 percent of your portfolio of investment, innovation and distribution network to black-owned businesses,
• Venture/Strategic Investors: Take a pledge to allocate a minimum of 15 percent of your investment portfolio to fund food, beverage, and hospitality entrepreneurial ventures to black-owned businesses.

In your process, you will make mistakes. It is better to move forward with the intention to dismantle and change the status quo than to stand still and wonder why things are imperfect and unbalanced. That is my charge as well.

While it is true that as a Black Man in business I have been extremely careful in both professional and public settings, I have also opened many of the proverbially closed doors and sat in many of the least desirable seats. My daily journey of attempting to gain access to menu and shelf space, capital, and networks has been difficult; but my story of continuing to navigate a flawed system is still hopeful, despite exhaustion and loneliness.

This isn’t about me alone though, by any means. Nope! It’s about those who don’t have the access, who may not have had the opportunity for higher education, or who may never make enough connections to get into the room where decisions happen. For those of us who have: it is time to listen, learn, and acknowledge the centuries-old trauma of systemic inequity endured by black individuals and communities. It is time to redesign a system that truly values the health, education, careers, and ambitions of black people. It is time to disrupt the old system and immediately commit to more equitable actions: invest money, commit to coverage, pledge space, support black-owned, and reward risk. It’s time to use this moment of inflection as an opportunity to redirect the course for black lives — which have always mattered.

Sincerely,

Jomaree Pinkard | CEO & Co-Founder, Hella Cocktail Co.

This post originally appeared on Medium.

____________________________________

Jomaree Pinkard’s career journey has taken him from helping to develop and implement The Salvation Army’s September 11 World Trade Center Recovery Program to consulting for the NFL. In 2012, he became the Co-Founder and CEO of a minority-owned craft cocktail company, Hella Cocktail Co. In eight years, he and his partners have grown a hobby into a nationally distributed premium-quality food manufacturer producing a line of nonalcoholic cocktail mixers, bitters, and newest innovation Bitters & Sodas that make it easier and more accessible to craft delicious drinks at home or behind the bar. Jomaree is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce and also earned his MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

IG: @jomareepinkard

The post 5 Steps to Move Your Food, Beverage or Hospitality Business to Equity appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

We at Food+Tech Connect stand in solidarity with the Black community against systemic racism. Built on the exploitation of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), our industry – from farm to fork – has an opportunity and imperative to chart a more equitable and diverse future.

We have compiled the following list of resources to help you learn about systemic racism in our food industry and how we might work to dismantle it. We have also featured lists of food and farm businesses and organizations for you to support. This list is by no means complete. We will be working to update it regularly, so please email us at danielle@foodtechconnect.com if you have any resources, organizations or initiatives you would like to see added.

Special thanks to Niyeti Shah MPH (Associate Director, Milken Institute Center for Public Health), Athena Roesler MPH (Associate Director, Milken Institute Center for Public Health) and Diane Kim (Associate, Milken Institute Center for Public Health) for their help with compiling this list.

Articles To Read

• Battling Inequity in Food Systems with Entrepreneurship – Olivia Rebanal
• Beyond Plant-Based: The Racial History and Future – Journey Foods
• Dismantling Racism in the Food System – Food First
• Entrepreneurs Share How Industry, Investors Can Make Good on Promises to ‘Do Better,’ Support Anti-Racism – Food Navigator
• Food Media Must Work Harder to Fix Its Racism Problem – Grub Street
• The Great Land Robbery – The Atlantic
• How USDA distorted data to conceal decades of discrimination against black farmers – The Counter
• Leaders of Color Discuss Structural Racism and White Privilege in the Food System – Civil Eats
• People of Color are at Greater Risk of COVID-19. Systemic Racism in the Food System Plays a Role – Civil Eats
• Reckoning with Racial Justice in Farm Country – Civil Eats
• Restaurants Must Use This Moment to Change, Too – Eater
• The Sugar That Saturates the American Diet Has a Barbaric History as The ‘White Gold’ That Fueled Slavery. – The New York Times
• There were nearly a million black farmers in 1920. Why have they disappeared? – The Guardian
• To Natural Products Industry Leaders: Let Us Act Now to Dismantle Systemic Racism – New Hope Media
• Why Food Belongs in Our Discussions of Race – Civil Eats
• Working Against Racism in the Food System – Bioneers

Videos To Watch

• A Growing Culture’s Hunger For Justice Series – Multiple videos all worth watching!
• Black Food Matters: Race and Equity in the Good Food Movement – Devita Davison
• Farming While Black: African Diasporic Wisdom for Farming and Food Justice – Leah Penniman
• Race Equity in the Food System – Michigan State University
• Taste The Nation With Padma Lakshmi – The Gullah Way 
• The Underlying Racism of America’s Food System – Regina Bernard-Carreno
• What Natural Products Industry Members Need to Know About Racial Inequity – Ijeoma Oluo

Media to Follow

• Civil Eats: Website / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook
• Black Food Folks: Instagram / Twitter
• For The Culture Food Magazine: Website / Instagram
• Pass The Spatula: Website / Instagram
• Whetstone Magazine: Website / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

Podcasts To Subscribe To

• 1619 Podcast (episodes 2& 5)
• Point of Origin
• Racist Sandwich
• All of the 20 Food Podcasts by Black Women (compiled by soulPhoodie)

Books To Read (support Black-owned bookstores):

Check out Black Food History’s Black Food Studies Book Lists for more books to read!

• The Color of Food by Natasha Bowens
• The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty
• Farming While Black by Leah Penniman
• High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Dr. Jessica B. Harris
• Black Food Geographies by Ashanté M. Reese
• Building Houses out of Chicken Legs by Psyche A. Williams-Forson
• Feeding the Other: Whiteness, Privilege, and Neoliberal Stigma in Food Pantries by Rebecca T. de Souza
• Freedom Farmers by Monica M. White
• Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
• Notes from a Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi
• Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time by Adrian Miller
• The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin
• Working the Roots by Michele E. Lee
• Land Justice: Re-Imagining Land, Food, and the Commons by Justine M. Williams

Educational Resources & Toolkits

• The Young Farmers Racial Equity Toolkit
• Studio ATAO’s Toolkit For Recognizing, Disrupting & Preventing Tokenization in Food Media 
• Michigan State University’s Annotated Bibliography on Structural Racism Present in the U.S. Food System
• Food Solutions New England 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge
• Building the Case for Racial Equity in the Food System by the Center For Social Inclusion
• Racial Equity in the Food System Workgroup & Listserv
• General Anti-Racism Resources Document compiled by Sarah Sophie Flicker & Alyssa Klein

Training Programs For Dismantling Racism From Farming While Black

• AORTA Collective 
• Beyond Diversity 101
• Catalyst Project
• Interaction Institute for Social Change
• People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond
• Soul Fire Farm’s Uprooting Racism in the Food System
• Training for Change 
• White Noise Collective

People & Organization to Follow on Social Media

Samin Nosrat has a great list of Black farmers, chefs, writers, historians and more to follow on Instagram.

Lists of Black-Owned Farms, Businesses & Organizations To Support

• Black-Owned & Operated Farms + Organizations That Support Black Farmers by Shannon Lai and A Growing Culture
• Black-Owned Farms in The US
• Black-Owned Restaurants in The US
• BIPOC in Agriculture and Food: A Comprehensive Resource Database (Spreadsheet / Google Doc)
• BIPOC-Led How-to Videos, Gardening Projects & Online Learning Resources
• EatOkra Black-Owned Restaurant Guide App
• Equity at The Table’s database for food industry professionals featuring only women/gender non-conforming individuals and focusing primarily on POC and the LGBTQ community
• Food & Land Sovereignty Resource List for COVID-19 (Compiled by Soul Fire Farm, Black Farmer Fund, and Northeast Farmers of Color)
• Journey Foods’ Black Companies to Support

Campaigns to Support Black Farms & Businesses

• Black Farmer Fund (NY): Black Farmer Fund (BFF) is an emerging community investment fund that invests in black food systems entrepreneurs in New York State. Beyond making investments in these communities, BFF also emphasizes in building financial and investment literacy and active involvement of the community when discussing and creating financing options

• Black-Led, Regenerative Farm: As a Black, queer, woman land ownership has felt evasive for much of Kiley Clark’s life, not having the capital or the generational wealth to make this possible. She launched this campaign to build a regenerative, no till farm that pays homage to the traditional ecology knowledge of her ancestors, and the land’s original Indigenous caretakers.

• Detroit Dirt: Detroit Dirt is raising money to support its composting operations and drive forward a low carbon economy by diverting waste and promoting materials management. Its campaign is supported by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), which will match all donations dollar for dollar.

• EatOkra: EatOkra has a crowdfunding campaign to fund it Black-Owned business directory app connecting people to Black food and beverage.

• For The Culture Magazine: The biannual printed food magazine celebrates Black women in food and wine. The stories in For the Culture will be about Black women throughout the diaspora, written by Black women and photographed and illustrated by Black women. It will be the first magazine of its kind.

• Forty Acres & A Mule Project: Wisconsin-based restaurateur Adrian Lipscombe is raising money to purchase agricultural land. The land purchase will help guarantee farm-to-table resources for the food industry, serve to provide an outlet for Black foodways and establish a safe haven to secure the legacy of Black foodways.

• Future Farm Fund: Farmer and activist Amber Tamm Canty launched this fund to buy a farm in upstate in New York. She is also working to secure land in New York City’s park systems for BIPOC communities to farm. Support the fund here.

• Oko Farms:  The only outdoor aquaponics education and production farm in NYC. The farm dedicated to both increasing food security for NYC residents and the promotion of ecological and humane food cultivation practices. Due to change in policy and licensing requirements, it can no longer operate sustainably at its current site. It is currently raising money to move the farm to a new location.

• Reparations Map for Black-Indigenous Farmers: The food system was built on the stolen land and stolen labor of BIPOC people. Soulfire Farm’s map calls for reparations of land and resources for the farmers listed, so they can grow nourishing food and distribute it to their communities. Read more about the Reparations Map here.

• Sylvanaqua Farm: The Farm is looking for gifts and low-interest loans to build a vertically-integrated, employee-owned cooperative of farms, nurseries, mills, processors, retail outlets and wholesale distributors.

• Soul Fire Farm: A BIPOC-centered community farm in upstate New York fighting racism and injustice in our food system. Its food sovereignty programs reach over 10,000 people each year, including farmer training for Black and Brown growers, reparations and land return initiatives for northeast farmers, food justice workshops for urban youth, home gardens for city-dwellers living under food apartheid, doorstep harvest delivery for food insecure households, and systems and policy education for public decision-makers.

 Round-Ups

• Cherry Bombe’s List of Black Businesses (cookbooks, CPG products, chefs & creatives, restaurants & cafes, media & special initiatives)
• Civil Eats: Want to See Food and Land Justice for Black Americans? Support These Groups.
• Food Tank: 21 Individuals and Organizations Building Stronger Black Communities and Food Systems
• A Reading List For Learning About Anti-Black Racism and Food – Epicurious
• MOFAD BLM Community Resources

CPG Organizations To Follow & Support

• Hotbread Kitchen:  Website / Instagram / Twitter
  Helps turn talents and dreams into financial security for women and entrepreneurs. Its workforce development program  helps women get good jobs in kitchens and food manufacturers around the country. Its small business incubator provides emerging food entrepreneurs with wrap around support and connections to the food community to grow their enterprises.

• JEDI Collaborative: Website / LinkedIn
  The OSC² J.E.D.I Collaborative of CPG industry peers and experts is leading this project for the natural products industry to frame the business case for embedding justice, equity, diversity and inclusion into our entire food ecosystem.

• La Cocina:  Website / Instagram / Twitter
  A nonprofit working to solve problems of equity in business ownership for women, immigrants and people of color. It provides affordable commercial kitchen space to entrepreneurs, as well as access to mentorship and market opportunities.

Hospitality Organizations To Follow & Support

• Black Culinarian Alliance: Website / Twitter / Instagram / Facebook
  This organization, founded as the Black Culinarian Alliance, works to advocate for Black people in the food and beverage industry, a demographic that has been largely left out of mid and upper management opportunities in the culinary sphere. Today, they work to “promote not only people of color but to increase diversity overall and develop women as industry leaders.”

• Food Lab Detroit: Website / Instagram
  FoodLab is a community of food entrepreneurs committed to making the possibility of good food in Detroit a sustainable reality. It designs, builds, and maintains systems to grow a diverse ecosystem of triple-bottom-line food businesses as part of a good food movement that is accountable to all Detroiters. It is currently accepting applications for its Fellowship for Change in Food & Labor, a six-month, stipend based fellowship opportunity.

Farm & Land Justice Organizations to Follow & Support

• Black Family Land Trust: Website / Facebook / LinkedIn
  The Black Family Land Trust is one of the nation’s only conservation land trust dedicated to the preservation and protection of African-American and other historically underserved landowners assets, utilizing the core principles of land conservation and land-based community economic development. BFLT provides families with the tools necessary to make informed, proactive decisions regarding their land and its use including their Wealth Retention and Asset Protection (WRAP) program.

• Black Urban Growers (BUGS): Website / Facebook / Twitter
  Black Urban Growers (BUGS) is an organization committed to building networks and community support for growers in both urban and rural settings. Through education and advocacy around food and farm issues, they nurture collective Black leadership to ensure they have a seat at the table. Check out their Facebook page for virtual events.

• Family Agriculture Resource Management Services (FARMS): Website / Facebook / Instagram
  FARMS is a legal nonprofit, committed to assisting Black farmers and landowners in retaining their land for the next generation.

• Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund: Website / Twitter / Facebook / Instagram
  A non-profit cooperative association of Black farmers, landowners, and cooperatives, with a primary membership base in the Southern States.

• HEAL Food Alliance: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Linkedin / Instagram
  HEAL brings together groups from various sectors of movements for food and farm justice to grow community power, develop political leadership, and exposing and limiting corporate control of the food system.

• The Land Loss Prevention Project: Website
  The Land Loss Prevention Project responds to the unprecedented losses of Black-owned land in North Carolina by providing comprehensive legal services and technical support to financially distressed and limited resource farmers and landowners.

• The National Black Farmers Association: Website / Facebook
  The National Black Farmers Association is a non-profit organization representing African American farmers and their families in the United States.

• The Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust: Website / Facebook / Instagram
  The Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust advance land sovereignty in the Northeast through permanent and secure land tenure for Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian farmers and land stewards.

• Southeastern African American Farmers’ Organic Network: Website
  SAAFON is a regional network for Black farmers committed to using ecologically sustainable practices to manage their land and the natural systems on it in order to grow food and raise livestock that are healthy for people and the planet.

The post Food & Ag Anti-Racism Resources + Black Food & Farm Businesses to Support appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Sanjeev Krishnan

This is a guest post by Sanjeev Krishnan, Chief Investment Officer and Managing Director at S2G Ventures

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global health and economic crisis like none we have seen in our lifetime. In the food supply chain this has impacted employees that ensure that food is planted, harvested and processed, grocery shelves are stocked and food is available to all people. It takes a global village to feed the world, and we have seen selfless sacrifice and silent grit to ensure the continuity of our food system. Because, if our food supply breaks down, this pandemic may move from a crisis to a catastrophe.

Over the past several months several cracks have shown up in the food supply chain. The pandemic is challenging the nature of our global supply chain, stressing logistics networks and reinforcing the importance of labor. There are concerns about food nationalism, continued access to labor and redefining the nature of food security from global to national systems. While now is the time for urgent action – from government and private sector – there is a need for longer-term investments required for building a more innovative and resilient future food system.

Our team at S2G Ventures spent several months researching and monitoring COVID-19 and its implications to better understand these questions, keeping a close eye on the news cycle, conducting extensive desktop research and speaking with various experts across many fields. We spoke to epidemiologists, healthcare professionals, farmers, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and other investors to gather insights and develop our perspective on the implications of COVID-19 on the world of food and agriculture. We have compiled our finding into a report that explores the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic to the food and agriculture industry and identifies the areas of innovation critical to building a healthier and more sustainable food system.

As an investor in companies across all stages of the food system, we believe our role in the recovery is to ensure we build a more stable, resilient, sustainable and healthy system. We will continue to invest in entrepreneurs and innovations that are the catalysts for meaningful progress. Below, we offer a summary of our report, which can also be downloaded in full here.

Pandemics 101: A History of Recovery & Innovation

Taking a look back in time, the world suffered a deadly pandemic in 1918. The Spanish flu, whose origin is believed to be a farm outside of Kansas City, spread quickly across the globe. Although the world was not as connected, World War I was still ongoing, and troops were being shuttled between the United States and Europe. Between 1918 and 1919, the Spanish flu is believed to have infected nearly a third of the global population and killed between three and 20 percent of those who were infected. In the end it killed between 40 and 50 million people. In the years following the Spanish flu, there was a bright period of innovation that included the adoption of the Bell telephone and modern medicine. It was an event that helped shape the future.

Between the Spanish flu and today’s pandemic, there have been seven major epidemics or pandemics. Each varies in mortality, duration and contagion, but ultimately all come to an end. The economic recovery period that follows a pandemic-induced recession is generally different from traditional economic recessions. Pandemic-induced recession recoveries have generally seen a V-shaped recovery, while traditional recessions have varied between V-, U-, W-, and L-shaped recoveries. The global financial crisis of 2008 saw a L-shaped recovery. Typically, economic recessions have a longer duration and deeper economic consequences.

The coronavirus pandemic is unique among prior events. While many events have temporarily shut down regions, none have had the same global shutdown that we are currently facing today. So, despite being able to draw comparison and insights to learn from pandemic economics, the situation is different due to a staggering rise in globalization, digitalization across many sectors and the rise of fiat currencies. Pandemic economic history teaches us that one of the hallmarks is that innovation plays a critical role in the future normal that emerges. As professor Katherine A. Foss notes, “disease can permanently alter society, and often for the best by creating better practices and habits. Crisis sparks action and response.”

While the direct effect of COVID-19 is on the population – with infection rates, social distancing and shelter-in-place restrictions and continued operations of only essential businesses – there are significant implications across many industries. The second order consequences of coronavirus are reshaping industries, catalyzing innovation and encouraging resilience in business planning. Although the lasting impact on many industries is unknown, we see exciting innovation accelerating across automation, telemedicine, virtual reality and transparency systems (i.e., blockchain or similar technologies).

Everyone Eats – Pandemic Proof Demand, but Supply?

While the food and agriculture sectors are generally more resilient in bad economic situations, there are several sub sectors that rely heavily on in-person labor and are currently strained due to the unique social distancing pressures placed on businesses. One significant pressure point is meat processors. Several large meat companies have been forced to shutter processing facilities due to COVID-19 outbreaks. Smithfield had to shut down one of its pork processing facilities that supplied roughly 5 percent of the U.S. pork supply, while JBS had to close a Pennsylvania facility that processed beef. The second-order consequence of these closures is the farmer, who may be forced now to cull their herds of cattle and hogs. The strain on this pressure point affects not only the farmer, but also the consumer. Wendy’s felt the effects of this during this past week, when nearly one-fifth of all 1,043 locations ran out of beef.

While it will take an extended period of time to fully understand the implications of consumer purchasing data coming out of the pandemic – more specifically if the duration of the consumer behavior shift will be a ‘fad’ or ‘trend’ – certain areas of the market are seeing a quick adoption of trends that were previously accelerating. As slaughter-house closures have increased, plant-based meats sales have jumped 200 percent. Plant-based meats remain a small portion of the market, but this is a significant and notable demand signal from consumers.

Coronavirus is notably changing how consumers shop, prepare and consume food. Between 2009 and 2018, out-of-home eating rose from 50.1 percent to 54.4 percent of the market. Now, with social distancing limited the ability to eat at restaurants, many are turning to preparing food at home or ordering delivery or takeout. And, despite food being a resilient sector, the bifurcation between grocery and food service has become clear.

In the grocery store, private label market-share gains are poised to accelerate, as consumers tighten spending and look for value-focused alternatives. However, we expect consumers to prioritize a balance of value and better-for-you brands instead of a complete tradeoff to value, consistent with the consumer megatrend towards better-for-you products.

Taking a step back, and observing the broader food value chain, we observed three primary delivery vulnerabilities in the food system:

1. Agricultural inputs to farms (e.g., seeds, animal feed, fertilizer, et al.)

2. Farm products to processors, packagers, spot markets and export markets

3. Food to retail distribution

This is important, because the global food system relies on a just-in-time economy, where inventory levels are intentionally kept low. Meaning, that regardless if there is enough supply in existence, it may not be able to reach its proper destination if the supply chain is disrupted.

China, which provides a good example because it is further along in the lifecycle of the pandemic, has been suffering from this problem the last several months. Upstream and downstream logistics are a major challenge; at the ports there are thousands of frozen meat containers piling up because the trucking has effectively collapsed. Meanwhile, ports are running out of power, stoking fears that much of the food currently stored there will go bad. There is also an American company that makes immunization equipment for chicken that said their containers had been docked at Chinese ports for four weeks. Although China is doing its best to ensure that the grain planting season is not missed, the logistics of this supply chain are making it increasingly difficult.

The Future of Food – COVID-19 and Calories

While we continue to watch the situation, and the strain it is placing on the food system, we view the common thread that could bridge the existing system to the future as technology. Consumer purchasing behavior coupled with innovation may drive changes in market share and pressure existing players in the market. Although we have not seen COVID-19 create a new trend, we have seen several trends that were in motion pre-coronavirus further accelerated by the pandemic, including alternative protein, indoor agriculture, digitalization of agriculture and grocery and food as medicine.

Although animal agriculture remains a large and growing market, the pandemic has exposed challenges with the industries long production cycles, centralized production and limited processing facilities. It has allowed for faster consumer adoption of alternative proteins, including plant-based protein, fungi, algae and other biomass concepts including cellular meat. Notably, some of these technologies are further along than other, for example plant-based protein has been a trend for several years, while cellular meat remains in a research and development phase. We continue to believe that whatever the next generation of protein is, it will be driven by production speed, price and taste.

A second trend we believe is accelerating is food as an immunity. The convergence of food, science and technology may unlock this sector and usher in a new era in microbiome, functional ingredients, precision and personalized nutrition and medical foods. Prior to COVID-19, this was largely driven by nutrition-related disease, but the pandemic has exposed at-risk populations, with approximately 90 percent of hospitalized patients having one or more underlying condition, with the most common underlying condition being obesity.

Beyond specific trend acceleration, several themes emerge throughout this research that we believe may be catalyzed and emerge in a post-COVID-19 world. Digitalization will likely be driven by dis-intermediation to allow for new relationships with the consumer and to reduce risk throughout the supply chain. Decentralized food systems allow for the automation of local (alternative protein and produce) and the reshaping of complex perishable supply chains to reduce shrink and waste. They are also more omnichannel congruent as e-commerce, specifically online grocery, adoption accelerates. De-commoditization in the food supply chain, coupled with technologies that place deflationary pressure on the industry, may help catalyze breeding for attributes beyond yield (taste, protein content, et al), a return to polyculture farming and a shift from a strict focus on yield to profit per acre. Lastly, food as an immunity has the potential to bridge healthcare and food production and consumption for treatment of specific nutrition-related chronic lifestyle diseases, as well as change the future of brands to focus on unique, functional ingredients. a

Our full report, The Future of Food in the Age of COVID,  is available online.

_____________________________

Sanjeev Krishnan, Chief Investment Officer and Managing Director at S2G Ventures

Sanjeev has nearly 20 years of experience in sourcing, executing, managing and exiting venture and private equity investments, including a focus in agriculture and food companies. As Managing Director, Sanjeev is active in developing investments and managing portfolio companies including, serving on many portfolio company boards. His portfolio work ranges from genetics, crop protection, soil health, digital/IOT, crop insurance, merchandising, indoor agriculture, novel flavor and ingredients, new protein development, unique processors and brands that will feed this changing consumer.

He is passionate about the role of innovation, entrepreneurship, markets and system investing as a theory of change. Sanjeev has worked in the intersection of sustainability, technology and health in many regions, including Europe, Africa, Asia and North America.  He has invested over $500 mm in venture and growth stage firms throughout his career.

Sanjeev began investing as a co-founder of the life sciences practice of the IFC, the $99 billion private investment arm of the World Bank. His previous investment roles include CLSA Capital Partners, Global Environment Fund, World Bank Group’s IFC and JPMorgan. Sanjeev is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

About S2G Ventures: S2G Ventures (Seed to Growth) is a multi-stage venture fund investing in food and agriculture. The fund’s mission is to catalyze innovation to meet consumer demands for healthy and sustainable food. S2G has identified sectors across the food system that are ripe for change, and is building a multi-stage portfolio including seed, venture and growth stage investments. Core areas of interest for S2G are agriculture, ingredients, infrastructure and logistics, IT and hardware, food safety and technology, retail and restaurants, and consumer brands. For more information about S2G, visit www.s2gventures.com or connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post Pandemic Proof: S2G Ventures on Why Resilient, Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems are More Important Than Ever appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Tilton, founder and CEO of Oyster Sunday

All across the US, restaurants are being forced to lay off their staff, close their businesses and make heartbreaking decisions in hopes to weather the storm caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At my company, Oyster Sunday, we are committed to supporting independent restaurants with in-kind consultations to ensure they have another resource in their corner during these unimaginably trying times. From communicating with your team, to pro-bono legal counsel, to thinking through cash flow constraints, please contact us. Beyond our leadership team, we are connected with a remarkable community of professionals (including lawyers, PR professionals, accountants, CPAs, copywriters and more) who have generously offered to donate their time and resources to restaurants that need help navigating this crisis.

In challenging moments, creative measures and alternative paths are essential. As a result, we have been working around the clock to pull resources so that restaurants have the information they need to make these incredibly difficult decisions about labor, financials, compliance and, in the future, how best to open their doors. Below we’ve highlighted some of the most important information, all of which is available in more detail on our website.

Food+Tech Connect has also created database of resources for people working across the food system who are impacted by this crisis. Please peruse and add you resources to the database.

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Safety Best Practices

Everyone understands the critical importance of safety during this crisis, and below are two key resources to share with your teams.

• CDC
• Restaurant Guide

Communications

Now more than ever, clear messaging is key, and restaurants have a direct line to not only their employees, but also their customers. Operators should ensure they are communicating clearly with their team and customers about topics including changing offerings, hours, and safety measures on all applicable platforms: website, email listserv, social media, and on-premise signage. If you need help communicating with your team and / or guests, we’re here to help.

Operations

Although many restaurants around the US have closed, restaurants that continue to operate can utilize pickup and delivery to continue service. Alternatively, operators can turn to alternative revenue sources such as selling gift cards, merchandise, dining bonds to be redeemed upon re-opening, and creating GoFundMe campaigns.

Pickup + Delivery 
Restaurants across the country are still open and offering pickup and/or delivery, enabling them to continue to bring in revenue while maintaining the health and safety of their employees and customers. Some state liquor authorities are now allowing restaurants off-premises privileges for licensed businesses with on-premises privileges, as long as the alcohol is sold in conjunction with food.While delivery services like Grubhub and UberEats are deferring fees to restaurants, this doesn’t mean they’re waiving fees entirely and the fine print has been difficult to navigate. You can read more about this on Eater.

Gift Cards + Merch
Restaurants are encouraging customers to purchase gift cards, and some are even selling “dining bonds,” reduced price gift certificates that can be redeemed for a greater value at a later date.. With the purchase of a gift card or bond, some restaurants are also offering an invite to their re-opening party when the time comes.

HR

Your teams are the heartbeat of the industry, but we understand that safeguarding the future of your business is requiring you to make enormously difficult decisions. The goal is to balance your team’s immediate needs while ensuring they will have a job and a community to return to in the months to come.

While we understand that many restaurants have already had to lay off their teams so that they can start collecting unemployment, we have outlined different options for those who have yet to make these decisions for salaried and hourly employees. To help understand the differences, you can read more here.

• Salary reductions
• Transitioning salaried employees to hourly compensation
• Adjusted pay rates
• Unpaid leave of absence
• Work furlough
• Layoffs

Finance + Accounting

This crisis is impacting the bottom line for restaurants in unimaginable ways. It is critical to understand how much cash you have available, what the next few weeks look like (we recommend budgeting up to 12 weeks out, if possible), and what fixed costs you can immediately reduce to help free up available cash.

• Build a 12-week budget
• Reduce ongoing fixed costs
  • Ask your landlord for temporary rent abatement
  • Ask your bank for temporary loan forgiveness
  • Ask your vendors for extended payment terms

• Reduce monthly subscription and software costs,
  • POS
  • Inventory management

• Reservation system
  • Effective March 9th, Resy is providing 100% relief on all fees and billing for at least 30 days.
  • OpenTable is waiving subscription fees for restaurants that are closed through April 30th.

Business Loans + Grants

A number of associations and non-profit organizations are offering business loans and grants to restaurants. This is a comprehensive list of from Gusto outlining available COVID-19 resources for small businesses on federal, state, and local levels, as well as assistance being offered by private companies. You can also read more information on our website, and we have outlined a few key loans below.

• SBA | Economic Injury Disaster Relief Program: Small businesses and nonprofits impacted with revenue loss re: COVID-19 can apply for low-interest loans up to $2M.
• SBA | Loan Programs: Small businesses can apply for SBA-approved loans for working capital to support their business.

Donation + Additional Resources

If you’re looking for donation opportunities to help those affected, we have information on relief funds, organizations accepting food donations, and more on our website. [link to Food Donation Opportunities]

Advocacy
Restaurateurs and their guests are banding together to save America’s restaurants. Below are links to petitions you can sign, as well as information on how to call your local representatives, mayors, and governors to ensure your voice is heard. We’re all in this together.

National

• Save America’s Restaurants – National petition calling on the government to include restaurants in relief bills
• RWCF COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund – Provides direct relief to individual restaurant workers, non-profits serving restaurant workers in crisis and zero-interest loans to restaurants.
• One Fair Wage – Emergency coronavirus tipped and service worker support fund

Local

• ROAR (Relief Opportunities for All Restaurants) – NYC / National petition calling on the government to include restaurants in relief bills
• Call Local Representatives, Mayors, + Governors

To emphasize the importance of giving restaurants a stake in upcoming emergency relief funds. Below are local representatives for New York City + New Orleans, but all numbers are available to the public online. Sample Call Script is here.

Congressional Reps and Senators | 202-224-3121

[NY] Governor Cuomo | 518-474-8390

[NYC] Mayor Bill de Blasio | 311 or 212-NEW-YORK

[LA]  Governor  Edwards | 225-342-7015

[NOLA]  Mayor Cantrell  | 504-658-4900

For more information + an in-kind consultation, please visit us at Oyster Sunday or email us at hello@oystersunday.com.

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About OS | Oyster Sunday is a company based in New Orleans and New York City with the mission to reimagine the infrastructure necessary to build stable, progressive businesses in the hospitality industry.

Elizabeth is the founder of Oyster Sunday, an operating system for independent restaurants based in New Orleans and New York City with the mission to reimagine the infrastructure necessary to build stable, progressive businesses in the hospitality industry. Prior to Oyster Sunday, Elizabeth started her carrier as a pastry cook in New Orleans and moved to NYC to join the team at Momofuku. On the Public Relations and Marketing team at Momofuku. she helped manage public relations and marketing for Momofuku’s New York restaurants and major partnerships for the restaurant group. After Momofuku, Elizabeth was the Head of Brand at W&P, a vertically-integrated design and manufacturing company developing culinary products, managing the launch of over 300 products including product partnerships with Lucas Films, Williams-Sonoma, West Elm, and Food52.

The post COVID-19 Hospitality Resources & Best Practices From Oyster Sunday appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Square Roots Transparency Timeline via Square Roots

Food you can trust.

We can all remember the Thanksgiving romaine lettuce recall. It put millions of consumers at major risk of foodborne illnesses. The situation was compounded by opaque supply chains in the Industrial Food System, making it ridiculously difficult to accurately trace the source of guilty pathogens. To their credit, the big lettuce producers did eventually react, and agreed to start labeling their products with a mark of the state in which their products are grown. But that’s not enough. Consumers want food they can trust.

It’s common today to see companies telling consumers “you can trust our food.” That never sits comfortably with us. “Trust us” can’t be an instruction. Trust has to be gained. And one way for a food brand to start gaining trust is by being transparent, by opening up data, and by giving consumers all the facts. When it comes to produce, for example, what people want to know is: where and how was my food grown, who grew it, and when? With that data, people can make their own informed choices about whether to trust the food and whether to buy it.

We have that data at Square Roots. After the romaine recall, we realized we should make it available to our customers.

Sharing insights and learnings.

In the spirit of sharing insights and learnings that are hopefully helpful to others in the Food+Tech Connect community, this post shines a light on how we made this data accessible to customers, and also covers some of the technology decisions we made along the way.

For those not familiar with Square Roots, we are an indoor urban farming company headquartered in Brooklyn, NYC. We grow a range of herbs – like basil, mint and chives – and distribute them directly to retail stores across the city within a day of harvest. At the heart of Square Roots is our Next Gen Farmer Training Program, which provides a launchpad for young people to enter the farming industry. Meanwhile, our farms are constructed inside refurbished shipping containers, each with its own programmable climate—meaning we grow food all year round, with zero pesticides.

To help us train young farmers, we’ve developed our own software layer, which we call The Farmer Toolbelt, that provides instructions and insights to help the farmers with their day-to-day activities. Our farmers access The Toolbelt via tablets in the farms—and the software might tell them, for example, what tasks need completing in the farms that day, based on models we’ve built to optimize the growing cycle of certain crops. The Toolbelt is also used to capture data at every step of the process—such as who completed what task, when, how long it took, and more. As a result, we’re able to trace a direct line from every seed we sow to every package we sell. All that data is then analyzed against factors such as the quantitative impact on eventual yield, and the qualitative impact on taste, which helps us develop even more effective growing models over time.

Nate Burt on our engineering team was hacking on the Toolbelt’s backend data over Thanksgiving when the romaine recall happened. He saw the furor unfold as consumers got scared and millions of dollars of perfectly good produce got pulled from the shelves—all because no-one could swiftly trace the source of the issue.

Nate immediately understood that we could open up elements of our data set, expose it to consumers, and show a complete timeline—tracing where and how the food is grown, and who grows it. He built V1 of what we now call “The Transparency Timeline” that weekend, and showed us all when we came back in the office post-Turkey coma.     

Transparency Timeline QR Codes via Square Roots

To blockchain or not to blockchain?

When you hear the words “transparency” and “traceability” in food-tech circles, people often jump to the conclusion that blockchain is the right solution. We certainly had to think that through when assessing the viability of Nate’s V1.

We’ve been tracking this technology closely for a while. Inspired by Mike Lee, I’d written about its uses for food traceability on my personal blog last year. But our feeling is that “blockchain for basil” isn’t quite ready for primetime yet. Initial implementations from Big Food companies have been heavily buzzword-compliant but are distinctly underwhelming in terms of the useful information they provide.

There’s another irony with the blockchain buzz. Architecturally, it could be a neat solution to provide traceable information about industrially-produced food—which can travel for weeks to get to the consumer while passing through multiple vendors performing multiple processing steps along the way. But, increasingly, consumers are turning towards local real food, precisely because there are fewer steps in the supply chain and they trust it more. It’s almost like blockchain is a new solution for the old food system that consumers are moving away from.

At Square Roots, for example, all our products are sold at retail stores within four miles of our farm, and we own every step from seed to shelf; there are no third parties or handoffs along the way. As we scale, we will keep building local farms in the same neighborhood as the consumers — so we can always own the supply chain end to end.

Even though we’re optimistic about the long term vision for the wider food industry, the reality is that we, like many local farmers, don’t need to utilize blockchain architecture to give the consumer what they want today—total transparency, without the need for buzzwords. Even the blockchain vendors recognize that.

Going from internal demo to full product.

On December 1, we made the decision to take Nate’s V1 and turn it into a real product. The functionality would be simple, but really powerful. Every package we sold would have a QR code on it. The QR code would be associated with the data set for that particular package, as captured in The Farmer Toolbelt. Consumers would scan the code with their phone, and a mobile web page would pop up showing a complete timeline of where and how your food was grown, and who grew it.

QR codes are commonplace for consumers in Japan and China, but have been slow to take off in the US. However, now that Apple has integrated a QR code reader right into the native camera app on the iPhone (you simply need to point your camera app at the code and it gets read instantaneously), adoption is increasing here. In the retail setting, it’s easy for consumers to take out their phone, scan the code, and quickly learn more about the food they might buy. However, to make the Transparency Timeline feature available to everyone—even non-adopters—we also built a page on the Square Roots website where customers can manually type in the lot number found on the package and see the same information.     

Our systems also track what happens to every clam shell as it get packaged, leaves the farm, and heads to the store. So we are able to show the complete story of the food from seed-to-shelf.

We launched the Transparency Timeline on December 19.

That sounds fast, but remember that we haven’t had to invent new business processes or technologies to make this happen — we’re just exposing the data we already capture in the Farmer Toolbelt as part of our everyday operations.  

Launching, of course, didn’t just mean designing the UI and building the backend app. We had to change our labels to make sure every package now had a QR code. And we trained our farmers to explain things to our customers and retail partners. We’ve only got 17 full time staff at the company, so the initiative probably touched everyone at some point during the 3 week sprint to pull it together.

But it’s been totally worthwhile. It’s a whole new level of transparency. It’s all about consumers getting the information they need to make their own informed decisions about food they can trust.

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Tobias Peggs, CEO and co-founder at Square Roots

Tobias is cofounder and CEO at Square Roots – the urban farming company, headquartered in Brooklyn, NYC. He was previously CEO at Aviary, a mobile photo editing company (acquired by Adobe); and CEO at OneRiot, a social media analytics company (acquired by Walmart). Tobias has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Cardiff University in his native UK. He is a Techstars mentor, competitive triathlete, snowboarder, and eats far too much ramen.

The post Why & How Square Roots Launched Its Transparency Timeline appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Emerging technologies are transforming how we produce, distribute, and consume what we eat by bringing food to people instead of bringing people to food. A new report by the Refresh Working Group featuring Food Tank, Google, the US Chamber of Commerce, and more than twenty other partners, called Refresh: Food and Tech, from Soil to Supper, highlights more than 20 digital platforms and artificial intelligence algorithms being adopted across the U.S. food supply chain by farmers, distributors, grocers, retailers, and consumers.

Today, AI and machine learning offer the opportunity to bring a greater level of certainty to the notoriously uncertain business of farming. By using the processing power of AI to collect and analyze multiple sources of data out in the field, farmers are working with analytical tools to make decisions and generate predictions about their yields. Craig Ganssle drew upon his military experience in radio and infrastructure systems with the United States Marine Corps to create FARMWAVE, an app that helps farmers identify plant pathogens, bugs, and weeds. It works by integrating with smartphone cameras, drones, machinery, and field sensors: all of the necessary components in creating the connected farm of the future.

FARMWAVE is part of a new generation of apps like PlantVillage and Plantix that use deep learning algorithms to diagnose plant diseases and pests in a matter of seconds, not days or weeks. They will prove critical to addressing food security in the coming decades, for it is estimated that global food production will need to increase 25-70 percent by 2050 in order to nourish a population predicted to reach 9-10 billion in the next thirty years.

The benefits of AI in the food system are not limited to farming. Distributors, grocers, and consumers are also leveraging machine learning tools to improve the way that we buy and eat food—from Shelf Engine’s “predictive ordering” system to Calorie Mama’s visual food journal. Most importantly, emerging technologies are helping to create more equitable food systems.

Wholesome Wave has launched a card-based payment platform that supports an initiative called Wholesome Rx. It utilizes a machine learning algorithm that aggregates data from supermarket loyalty cards to generate coupons for nutritious foods and personalized diet recommendations. This fruit and vegetable prescription program is administered at participating health clinics and used by Medicaid patients who want to eat more fresh produce. The platform captures the entire shopping trip and offers incentives for making healthy food purchases beyond produce.

AI tools are also helping to build the food banks of the future. A new spin on popular home meal kits, Feeding Children Everywhere developed the Fed40 app using AI technology to deliver nutritious meals to food insecure families. By filling out a simple request form, families in need can receive 40 prepackaged, dehydrated red lentil jambalaya and apple pie oats right to their door. The app is especially geared toward working families who might not have the time to trek out to a food bank.

The report makes it clear that our food system is entering a new frontier. AI is becoming part of the infrastructure of the food system. Refresh’s stories and profiles suggest AI might also make it easier for people working all along the food chain to collaborate and innovate together.

Join a conversation on the Refresh report with former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and members of the Refresh Working Group on Wednesday, December 5^th at 5:30 PM CST at https://refreshfoodandtech.com/food-tech-live-stream-with-former-ag-secretary-tom-vilsack-on-12-5/. Learn more about the Refresh report and the Refresh Working Group at www.refreshfoodandtech.com.

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About The Author:

Sarah Papazoglakis is a Client & Content Manager with Swell Creative Group, an award winning creative agency that helps companies and causes solve the world’s biggest problems. For the past 15 years, Sarah has been working at the intersection of storytelling and social action. At Swell, she blends research and analysis with writing, community outreach, and issue advocacy to curate media and public debates at the center and periphery of the tech sector. Sarah has a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The post The Growth of AI and the U.S. Food System appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Cheryl Clements, Founder + CEO of PieShell
For PieShell founder Cheryl Clements, food is personal. It’s about connection. Growing up, Cheryl spent summers helping her mother run a pie-making business. Aptly named “The Pie Shell,” it was headquartered where all good startups begin: the family’s basement. It was from her Mother that Cheryl learned what it takes to build a successful food operation, but more than that, she learned how communities grow around the food that people share. A few years ago, when Cheryl thought of embarking on her own food venture, she saw a crucial need for a crowdfunding platform that addresses the unique challenges of food and beverage entrepreneurs.

The post PieShell + OurHarvest Crowdfund for Businesses Impacted by Pilotworks Shutdown appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

PICTURED:Greg Fleishman, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Galit Laibow (Foodstirs co-founders) PHOTO by: Michael Simon/startraksphoto.com

Glyphosate, the world’s most used herbicide, has recently become a major issue for the U.S. food and supplement industry because of its residues in foods. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifying glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen” in 2015. A very well publicized testing report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found glyphosate in a number of popular breakfast foods and cereals marketed to children. And Henry Rowlands at The Detox Project estimates that nearly 20 percent  of organic consumer packaged good brands have pesticide residue in their products – truly frightening. Our customers told us glyphosate is of particular concern to them, which is why we conducted testing. We found that consumers need deep transparency and verification when it comes to food, especially pesticide-free products and foods heavily consumed by children further solidifying our decision to move forward with The Detox Project and get Glyphosate Residue-free certified.

Together with my two other co-founders, Galit Laibow and Sarah Michelle Gellar, Foodstirs began with a simple mission: help families create indelible memories together through the power of good clean food. When it comes to Foodstirs products, we are committed to providing deep transparency that gives our consumers the peace of mind they deserve. When The Detox Project launched the Glyphosate Reside-Free Certification in 2017, we were thrilled there was finally a way to test packaged products for pesticides so consumers never have to question whether they are consuming glyphosate while eating our products, helping them feel safe so they can enjoy the ultimate home baking experience.

To gain our certification, we worked closely with The Detox Project Director, Henry Rowlands, whose beliefs align with the Foodstirs mission that verifiably clean ingredients are crucial to consumers, especially as we see more and more consumers growing their education around food labeling. The thorough process took 2-4 weeks, where we sent our products to be tested by a third-party lab using equipment that has the ability to test down to parts per billion, which is the only way to ensure there is zero trace of the pesticide. Note: the US Government only tests down to parts per million, which is not effective at knowing if there are traces of pesticide residue in a finished product. For most brands and even organic certified brands there is a way to ensure you pass the test. Using crops made with purest of growing methods is key. This includes Biodynamic(r) and Single-Origin Identity Preserved (non-tilled) where no outside chemicals are allowed. If you are currently using crops most susceptible to glyphosate residue, like Oats, Wheat, or Pea, then replacing with Biodynamic(r) or IP is the best chance at ensuring you will pass.

Foodstirs Organic Chewy Oat Bar Mixes in Chocolate Coconut, Cinnamon Raisin and Very Berry Chocolate Chip flavors were the first to become Glyphosate Residue-Free certified, which is important given oats are a major glyphosate-impact crop. As of today, all Foodstirs products are Glyphosate Residue-Free certified. To make sure our offerings are 100 percent free of glyphosate, The Detox Project tests each product 3 times a year and perform spot checks at manufacturing facilities and products sold at retail. To guarantee there are no pesticides, it is important to regularly test your supply chains, which is exactly what The Detox Project does. According to Henry Rowlands, the main reason that glyphosate is appearing in many GMO and conventional food products is because glyphosate is used to dry out crops a few weeks or days before harvest. In order to reduce the possibility of glyphosate residues in their products, food brands can request that farmers in their supply chain do not use glyphosate to dry them out.

Looking ahead, how to be transparent on the glyphosate issue will be one of the main focuses of discussion and action for the food and supplement industry in 2019. With The Detox Project certification, we now have a trusted way for brands to validate their glyphosate free products so that all consumers can have an informed choice. This is great progress towards cleaning up our food system!

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About The Author:

Greg Fleishman, Co-Founder & President/COO, Foodstirs

Greg Fleishman is the President/COO & Co-Founder of Foodstirs along with Galit Laibow and actress Sarah Michelle Gellar. He’s spent the majority of his 20+ year career in the natural food and beverage industry, and has been instrumental in shaping some of the most progressive products and hottest trends on grocery store shelves and online. Greg’s extensive track record includes leading brands and companies within Suja, Sambazon, Kelloggs, Coke, and Kashi plus launching more than 3,500 consumer products across 17 different categories and 12 countries. Greg is also the co-founder of Purely Righteous Brands where he advises leading natural products companies including Chameleon Cold-Brew, 4^th & Heart, Counter Culture, REBBL, and many other leading brands in the green space. Greg also co-founded Modern Alkeme SuperTonics with Larry Praeger. Named to Forbes List of Top Consumer Catalysts of 2016, Greg currently serves on the Board of Directors for Demeter Biodynamic, Nuun, Lily’s, and Once Upon a Farm.

The post Why Foodstirs Got Glyphosate Residue-Free Certified appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Tyson Innovation Lab developed and launched its first brand,¡YAPPAH!, in just 6 months — which is unheard of when it comes to big brands. ¡YAPPAH! is a mission-driven snack made from upcycled proteins, rescued vegetables and spent brewer grains. The product signals a new approach for Tyson, as it aims to address sustainability challenges in order to disrupt itself internally.

Brand Manager Santi Proano joined us at our Rethinking CPG Meetup this past August to share insight on Tyson Innovation Lab’s product development process and greatest challenges operating as a startup within a large packaged goods company.

For ¡YAPPAH!, the first step to rethinking CPG was unlearning. Rather than playing by traditional industry standards, the innovation team embraced ideas from marketing and brought the product to market within six months. Instead of launching nationally, ¡YAPPAH! started small by crowdfunding and entering a select few markets.

The innovation lab operated under a single leader across function, allowing for quick alignment and decision making. Tyson also ensured that leadership for direction was available at the highest levels. The team applied the five-day design sprint typically used by technology companies for developing software, modifying the process for a food CPG company to rapidly create its product and brand. In order to tackle food waste internally, the innovation team opted to speak to a spectrum of people who did and didn’t care about food waste, rather than relying on brainstorms and focus groups. By doing so, it learned that tackling food waste was about rescuing forgotten ingredients, and chefs were key to applying a lens to ingredients that would otherwise being disposed of.

You can see videos of other presenters at our Food+Tech Meetups here.

The post How Tyson Launched ¡YAPPAH! in 6 Months appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Source: Pilotworks

As of mid-day, on Saturday, Pilotworks the shared kitchen provider that opened here in Chicago in May, and for which I worked last winter, announced its abrupt closure and shut down its four remaining facilities– Chicago, Dallas, Brooklyn, and Newark. The company’s closure leaves about three hundred young makers with no facility in which to manufacture, eliminates primary distribution avenues for those tied to the Pilotworks distribution network, and creates a mass layoff for the nearly 100 remaining employees with no notice and no severance.

The company has faced challenges for months. Just a month ago the company announced the closure of its Portland and Providence facilities. The company’s board unseated its original Co-Founder/CEO Nick Devane in the spring, which lead to an early series of layoffs and significant staff departures just post that (of which my own position, and that of 3 other members of my local Chicago staff were a part).

Over the next month, the main story needs to focus on the 300 startup companies that were still operating in Pilotworks’ spaces on Saturday. Companies that Pilotworks was still billing and actively signing and recruiting as of the start of October – unironically, the signature of CEO Zach Ware still included the “Refer a Friend” recruitment link in his termination email distributed to staff Saturday morning.

As these makers head into the holiday season, which for some can represent as much as 40-45 percent  of their annual revenue, they will need new manufacturing locations, new access to capital to bridge revenue and loss gaps, and solid support from consumers and buyers. Some, like those in Portland, Maine, were able to utilize their collective position to partner with a regional non-profit which they hope will provide new life to their facility. Despite the legal and ethical infractions Pilotworks’ actions open for its former members, many  will be forced to suffer financial losses and failures.

In the longer term, though, there are some important take-aways from this series of events that hopefully we can learn from as we, collectively, work to move our industry forward.

1) Food is a viable industry, and we need people with expertise leading its much needed transformation.

Pilotworks was led to its close by a management team with very little actual food industry experience. CEO Zach Ware, a VTF Capital fund lead, liked to comment that he was well cut out for the job of leading a food company into a new space because of his personal “love” of tacos and “enthusiasm” for all things food.

The food industry – whether we are discussing hospitality, service, product, or manufacturing – is at its core an industry founded, run, and full of staff operating from a passion story or personal connection with food. It is the narrative that we all are drawn to and happy to cheer and support. These stories are impactful, they make for good marketing, and they are the basis of why we, as CONSUMERS, are drawn to products and services. But while that passion might lead someone into the food industry, the reality is that success is built upon those who can combine that passion with a willingness to work, a cultivation of expertise, and a development of business acumen to make their products and services successful.

As an industry we need to stop excusing poor ideas, poor execution, and poor leadership. We need to stop allowing our industry to be led and steered by people who think that money and outside skills or expertise they have will translate into the industry because “it’s just food.”

The food industry is complicated. The issues, problems, and faults of the industry need real change inspired by experienced leadership. We need innovation, ideas, and change driven by strong leaders with a genuine knowledge of how this industry can and should run, not just those with capital and skills they think can translate to food.  The food industry needs to start taking responsibility for itself and making its own changes. We can’t just rely on tech bros and VCs to save us.

During my time at Pilotworks, I had to routinely explain the business back to the senior leadership that were setting our course – defining what equipment was and how it would be used, what culinary processes were and how those processes would impact spaces, and what the regulatory guidelines of the industry would require or allow.

A startup or company in the medical, legal, or industrial space would not allow itself to be steered and led by an individual with no expertise, length of service, or practiced knowledge of subject matter. But, in food, we do – whether because we doubt our expertise, we question the legitimacy of our industry and professions in comparison to others, or simply because we accept the myth that it’s about passion and willingness over all else.

2) Accountability to your employees, customers, and community is key in business.

In March 2016, Pilotworks CEO Zach Ware ironically noted in a blog post, “What’s not ok, no matter how young your company, is delivering bad service.”

Pilotworks’ final decisions in regard to its members, employees, and investors in its last 6 months of operation clearly lacked accountability or an emphasis on serving these communities.

As people, we are taught that accountability stems from both being financially responsible and for having ethically guided responses to the commitments we undertake. There are certainly many times in each of our lives when these principles are tested, and some of us fail. But society functions because the majority of us, as people, don’t.

We also hold corporations, governments, and organizations to the same standard – it’s what validates their authority, or expertise, or gives us security in our interactions with them when we are turning over our time, money, or confidence. The fact that companies are able to routinely violate this trust – and so flagrantly demonstrate it – is where everything breaks down. And, unfortunately, in the start-up and food industries, it is downright common to display little or no regard for these rules.

Pilotworks marketed claims of a strong commitment to its members (the maker community) and its staff (the “team” that supported that community). The responsibility inherent in those claims is the foresight of ensuring that, even in failure, there is a demonstration of the partnerships and investments that those communities made in return in Pilotworks.

There is certainly no assumption that Pilotworks, its CEO Zach Ware, or its board took the decision to close the business lightly. But there is clearly a demonstration that in executing that closure they lacked any planning or commitment to protecting and promoting the very employees and businesses that were their lifeblood. There were obvious signs in the company over the course of the last six months that the company was in trouble – the change of executive leadership, the lack of completion of funding rounds, the scale back of project development, the closure of units, and the dismissal of employees en mass.

But where was the planning for this eventuality – no matter how hard the company was fighting to avoid it? The creation of a severance pool for employees, the proper notification of members for planning and re-location, the payment of vendor debts, the discontinuation of active solicitation of memberships and forward billing – any of these actions, even if undertaken in isolation, would have demonstrated some accountability to the populations the company claimed to serve.

We have to start expecting companies to be accountable – in the food industry and beyond – and ask them to prepare for that in their execution and long-term planning.

The problems we face in the food industry go far beyond the small populations affected by Pilotworks’ current actions. But how can we expect to affect change and hold the corporations and entities accountable for larger issues – like pollution, immigration violations, fair wage battles, and many more – if we cannot start with some of the newest and with those that are designed and aimed at the most needing populations.

3) Diversity is not a marketing platform, it is about what you do.

Pilotworks’ first marketing campaign focused on “democratizing the food industry.” My first day on the job, I was introduced to an array of people from all backgrounds working in the kitchens in Brooklyn. The makers of Pilotworks were a diverse and inclusive group – with women and minorities making up a majority of the tenants at a majority of the facilities. It is these very groups that need the access and the foundational tools to build and develop their businesses – and making a commitment to this work and progress is important. Despite the diversity of the populations they were working with, however, Pilotworks’ own leadership was all white, and all male.

It is this imbalance which can no longer be taken for granted. If, as a company, you preach a policy of diversity and inclusive practice, then the leadership, workers, and backers (and board) of your business should align and be reflective of that policy. Without including diversity in the positions who make decisions and influence the policies and path of your venture, you are failing in the execution of actual inclusion.

The consumer is better educated today and wants to see that they are better represented in the companies that their dollars are going to support and grow. Similarly, the average employee is better informed and better educated, they deserve a seat at the table to provide meaningful insight into the companies that they are investing their time and talents into. Companies need to adjust their course to be reflective of the markets they want to engage and of the employees and constituencies they want to represent.

The problems facing the food industry – that companies like Pilotworks are designed to solve – will not be solved by boards and c-suites of white men. The change, innovation, systemic industry knowledge, and cumulative experience that we need to demand of our leadership and companies, as they attempt to tackle these problems, will need the input of people from a diversity of backgrounds and genders to make it an honest and reflective reality.

4) The numbers have to add up.

There is a general belief amongst a lot of startups, in the food industry and beyond, that creative math is a necessary part of the equation to success. And it is true in a sense – entrepreneurs have to be willing to take risks, spend money, and sometimes push past the normal bounds of +/- to deliver.

Yet in time, if your business lives in brick and mortar, delivers a defined product, or quantifies a service for a customer, then there has to be a budget and the math needs to move from “creative” to “clear.” In time, all of the real math can’t be hidden behind the spreadsheet cells without anyone able to explain it. And in time, if you are going to judge performance, livelihood, commission, and value for real people, employees, and customers, then those metrics have to be real numbers that intelligent people can explain – and explain all the way down.

Pilotworks had a real problem with creative math – with a majority of its units, save one, effectively operating without budgets or transparency of numbers and metrics. With no budgets, units and the central office that attempts to run them, have no foundation for performance, growth metrics, balance of spend, understanding of loss, or ability to account for change either positive or negative.

As a small business owner, we are all placed in a continuous loop of numbers – we need strong numbers to get capital, we need real numbers to grow and secure investment, and we need clear numbers to understand our failures or successes and judge our path forward. Whether large or small, a company with a lack of transparency in understanding, building, or upholding clear numbers and budgets amongst its teams is handicapping, if not committing itself to failure.

Transparency, especially financial transparency, is a larger topic that is a pervasive problem in the food and hospitality industry. There are so many buried layers and so much stigma attached to the numbers associated with wages, revenues, and pricing, that the industry acts under-the-table more than it should. Putting those numbers on the table, educating the members of our industry and communities about how to use and operate within these frameworks, and encouraging clear lines of communication amongst companies and employees will help us all to operate better. And hopefully, will help us to avoid failures like the one seen with Pilotworks – whose lack of budgets and numbers will now have a substantial impact on the bottom lines of many smaller companies and makers beyond.

5) No company is a one-person operation.

My husband used to tell me – when we ran our own businesses and would fall into a spot where we were down an employee or frustrated with an employee’s performance – that at the end of the day, the only two people that had to show up the next day were he and I. It was our company, our restaurant, and our dream – no one else was invested, or responsible, or required to be there, but us.

It was a good sentiment. It would usually catalyze in me a little more confidence in myself and my decisions and give me the strength or the needed push to get through to the next challenge.

And while it was helpful, it inherently just wasn’t true. Nor, quite honestly, should it be.

Employees are important. Collaborators, investors, partners – are all important to the life of our business in different ways. But employees, are some of our most important assets. Employees are typically the main point of contact for most of our customers, significant sources of feedback from those customers, and a good judge of the health and path of our companies.

When an employee signs on to work for a company, it becomes the responsibility of the CEO or owner to not only provide leadership, direction, and a clear path, but to advocate for that employee in return for the investment of time and talent that employee is making in the company.

The allegations against employers that have been rampant in the food industry in recent months exhibit a systemic failure of the companies and the leadership of those companies to advocate and protect their employees. Unfortunately, Pilotworks’ actions this past weekend continues that trend.

Pilotworks did not hire a full time HR representative until nearly a year and a half of operation – a point at which the company was already dealing internally with a raft of issues stemming from abuse of employees’ time, resources, and functionality. Further, the HR representative was brought on to work for the CEO, not as an advocate for the employees – which further explains why employees were not a factor in the eventual closure of the company.

The role of an autonomous HR representative in companies, especially in the food industry, is essential as we move the industry forward. Those companies who take the time to understand how to give employees the respect and resources they need to innovate, excel, and drive the company forward will benefit as the industry develops.

Pilotworks failure has had a tremendous immediate impact on a small community of makers, employees, and investors. However, in the long term, the impact will be even greater if we are not able to recognize and deal with the issues raised even in small case studies as this one. The conversation surrounding these issues is more involved than the actions of any one company.

The work to be done to change and move the food industry forward – which will impact the lives of millions of workers and consumers – is extensive. But taking the time to pause and learn, as clear examples of right and wrong present themselves, will leave us all better equipped to tackle the systemic issues beyond.

Update: An earlier version of this piece included a reference to noted restauranteur and investor David Barber as a member of the Pilotworks Board.  Mr. Barber was a personal and fund investor in Pilotworks but did not have a seat on the company’s board.

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ABOUT ANDREA

Andrea J. Carbine is an industry advocate, entrepreneur, chef, and consultant working in food for over twenty years. For her work in the kitchen, she was recognized with two James Beard nominations, a Local Hero award, and a Women of Excellence Award for Entrepreneurship. Her work advocating for change in the restaurant industry and food industries at large, has transitioned her into a second career helping establish people, systems, and culture among start-ups and young entrepreneurs.

The post Lessons From Pilotworks’ Demise appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Plant-based yogurt startup Lavva is way more than meets the eye. With just seven whole food ingredients and no stabilizers, the probiotic- and prebiotic-rich formula have set it apart from other non-dairy yogurts on the market. But simple is often way more difficult.

Each of its ingredients have required reinventing and rethinking supply chains– from timing plantain growth to ensure its prebiotic qualities to partnering with a co-manufacturer to produce its organic and sugar-free fruit purees. The company invested in creating an entirely new supply chain for pili nuts, a wild nut grown in tropical volcanic soil,  by establishing a 200-farmer cooperative in the Philippines. In addition to its East Coast co-packer, Lavva has built its own dedicated facility on the West Coast built with its formulas in mind. It is currently developing the first exclusively non-dairy co-packer in the United States.

Executive chairman Victor E. Friedberg joined us at our Rethinking CPG Meetup this past August to speak about the company’s business strategies and burgeoning projects in the co-manufacturing space.

You can see videos of other presenters at our Food+Tech Meetups here.

The post Plant-Based Yogurt Lavva on Reinventing Supply Chains appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

There was a time, prior to the 20th century, when agricultural soil was rich, healthy and organically dense. Soil, in all of its regional variations, had always been a deeply complex ecosystem of microbes, minerals, decomposing organic matter, air and water. Our agricultural society was built upon it.

Following two World Wars and the Great Depression, modern agriculture – with its reliance on mechanization, synthetic fertilizers, and the pursuit of ever higher yields – was widely adopted with the goal of achieving global food security. While modern agriculture was successful at increasing yields, and thus food security, its use of chemicals to fight weeds and pests severely degraded soil health. Industrial agriculture literally treats soil like dirt – a at an alarming rate. If current trends continue, soil as we know it (or more importantly, as we need it) will be gone by the year 2050.

“We know more about the movement of the celestial bodies then we do of the soil underfoot.” Leonardo DaVinci said that in 1500, and this still holds true today.

In 2050, at least 10 billion people inhabit our planet. Yes, there will be advances and scaling of controlled environment agriculture, which will play an increasing important role in food security. But any future that includes 10 billion people eating healthily, sustainably and equitably will require soil – healthy soil. To meet this challenge, we have to start now.

Soil is at the nexus of agriculture and climate change. Ten million hectares of cropland are lost annually because of soil erosion, which is the equivalent of 30 football fields per minute. For every .1 meter of soil eroded, yields are reduced 4 percent, and there is a 10 percent loss of yields for every one degree rise in temperature. We burn 10 calories of fossil fuel for every single edible calorie. This is not sustainable.

Soil is also the nexus between agriculture, climate change and nutrition. In 2050, when population growth is estimated to grow to 10 billion and CO2 concentrations are expected to reach 550ppm, nutritional levels of protein, iron and zinc in staple crops such as wheat and rice will be lowered by as much as 17 percent. This will leave 2 billion people deficient in at least one or more essential nutrients, while 1.4 billion women of childbearing age and children under 5 will be at high risk of iron deficiency, 122 million people will be protein deficient, and 175 million people will become zinc deficient.

These are staggering numbers with profound future implications for human health, food security and geo-political security. We need significant resources and talent to spur the innovations that are needed to tackle these challenges.

FoodShot Global: A New Investment Model For a Better Food Future

Earlier this month, I launched FoodShot Global, a new nonprofit investment organization dedicated to transforming the food system into one that is healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable. For us, science, technology, innovation and investment are the keys.

Our first mandate is to solve big, global-scale problems. Our second mandate is to do this through collaboration, since no one fund, bank, foundation, university, corporation, non-profit or NGO alone can make the transformational changes that we need. As such we’ve brought together a consortium of world class Founding Partners, including Rabobank, Generation Investment Management, MARS, UC Davis’s Innovation Institute for Food and Health, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Builders Initiative, Armonia and the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. We have also partnered with a number of Resource Partners, including The Nature Conservancy, The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, The Path Foundation, and The Soil Health Institute. And our third mandate is to look to longer horizons and to align prize dollars, equity, and debt across a capital continuum.

We want to empower visionary entrepreneurs and change agents, and that takes time and resources. On the early side of our capital continuum, FSG has established the GroundBreaker Prize, a $525,000 award to groundbreaking rising stars in research, social enterprise and public policy/advocacy. The GroundBreaker Prize is the largest prize in food and agriculture. Further down the capital continuum, FoodShot Global has aggregated up to $10 million for equity investments and up to $10 million a year in debt.

Investing in a Healthier Soil Future

For our inaugural year, we are focusing on soil, because healthy soil is critical to the future of food and is an area ripe for research and discovery.

Solving the challenges around soil will not come down to a single solution – we need a collaborative effort that unites disparate disciplines and technologies into a new soil operating system — Soil 3.0.

Achieving the new soil operating system will take several steps. First, we need technology that allows us to observe and build global data sets for soil at the finest levels of detail. This means investing in sensing and imaging technologies that can give us new insights into what’s happening beneath the earth’s surface and tapping into the latest developments in robotics solutions to create autonomous equipment that can take samples, manipulate seeds and crops, and maintain conditions like soil humidity and pH levels without constant human input.

Second, we need to tap the very latest in biology, science and chemistry to understand soil itself – its organic material, mineral content and the chemical exchanges between the microbes and the plant. It’s not enough to understand the soil microbiome – we also need insight into the phytobiome and the interdependent ecosystems surrounding the plant. Presently, we know mostly what these phytobiomes are, but we don’t truly know what they do.

For exploration: Is it possible, for instance, to breed plants that have a lower impact on the degradation of organic matter in soil? Or even cultivate plants which have a regenerative effect on soil as part of their growth process? Are there microorganisms or inoculants that can catalyze soil regeneration?

Finally, all of this work will generate unprecedented data on how soil works. We’ll need new solutions in data analysis, predictive modeling and visualization to parse this deluge of information and obtain workable intelligence about the most promising areas for action and study.

Even more exciting is the promise of the ideas yet to come, which may hold the key to growing healthier, more resilient and more sustainable food. Somewhere in a lab or a garage in Singapore, Delhi, Nairobi, Brooklyn, or Vancouver, there is a scientist or technologist with an inspired but nascent idea that will be a breakthrough contribution to this integrated approach. We want to find them. We want to fund them. We want to look deeper into the soil and deeper into the future to make sure we realize a better one.

About The Author

Victor Friedberg, Founder – FoodShot Global

Victor Friedberg has been at the forefront of innovation, global development and sustainability for more than 20 years. A well-known thought leader in food system innovation, investment, and sustainable global development.  Victor is the co-founder of S2G Ventures, a leading food and agricultural venture fund and lead investments into transformative companies like Beyond Meat, Ripple, Lavva and Apeel Sciences among others.  As Founder and Chairman of FoodShot Global, a new non-profit investment platform to catalyze breakthrough scientific and technological solutions – Moonshots for Better Food – Victor is continuing his work to cultivate a healthier, more sustainable, and equitable food system. FoodShot invites entrepreneurs and researchers to submit funding requests for moonshot-scale ideas that will create a new soil operating system for the 21^st century. A healthy soil operating system will lead to more nutritious food, reduced agrochemical inputs, increased yields, higher farmer profits and healthier land and water ecosystems. By storing carbon, soil is also a key tool in fighting climate change. Healthy soil sets the framework for a food system capable of sustainably producing healthy, nutrient-dense food that is accessible to all. Applications and nominations for FoodShot Global’s challenge, Innovating Soil 3.0, are due by December 1, 2018 at www.foodshot.org/apply.

The post Our Dirty Secret: Soil is on the Endangered List appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Source: Back to the Roots

Reconnecting Families With Their Food

During our last semester of college, we became curious about a random fact we heard in a business ethics class: gourmet mushrooms could grow on spent coffee grounds. That curiosity led us to eventually turn down our job offers in investment banking and consulting to instead became full-time urban mushrooms farmers after we graduated. As we turned an old warehouse in Oakland into an urban mushroom farm, our curiosity grew into a deep passion to reconnect families back to where their food comes from.

After a couple years of growing fresh mushrooms for grocery stores, farmers markets, and restaurants, we saw an opportunity to shrink down our big urban mushroom farm into a table-top experience. We launched the Back to the Roots Mushroom Grow Kit – our first true “CPG” product – to let kids and families in any home or classroom experience that same magic of growing food, no backyard or green thumb needed. As we became more inspired by the incredible feedback from our community, we expanded into a whole line of Indoor Gardening Kits, sold mainly, at the time, in produce sections of grocery stores like Whole Foods Market. These included the Water Garden (tabletop aquaponics system), Kitchen Herb Gardens, and Self-Watering Tomato & Pepper Planters.

Our whole team spent countless hours in Whole Foods Market (WFM) doing demos. Standing in the produce section selling our gardening kits, for hundreds and hundreds of hours, we started noticing something really clear: there was a HUGE divide in the food values you experience in the produce section and when growing your own food from those just a few feet away at the start of the “center of store” aisles. In the produce section, you were able to taste and smell the freshness, see the ingredients, or grow them yourself. But all that transparency largely disappeared the moment you stepped into the grocery aisles.

Source: Back to the Roots

Bringing Transparency & Trust to The Center Aisles

We began to ask ourselves: how could we connect the dots between produce and grocery, between the garden and the kitchen, between food that’s ready to grow and food that’s ready to eat? How could we bring the same level of radical transparency and trust you feel when you grow your own food to the center aisles? How could we take ready to eat food “Back to the Roots”?

As we dove deeper into this question, we realized there was an opportunity to #UndoFood – launching grocery products that were direct-farmer sourced, radically transparent, and minimally processed. And what better place to start than with breakfast cereal? For many kids, it is their first experience with “cooking” – mixing milk and cereal together. It’s also a $10B industry that has 90 percent household and school penetration, an institution and symbol of our food system. It is also a category that was started as a “health food” by the Kelloggs’ brothers over a hundred years ago, but had unfortunately morphed into a candy aisle – full of sugar, artificial ingredients, and lots of additives/preservatives.

We saw an opportunity to “Undo Food,” first through cereal.

Two years ago, we launched a line of organic (and biodynamic!), 100 percent stoneground cereals made with just 4 or less direct-farmer sourced ingredients. We put the recipe right on the box and the packaging was the first bagless cereal box – 100 percent recyclable.

We launched the cereal into WFM, becoming its 2nd largest driver of category growth, not including private label. Then, after students in NYC voted on new cereals in blind taste tests, Back to the Roots displaced Kellogg’s in the NYC Public School System to feed 1.1 million kids every day, becoming the first organic cereal ever offered in US public schools.

As these accounts grew, we also saw momentum building on the indoor gardening side. The category had just reached $1 billion, as millennials drove the future of gardening towards organic and small/urban spaces. Throughout 2018, we’ve been growing quickly with our current partners  (The Home Depot, Amazon, Whole Foods), Ayesha Curry joined the movement, and distribution has grown with Costco and nationwide launches in Target and Lowe’s.

Source: Back to the Roots

Partnering to Maximize Impact

Through all this, we began to ask ourselves what was the best way to maximize impact. How do we grow the indoor gardening category, while scaling our cereal line into every home and classroom?

And while we could do it alone, given the tight category margins and high-volume runs required, it would take raising significant capital and working through the years-long distribution cycles. We began to ask how could we, today, make a bigger impact, faster. We realized if the right partner and opportunity came along to help us scale the cereal side, it would allow us to focus our core resources on scaling the gardening category.

Through this exploration, we met Arran, Ratana, and Arjan Stephens, the amazing family behind Nature’s Path, the largest organic breakfast company in the world, at Expo West 2018. We’ll never forget walking up to their booth at Expo West to chat with Arran, sitting atop their tall treehouse, overlooking the beautiful chaos that is Expo West, and chatting about the future of food. They are a company we have looked up to for years – true pioneers in this industry, spearheading the organic movement for over 30 years. Passionate and uncompromising in their vision to promote an “organic world,” all the while operating on a massive scale with their own manufacturing facilities across North America.

After our first conversation we realized there was a perfect fit here — starting with a truly shared vision. Layer on top of that the Back to the Roots organic, biodynamic, and simple-ingredient cereal brand that was resonating with millennials in retail and school districts, and Nature’s Path deep manufacturing, supply chain, and sales/marketing expertise — right away, it felt like magic.

Fast forward to today, and we’ve now signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Nature’s Path. Starting this school year, they will be taking over sourcing, manufacturing, sales, and distribution of our cereal lines. We continue to own the brand, and will still stay deeply involved in R&D/new product development, and the overall vision for the line.

The first task at hand? Take our case study in NYC Public Schools and get organic cereal into every school district in the country. If it can work in NYC, with 1.1 million students, we know it can work everywhere. We’re already well on our way — bids have been submitted and interest is coming back from districts around the country. We now have the resources to scale up, the capabilities to offer new SKUs, and the opportunity to service millions of more kids. Through our partnership with the Urban School Food Alliance, we expect that by 2020 1 in 5 kids in America will have an organic cereal choice for breakfast!

As we look forward, we couldn’t be more excited and inspired by the future. We wake up every morning for this mission to reconnect families and kids back to food. Now, we get to do it by mainly focusing on the fun challenge of inspiring everyone to experience that magic of growing their own food; all the while also supporting our friends at Nature’s Path to get our cereals into every home and classroom in America. Together, we truly have a chance to #UndoFood for this next generation.

As Helen Keller reminded all of us, “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.”

The natural foods movement was built off collaboration, and we’re seeing the need for it more than ever now as the movement matures. With a truly shared vision, big and small can work together in so many more ways than just an acquisition or investment.

We’re honored to be partnered with Nature’s Path and excited to grow, together.

Do you have thoughts or comment on the partnership? Comment below!

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About Alejandro Velez & Nikhil Arora

Back to the Roots was founded in 2009 by then college seniors Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora after discovering how to grow gourmet mushrooms on recycled coffee grounds. Since then, Back to the Roots has evolved from an urban mushroom farm to a thriving business on a mission to Undo Food and reconnect families back to where it comes from through an award-winning line of Ready-to-Eat breakfast cereals and Ready-to-Grow Indoor Gardening Kits. Back to the Roots currently distributes its products in thousands of stores & schools nationwide.

Nikhil and Alejandro, co-founders & co-CEOs of Back to the Roots, have been honored with several awards recognizing their efforts in sustainability and entrepreneurship including BusinessWeek’s “Top 25 Entrepreneurs under 25,” Inc.’s “30 Under 30,” Inc. 500, Forbes’ “30 Under 30,” and CNN’s “10 Next Entrepreneurs to Watch.” In addition, Back to the Roots was recognized by Martha Stewart as a Top Ten American Made honoree, by President Obama as Champions of Change, and recently delivered the commencement address at their Alma-Mater, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Back to the Roots is a certified B-Corp based in Oakland, CA. For more info visit www.backtotheroots.com.

The post Why Back to the Roots Inked a Historic Partnership with Nature’s Path to Bring Organic Cereals to Every School in America appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.