This is a guest post by Kelsey Formost, Director of Content Strategy at Tagger Media.

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. 

Without the ability to drive product trial through in-store demos and sampling, brands have been forced to rely even more heavily on digital means to drive customer discovery. 

While influencer marketing was already a pretty commonplace tactic for brands, in 2020 it became even more essential for brands to work with trusted content creators across social platforms to drive discovery of their products. 

Social media has always been ingrained in our daily lives, but according to a recent study, 72% of social media users report spending significantly more time per day on social media. Before covid, the average American was consuming an average of 3.5 hours of social media time per day. After covid, that number has nearly doubled to six hours a day, on average.

Beyond increasing screen time, Covid accelerated our comfort with using social media as a means of discovering and purchasing new products. In fact, because of a surge in on-platform shopping, we’re predicting that all major social platforms will be adjusting their algorithms to boost product discovery and eCommerce in 2021.

Tagger Media, the influencer marketing platform I work for, helps connect brands with the most valuable content creators for their campaigns so they can get their products in front of the right audiences. Over the last year, we found that brands who increased their investment in influencer marketing were able to more seamlessly transition into a pandemic economy and social landscape. By partnering with influencers and meeting consumers where they already were, brands were able to stay top of mind with their existing customer base and drive discovery for new leads. 

In advance of the Reimagining Discovery Conversation on January 21, we wanted to share some of the key learnings from 2020 to help brands increase their ROI by leveraging influencer partnerships and staying ahead of upcoming industry trends.

Learning #1: Consumers are increasingly looking to influencers for recommendations and deals

Data shows consumers are purposefully seeking the opinions and recommendations of influencers before they make a purchasing decision. Influencer Marketing Hub reports that 91 percent of millennials trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations from friends and family. A survey by BrightLocal shows 95 percent of consumers aged 18-34 seek out online reviews before making a purchase, reading an average of 10 reviews before they feel they’re able to trust a brand.

Not only are consumers seeking out the opinions of online creators, they’re actively looking for discount codes and product links from influencers they trust. When it comes time for a consumer to purchase, they often return to the source of discovery – in this case, the influencer – to complete that “last click” step and add the product to their cart.

Recent data shows that long-term partnerships performed best for brands in 2020 which allowed brand campaigns to build momentum with a dialed-in audience. Repetition builds recognition, recognition builds trust, and trust creates sales. 

Most marketers are aware of the statistic that a viewer needs to be exposed to something an average of seven times before they opt in. Investing in a long term influencer partnership ensures you’re getting your product in front of the right audiences (on the right platform) enough times to drive real-life purchasing decisions. 

Learning #2: Social media algorithms are changing to reflect new spending habits

In order to maximize success with influencer marketing, it’s important to consider upcoming algorithm changes that might affect your campaign reach and engagement. Last year brought a massive increase in consumer comfort with online shopping which led every major social media platform to create new opportunities to incorporate eCommerce into their user experience.

We expect that consumers’ social media shopping behavior will be even more heavily weighted in upcoming algorithm updates, ensuring that users are served influencer content that more specifically aligns with their past purchases.

We’ve already seen these changes taking effect. With their accelerated launch of Shops back in May, Facebook made it clear that their priority is eCommerce. Instagram’s much-publicized addition of a “shopping” tab to the home screen announced similar intentions. With eCommerce so well-blended into the social media experience, the algorithms will inevitably adjust to track consumer shopping behavior to better inform the platform what kinds of content and ads to serve.

Influencer Marketing Case Studies for Food Brands

Now let’s dive into specific examples of how a few food brands we work with that were able to leverage influencer marketing to drive discovery and growth, even during a global pandemic.

Using our technology, these brands were able to hone in on specific audiences that were pre-disposed to respond positively to their products. With access to accurate, real-time social data, companies are able to streamline and scale their influencer discovery process, partnering with the top creators for their specific goals.

Poppi @drinkpoppi  

Pre-biotic soda brand Poppi is an excellent example of a brand that was able to immediately increase awareness and reach after partnering with influencers. This graph shows Poppi’s social health before and after running an influencer campaign. Before, Poppi was averaging a potential reach of around 10,000. After the influencer campaign, Poppi saw a reach of over 1.5 million. That’s a growth percentage of 15,000%.

Four Sigmatic @foursigmatic

Four Sigmatic is a wellness company that touts the benefits of “the world’s most nutrient-dense ingredients” with the world. You can see in this graph how their reach and engagement spiked in direct relation to their sponsored mentions. This means that when Four Sigmatic invested in sponsored influencer content, they saw a huge spike in conversations being held about them in the online community.

Tate’s Bake Shop @tatesbakeshop

Lastly, let’s take a look at how user-generated influencer content can drive engagement for food brands on social media. Tate’s Bake Shop has partnered with nano and micro-influencers to drive huge engagement numbers, with engagement rates of up to 5 percent – that’s more than double the industry average. When brands partner with influencers, they’re getting more than just well-done content, they’re getting direct interaction with that influencer’s audience, upping their own engagement rate in the process.

Driving Discovery with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing provides brands with higher value leads at a lower cost per lead, produces a higher ROI that any other form of marketing, takes the cost of content creation out of the brand’s pocket, and helps work around ad blockers. But one of the most valuable results of influencer marketing is its ability to drive real-life purchasing decisions, encouraging consumer discovery off-platform.

When an individual follows an influencer, they are part of a curated community. When a brand is able to tap into that community via influencer marketing, they also tap into that influencer’s hard-earned trust. When an influencer shares a positive recommendation with their dialed-in audience, that audience is more likely to be open to ordering products they have yet to physically try, simply because those products are recommended by someone they trust.

In a digitized world, influencer marketing provides a high ROI that not only drives sales, but accelerates discovery among new audiences allowing food brands to scale in a pandemic economy.

Join us on January 21 for a conversation with Vanessa Pham, Co-Founder of Omsom,  Jeremiah McElwee, Chief Merchandising Officer of Thrive Market, Katie Marston, Chief Marketing Officer at Once Upon a Farm, and Kelsey Formost, Director of Content Strategy at Tagger Media, to discuss how leading food brands and retailers are increasing customer discovery, acquisition and loyalty in this new normal. 

Join us for future Redesigning Retail conversations here. 

Kelsey Formost, Director of Content Strategy at Tagger Media

Kelsey Formost is the Director of Content Strategy for leading influencer marketing platform, Tagger Media. Her work and expertise in the digital content and influencer marketing space has been featured by Business Insider, Refinery29, Glamour, and more. This year, Kelsey was named a ‘Rising Star’ by industry leader Talking Influence on their ‘Influencer Top 50’, a curated list of the Top 50 global individuals in influencer marketing. Kelsey is also an experienced speaker, presenting at high profile events such as HubSpot’s Inbound2020 conference and SXSW 2021.

The post How Food Brands Are Using Influencer Marketing to Drive Discovery & Acquisition appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Food+Tech Connect and The Future Market are hosting Biodiversity: The Intersection of Taste & Sustainability, an editorial series featuring interviews with over 45 leading food industry CEOs, executives, farmers, investors and researchers on the role of biodiversity in the food industry. Read all of the interviews here. 

Wholesome Wave enables underserved eaters to make healthier food choices by increasing affordable access to locally and regionally grown fruits and vegetables. Now, the team behind Wholesome Wave is launching Wholesome Crave, a for-profit, socially responsible soup company created to directly benefit Wholesome Wave.

Below, I speak with founder and James Beard Award winning chef Michel Nischan about how he and Wholesome Crave think about biodiversity. As Millennials and Gen-Z look for more global and flavor-driven food experiences, he argues, we need supply chains and foods that better meet their needs, which also happens to support biodiversity.

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Danielle Gould: Why is biodiversity a priority for Wholesome Wave and Wholesome Crave?

Michel Nischan: Wholesome Wave focuses solely on making produce available to food insecure families. Wholesome Crave will be prioritizing biodiversity in the food supply chain once we’re up and running. We will continue working to expand market demand for an array of biodiverse ingredients to be able to offer exciting and stimulating flavor profiles, cultural appeal and to differentiate Crave from existing offerings.

DG: How does Wholesome Wave and Wholesome Crave define and think about biodiversity?

MN: Crave looks at biodiversity as an essential component in creating a new reality in a supply chain currently very limited in any meaningful diversity. We know that by pleasing our eaters and offering them greater diversity, the resulting demand at scale could have positive environmental and human health impacts.

DG: What is the business case for products that promote a more biodiverse food system?

MN: Biodiversity equals flavor excitement. With Millennials and Gen-Z highly interested in and spending money on a wide variety of ethnic cuisines, the supply chain needs to step-up in ways that can address this expansive market demand. Planting biodiverse crops, and marketing them appropriately/accordingly, would provide quite a competitive advantage, considering how so much of the current supply chain is held by “old-school – big-food” companies.

DG: What investments need to be made to create a more biodiverse food system?

MN: Agricultural land leases need to go well beyond the current norm of year-to-year. Harvesting equipment for multiple varietals of legumes, grains and specialty crops. Ag technology to respond to changes in climate linking to varietals that grow well in draught, heavier rain patterns, etc.

DG: What are the greatest challenges and opportunities your organizations faces for creating a more biodiverse system, and what are you doing to overcome or capture them?

MN: The current food supply chain is set up more for efficiency than diversity. Market demand will be the answer here, as well as logistics tech that can introduce producers directly to the end user. There is plenty of supply chain infrastructure to support wheat, but Teff cannot be run through the same infrastructure, other than the transportation element.

DG: Does your average consumer care about biodiversity today? No, but that is changing. Why should they care?

MN: With the rapidly growing number of eaters (who are already craving diverse flavor) expressing their values regarding the environment, labor practices, sustainability and so on, biodiversity is a consistent solution. How do you (or will you) get them to care? By delivering exceptional flavor coupled with using digital communication to demonstrate the end benefit to under-served communities, directly to the eater.

DG: What are some of the most important things food manufacturers can do to support biodiversity? Retailers? Other key parts of the food supply chain?

MN: Vary the ingredients they use in their products. Onions, carrots and celery can be found in 70 percent of a full portfolio of a soup company’s product list.

DG: Are there certain products you would like to see more of in the food industry that would help promote a more biodiverse agricultural system?

MN: Asian, site-specific Central American, fermented, ancient grains and legumes.

Read all of our biodiversity interviews here and learn more about Biodiversity at The Future Market.

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Credit:Tom Hopkins

Michel Nischan, Chef, Author and Food Equity Advocate Founder & CEO, Wholesome Wave & Wholesome Crave

Michel Nischan is a four-time James Beard Award winning chef with over 30 years of leadership advocating for a more healthful, sustainable food system. He is Founder and CEO of Wholesome Wave, Co-Founder of the James Beard Foundation’s Chefs Action Network, as well as Founder and Partner with the late actor Paul Newman of the former Dressing Room Restaurant. Nischan, whose parents were farmers, began his career at 19, cooking breakfast at a truck stop. He quickly realized that the ingredients coming in the back door fell far short of the farm-fresh harvests he’d grown up on, and began a life-long career championing the farm-to-table concept, decades before it had a name.

Nischan was instrumental in securing $100M for Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI) grants for the food equity field in the 2014 Federal Farm Bill, expanding affordable access to locally grown fruits and vegetables. He’s also the author of three cookbooks on sustainable food systems and social equity through food. A lifetime Ashoka fellow, he serves as a director on the board of the Jacques Pepin Foundation and on the advisory boards of Chef’s Collaborative, Modern Farmer, Good Food Media Network and The National Young Farmers Coalition. The James Beard Foundation honored Nischan as the 2015 Humanitarian of The Year. To learn more about Chef Nischan, follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and visit www.chefnischan.com To learn more about Wholesome Wave visit, follow us on Twitter and Instagram or visit www.wholesomewave.org

The post Millennial & Gen-Z Eating Behaviors Will Shift Supply Chains, Says Michel Nischan appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Food+Tech Connect and The Future Market are hosting Biodiversity: The Intersection of Taste & Sustainability, an editorial series featuring interviews with over 45 leading food industry CEOs, executives, farmers, investors and researchers on the role of biodiversity in the food industry. Read all of the interviews here. 

Data will be key to creating a biodiverse future. The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) has created a global coalition of over 850  governments, academia, researchers, private companies and farmers to ensure food security and to preserve biodiversity through the sharing of open agricultural and nutrition data.

Below, I speak with GODAN executive director André Laperrière about how open data can be used to help eaters, health professionals and governments improve public health and preserve biodiversity. He also shares great examples of initiatives to protect biodiversity, like Biodiversity in Standards and Labels for the Food Industry, an EU-based project aiming to standardize biodiversity criteria and labeling standards and to encourage manufacturers and retailers to include biodiversity criteria in their sourcing guidelines.

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Danielle Gould: How does your organization define and think about biodiversity?

André Laperrière: Biodiversity is a critical element of the world’s ecosystem. As we are learning, the combination of all species currently inhabiting our planet creates a balance that allows for each, including us, to survive, thrive and contribute to each other species development. Every time a species become extinct, it creates a misbalance in the world’s life equilibrium. This is the first reason why biodiversity is important.

The second important element is that there are still thousands of species yet to be discovered, from fungus to mammals in the seas and land alike. These may be part of the discovery for cures and diseases affecting human life, as better knowledge of the specifics of livings whose existence we are aware of, will also lead to medical and nutrition progress, unless we fail to protect them.

Third reason why biodiversity is important is nutrition. Since 1900 the world has lost 75 percent of its crops variety, meaning we grow on average only 25 percent of crops we used to grow for human consumption.  As we know, 75 percent of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and five animal species, as few as 3 crops in some countries. Consequence: much less diversity in human food consumption, resulting in various forms of mal/incomplete nutrition problems. Fortunately, some countries are beginning to address that; in the most recent Food Security Index, for instance, South Korea won the palm, with its agriculture sector sharing half of its agriculture for traditional high volume crops, and the other half for a variety of other crops, who make nutrition much better – and Korean food taste so good.

DG: What is GODAN doing or planning to do to promote biodiversity?

AL: GODAN is a global institution composed of 850 governments, academia, research, private companies and civil society/farmer institutions in more than 110 countries. We help them develop and implement the right policies to trigger innovation in increasing agriculture productivity (currently around 20 percent in a number of countries), managing better cultivated land instead of simply expanding bad practices to new lands where biodiversity is trying to survive.

We awork with academia to increase knowledge on nutrition across the entire value chain to encourage valuing high quality crops that have been neglected (ex: Quinoa). We also work to develop adapted technology (again to manage agriculture in a way that safeguards and better, capitalize on biodiversity, like harvesting wild forest fruits – many proven to be up to 10 times more nutritious than the traditional ones found in the markets) in order to learn to live with nature and protect it, instead of falling into the biodiversity killing ‘slash and burn’ practices still in use in big segments of the world. We are working with farmer and fishermen organizations, as well, with the same goals. GODAN also has a senior advisory role in a number of organizations that promote and work hard on biodiversity, such as SDSN, CGIAR (including biodiversity international) and many others, and works closely based on the expertise available in its network.

DG: What’s at stake for our society if biodiversity is reduced? Are there examples where a lack of biodiversity has caused problems within an ecosystem or community?

AL: Unfortunately, there are many. For example, IPS reports that fish catches are expected to decline dramatically in the world’s tropical regions because of climate change. Furthermore, in 2006, aquaculture consumed 57 percent of fish meal and 87 percent of fish oil as industrial fisheries operating in tropical regions have been scooping up enormous amounts of fish anchovies, herring, mackerel and other small pelagic forage fish to feed to farmed salmon or turn into animal feed or pet food. This has resulted in higher prices for fish, hitting the poorest the most.

Another example is the elimination of natural predators for various reasons, from commercial interests to myths. More than 100 million sharks, for example are estimated to be killed every year. As another example, wolves mostly eradicated from western Europe have resulted in overpopulations of deer, leading to disease, starving, accidents through interaction with humans, damage to types of crops, etc.

Another example is when a campaign was done to stop seal hunting in eastern America/Canada; already with the shark population dwindling down rapidly, humans had over the years become a key predator that kept the seal population in balance through its annual hunting. Further to the virtual halt of such hunting due to bad publicity (resulting from poor hunting practices), the seal population exploded, which in turn triggered a significant attack on other parts of the fish fauna such as the lobster industry, very affected as lobsters and other species suddenly became under threat as food for much larger number of seals.  These are a few examples as to how the natural biodiversity balance can be rapidly affected once one of its elements is removed from the chain.

DG: What is the scientific and/or business case for a biodiverse food system?

AL: Biodiversity, when well managed, leads to more food products available and sustained, increased income and quality of life from its caretakers, increased economic activity linked to tourism (ex: in Namibia former poachers were converted in nature guards and villages whose populations used to hunt wildlife now protect it to further develop eco-tourism industry in their area).  Biodiversity can also lead to improved nutrition of the populations thanks to greater food diversity, itself leading to a decrease in food/malnutrition related illness and costs to the state.

DG: What investments need to be made to create a more biodiverse food system?

AL: We need to enforce laws designed to protect diversity. Second, we need to increase the awareness of the consumers as to the importance of diversified and sustainable foods, implement relevant fiscal regimes that will encourage the consumption of more varieties of food – especially those that can be produced locally – and their production. We also need to educate as to how species that we may not eat as humans, may have a critical importance due to their interaction with other species that are useful and desirable for human consumption.

DG: How might we reinvent capital structures or create incentives to increase investment in biodiversity?

AL: The two keys are sustainability and awareness. Sustainability is important for those who grow and harvest species for consumption. Through relevant trainings, many good projects across the globe have led to the protection and efficient management of fishing areas by fishermen themselves, whose long term life depends on it. Learning better fishing techniques and tracking catches have managed to protect these fishing environments, increase their catches as the fish population (like lobster) increased thanks to a more facts/data-based approach they learned. At the national level investments need to be done to help consumers make better nutrition related choices and choosing sustainable food sources over others. Access to tax incentives, but most important to credit, is also key especially for small farmers who are unable to invest in sustainable agriculture practices (ex: fertilizers, precision agriculture data, etc.). Finally, have governments and communities look at biodiversity in itself as an industry from which its protection can generate income, both through eco-tourism and through marketing wild and relatively unknown foods with great nutrition qualities.

DG: What are some of the most important things food manufacturers, chefs, retailers, farmers, and other key parts of the supply chain can do to support biodiversity?

AL: Promote the greater use of natural, local and wild foods to demonstrate their nutritive benefits and to create unique new tastes that in turn will enhance consumer knowledge about biodiversity and the advantages provided in protecting it. Restaurant NOMA in Denmark, for example, became a world success based on this approach.

Farmers should also be educated as to how modern practices can play a significant role in improving their productivity, reducing their costs and increasing their income in harmony with the environment they are living in. Good examples in Latin America show where cattle owners learned to raise their animals without cutting all the trees to make grazing areas. Rather, they learned to use the natural forest crops as a source of income, more and more in demand as people become aware of them their new flavors and high nutritive values. For this approach to be adopted more widely, actual data must be shared, understood and used to increase awareness and demand towards protecting biodiversity.

DG: Where can consumers and food industry professionals go to learn more about biodiversity issues and what they can do to help?

AL: Through open data, consumers can learn to make better food choices, health professionals can give better nutrition advice and governments can make better policies and incentives to protect biodiversity and improve the health of their populations (through food diversification, better food quality, sustainable food production respecting/protecting biodiversity. This is at the heart of GODAN’s mission.

DG: Are there certifications or other signals that can help the average consumer determine what kinds of foods are helping promote biodiversity?

AL: Yes, and this is coming more and more. For example, in August 2016, Global Nature Fund, Lake Constance Foundation, Agentur AUF! (Germany), Fundación Global Nature (Spain), Solagro, agoodforgood (France) and Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal) have initiated the project “Biodiversity in Standards and Labels for the Food Industry,” funded by the EU LIFE programme.

WWF and other organizations have also begun to associate their logo/brand to sustainable food production, as large food chains and markets have begun to realize that consumers are more aware of the importance of preserving biodiversity so adhering to such practices becomes a positive, marketing element built in their business model. This trend will grow and be further promoted by organizations like GODAN and many others.

DG: How would a biodiverse food system change the typical selection of products we see in a grocery store?

AL: Your dinner plate probably doesn’t include goosefoot, hopshoots, vervain, beremeal, medlars, Saltcote Pippin apples or Shetland black potatoes. But it could. These plants were once common British fare, and they grow here still. We simply don’t eat them. Nor do we eat the majority of the 30,000 edible plants growing on the planet today. For the most part, we eat about a dozen, according to the Soil Association’s Robe Percival.

In a perfectly biodiverse food system, the diversity of products available at the store will be based on products that are grown/raised in a sustainable manner respectful of the environment and that protects the soil, water and other resources that will allow the production of these products to continue. The products we will see will be based on evolved taste and awareness of the consumers on the relative benefits of each types of food available, its origin and processing, again encouraging sustainable production and consumption of healthier food. It will also display more of the locally available food, that often times due to marketing, trends, and commercial reasons had been gradually replaced by a limited number of high volume crops.

DG: What, if any, exciting products, technologies or services are you seeing that support a more biodiverse food system?

AL: I see a wave of innovators using open data, motivating producers to further open their product-related data (origin, composition, nutritive value) and producing a range of apps, bar code readers, websites and campaigns to promote knowledge of food alternatives for consumers to choose what is better for their health. Now, two new parameters are being included in this advocacy mix that will shape food purchases: food miles/carbon footprint of food products and sustainable production practices (ex: promoted by WWF). Among our partners, as an example, we have a small organization composed of volunteers that have now tracked composition and origin of thousands of products and developed a free app that allows consumers to scan their possible purchase and learn how it compares with other options vis a vis parameters listed above.  These are the pioneers that are moving, especially the new/young generation, towards making more environment/biodiversity aware decisions which in turn will contribute to their immediate (nutrition) and long term (environment) health.

DG: Are there certain products you would like to see more of in the food industry that would help promote a more biodiverse agricultural system?

AL: I would like to see more locally available foods made available locally. More high quality crops that can grow very well even in harsh environments and are a healthy substitute to other high volume crops. Quinoa is an excellent alternative to millet, for example. I would also like to see more transparency in food related data, especially in terms of origin, processing and contents vis a vis nutrients and components that should be avoided (sugar, salt, fat for example, who is more and more displayed but where norms/limits still lack in many countries). I would like sustainable food products to be more clearly advertised and promoted, and that this effort be supported not only by the producers but also by the state as in the end if benefits through reduction of health problems, stimulating local production, and better informed populations.

DG: What is your vision for what a more biodiverse food system looks like in 10-15 years?

AL: In 15 years, I believe food systems will be much more data driven than they are now, as the trend has started and is increasing very rapidly. This will range from consumers demand for better food, leading to production producing it and stores making it available. I would expand the vision of the food system to education, quoting Japan as a great example where they made nutrition a mandatory part of their curriculum, with great results.

Read all of our biodiversity interviews here and learn more about Biodiversity at The Future Market.

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André Laperrière, Executive Director of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) 

Mr. André Laperrière joined the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative as its first Executive Director, in September 2015. During his career, Mr. Laperrière has led/managed numerous projects on behalf of large Private Corporations and subsequently, within the United Nations and the World Bank. In this context he played a senior role in the design and the implementation of major reforms within a number of agencies such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF. He has extensive work experience in the Americas, Caribbean, Africa, Europe and the Middle East, in particular in developing countries and in conflict/post conflict environments.

Before joining GODAN, Mr. Laperrière was Deputy Chief Executive Officer at the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Washington DC. Among other positions, he has also been the first Executive Director of the Trust Fund for Victims at the International Criminal Court (ICC), Director of the Administration and Finance Division in the World Health Organization (WHO), and Coordinator for reconstruction and rehabilitation activities under the responsibility of UNICEF in Iraq.

Prior to his career in the UN, Mr. Laperrière was Director in the International Services of Price Waterhouse. In this position, he led multiple large scale business evaluations, privatizations, mergers and structural reform projects in Europe, Africa, the Americas and Caribbean. Mr. Laperrière was born in Canada, where he completed postgraduate studies in Administration and in Industrial Relations. Mr. Laperrière is an expert in international development.

The post GODAN on Open Data to Support Biodiversity & Health appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

From January 7 – February 8, Food+Tech Connect and The Future Market are hosting Biodiversity: The Intersection of Taste & Sustainability, an editorial series featuring interviews with over 45 leading food industry CEOs, executives, farmers, investors and researchers on the role of biodiversity in the food industry. See the full list of participants and read about why biodiversity in food is important here. 

We have been talking about incorporating more biodiverse ingredients into products and our diets over the last month, but where do you find those ingredients? Since 1996, Slow Food has been building the International Ark of Taste, a database of nearly 5,000 endangered foods from over 150 countries. With this database it hopes to catalogue and encourage greater use of foods forgotten by the industrial food industry. It is also launching campaigns to raise awareness of these endangered food. This spring, it is incentivizing 3,000 farmers, school gardens and Slow Food chapters to plant the seeds of endangered crops.

Below, I speak with Slow Food USA Executive Director Richard McCarthy about how the organization is encouraging greater diversity in regional food sheds. He argues for the need to move from mass production and monocropping to reclocalizing our foods to make them culturally and ecologically appropriate.

Danielle Gould: How does your organization define and think about biodiversity?

Richard McCarthy: Slow Food sees biodiversity as natural assets to be preserved and utilized.

DG: What is your organization doing or planning to do to promote biodiversity?

RM: Inspired by the idea that we must “eat it, to save it,” we believe that storing seeds is not enough. It is important to create popular excitement for heritage breeds and seeds. Slow Food’s living catalogue of endangered foods, the Ark of Taste, is our primary tool to identify and recognize foods that the world of industrial food deems archaic, unuseful and destined to be left behind. Of course, we feel differently. These are the foods that provide more options for farmers, gardeners, cooks and chefs to navigate gastronomic decisions in an age of climate change. With Slow Food’s desire to trigger behavior change, we launch campaigns to draw connection between individual choice and systems change. This spring, we will incentivize 3,000 farmers, school gardens and Slow Food chapters to Plant A Seed of Ark of Taste vegetables to popularize forgotten seeds.

DG: What does an ideal biodiverse food system look like? How do you measure biodiversity, and when will we know when we’ve arrived at a “good” level of biodiversity?

RM: An ideal biodiverse food system is one in which every region brands itself as “home of ______.” The tyranny of scale shoves farmers, chefs and flavors down a narrow corridor to plant the same products. This industrial thinking is what has yielded the 90 percent decrease in biodiversity in North America in the last 100 years. Even progress to counter these trends conform to industrial thinking. Consider the trends that convince farmers to “meet demand”: kale, brussels sprouts, arugula. On the one hand, the rise of “specialty crops” like these may be, on first blush, good news. What happens is that trends take off and every farmer follows suit. What if instead, we — producers and consumers — identify iconic products for each food shed; rally around these products; partner with chefs and others to get these products into production, supply and the popular imagination for eaters of all walks of life to cherish that which differentiates where we live from places others’ live.

DG: How would you describe the current state of biodiversity? What are the key forces that are helping or hurting biodiversity today?

RM: It is difficult to be optimistic when the culture of confinement permeates all stages of the food chain: We are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. The primary culprit is our devotion to cheap meat. It puts undue pressure on animals, ecosystems and economies. We confine animals, money and palates. We demand that we will can have as much meat as we want, when we want and not consider the hidden costs. Worse, we export this model all over the planet. As a result, places like Para in Brazil enables land speculators to introduce monocrop soybean cultivation on land previously inhabited by small farmers whose integrated farms regenerate soil and economies. Instead, soybeans are raised by large farms, sold to Cargill and transported to Europe for feed to produce Chicken McNuggets. This economic model destroys biodiversity. When we as individuals and institutions opt out of the monocrop economy, we support the ecology of local economies: from farmers markets to school systems that purchase local, fresh and sustainable products.

DG: What’s at stake for our society if biodiversity is reduced? Are there examples where a lack of biodiversity has caused problems within an ecosystem or community?

RM: When we reduce biodiversity, we restrict our society’s ability to be agile. Already, our over-dependence upon corn and a few grains to be part of nearly every meal we consume has gutted rural economies of their wealth, flooded waterways with chemicals and offshore fisheries with “deadzones,” and generations with intolerance to food. Perhaps the most vivid and well-documented example of this over-reliance upon a monocrop economy is the 19th century potato famine in Ireland. When colonialism — neo or old-school — results in a majority of a population consuming only one crop, then people and planet suffer.

DG: What is the scientific and/or business case for a biodiverse food system?

RM: The scientific and business case is the same for biodiversity. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Centralization is bad for economic health. If every farm is growing the same crop and selling to the same customer, then short term competitive decisions outweigh long-term ones. Cost-cutting measures undermine future investment in land and people.

DG: What investments need to be made to create a more biodiverse food system?

RM: For one, let’s stoke eater demands for new flavors by reviving old crops and old breeds by leveraging the behavior change institutions that meet the public where and when they shop: Campaigns in farmers markets, with supportive retailers and via imaginative tourism. At the same time, let’s underwrite farmers to experiment with more diverse varieties of seeds and breeds. For fishers, let’s help them disengage from the commodity corridor of shrimp sold at the dock. Instead, make the most of bycatch, reward quality over quantity.

Second, let’s rethink school lunch as an academic subject. Grow the next generation of good eaters who run towards new and interesting foods because they eat it at school and have a contextual relationship with the foods’ history and geography. And, of course, they love how it tastes. Change the culture of the cafeteria, as if we actually care about the children and to enjoy a future free of chronic diseases. This involves: purchasing endangered seeds and breeds directly from local farmers; ripping out all vestiges of the Fordist cafeteria line that treats children as cogs in a wheel and replacing it with civic lessons that teach children to cooperate and eat family style; and utilizing the power of the public purse to help farmers to shift from growing one commodity and to growing for one school. A tall task? What’s the alternative? This could represent a Marshall Plan for rural America and a cornerstone for a future that rewards innovation, biodiversity and the reinvention of tradition in agriculture.

DG: How might we reinvent capital structures or create incentives to increase investment in biodiversity?

RM: Nearly 95 percent of the Farm Bill invests in a monocrop economy. Get big or get out; takes risks and suffer the consequences. What if instead, we grew the 5 percent of the Farm Bill that rewards farmers to be good stewards of the land, urban consumers to forge ties with rural communities and public health policies that recognize the risks involved with changing eating behaviors. If we liberated rural communities from this culture of confinement, then we could invest in a generation of entrepreneurs who want to return to the land to grow food and dignity and wealth. Change is difficult. Good public policy is like good investment models: They mitigate risk. We should incentivize farmers to develop farms that integrate animals, direct marketing, cooperation with neighboring farmers and long-term land management (in order to diversify the ecology of the land and improve the water and air).

DG: What are some of the most important things food manufacturers, chefs, retailers, farmers, and other key parts of the supply chain can do to support biodiversity?

RM: Champion old varieties of fruits and vegetables, old grains and more meals that use no meat, or at least meat as flavor and not focus of every plate. These steps are huge gifts for farmers seeking guidance as to what to grow and for whom. Consumers can change supply when working closely with farmers. High volume customers speak the loudest, however, it is the small consumer who gets the ball rolling.

DG: Where can consumers and food industry professionals go to learn more about biodiversity issues and what they can do to help?

RM: There are many good resources to turn to. For one, the Slow Food Ark of Taste is a great starting point to stoke excitement about the biodiversity we are losing everyday. However, there’s no substitute for picking up a seed catalogue and spending time with farmers to map out the next season of planting. Can’t find a farmer? Visit your nearby farmers market. Every retailer who’s seeking trends, starts there first to get ahead of the wave.

DG: What are some examples of food products that promote biodiversity?

RM: The proliferation of heirloom tomatoes is one great example of how behavior is changing. Farmers are adapting to meet consumers who crave food that tastes of a place and a particular time. Many heirloom tomatoes are difficult to transport, which alone is an indicator of how limitations and scarcity can reward the farmer who undertakes the risk to change.

DG: If we get to a perfectly biodiverse food system, how would that change the typical selection of products we see in a grocery store?

RM: Travel outside of the USA and you see it already. Stores in Japan stock 80 percent of their shelves with fresh, local and seasonal products. This is not perfection, however, Japanese consumers — of all walks of life — value taste. Stores adapt to that impulse. This is something that is happening in the USA but it’s still small, weak. Farmers market shoppers are walking into grocery stores with a different set of assumptions.

DG: What, if any, exciting products, technologies or services are you seeing that support a more biodiverse food system?

RM: The desire for fermented foods, for one, is widening our sense of what tastes good. No one really saw this coming. Where did it begin? On the margins. Young people become fascinated with gut health, old canning techniques, and flavor. Similarly, the raw milk societies that operate on the margins and in the grey zone are changing expectations about public health, the right to choose, and how the industrial food system is designed to squelch choice.

DG: Are there certain products you would like to see more of in the food industry — either in foodservice or CPG — that would help promote a more biodiverse agricultural system?

RM: There are over 300 products in the USA living catalogue of endangered foods, the Ark of Taste. Some of these are working their way onto dinner tables. A few come to mind that are ripe for rediscovery at commercial levels: The Sebastopol Gravenstein apple, Louisiana satsuma, the Ohio Valley Paw-Paw. However, maybe the question is part of the problem. The Ark of Taste captures the most vulnerable and endangered foods. Few are poised for mass production. More importantly, we need to begin to think beyond mass consumption. We need to relocalize our foods to make them culturally and ecologically appropriate to a region. Maybe we should deploy import substitution thinking at the regional level. What products are currently on the menu that could be substituted with others that are produced locally?

DG: What is your vision for what a more biodiverse food system looks like in 10-15 years?

RM: One in which the kids in today’s schools grow up to raise their families on home-cooked meals from fruits and vegetables raised in backyards and community gardens. If this occurs, it’s because we’ve created a culture that demands more from life: Work less, earn more; spend more time with each other around the table. The pressures families feel today are the very same ones that confine farmers to a monocrop economy.

DG: Anything else you want to share?

RM: A love for cooking and eating. Only when we shed the perception that these are elitist notions will we rediscover that our grandparents were hipsters, that immigrants possess traditional knowledge that will rescue biodiversity from the scientists and economists that wish to subject us to fewer choices and less love for people, planet and parsnips.

Read all of the interviews here and learn more about Biodiversity at The Future Market.

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Richard McCarthy, Executive Director of Slow Food USA

An early innovator in the late-20th Century farmers market renaissance to reconnect urban consumers to rural producers, he founded Market Umbrella in New Orleans, where its flagship Crescent City Farmers Market launched some of the first health incentive programs. After Hurricane Katrina, the Market served as a fulcrum for social, economic and philanthropic reinvention for the region’s food system. Writer, lecturer, and community development specialist, at Slow Food, Richard launches campaigns, stages global gatherings and forge partnerships with expected and nontraditional partners to change the world through food that is good, clean and fair for all.

The post Slow Food’s Database Catalogues Thousands of Endangered Foods appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

From January 7-31, Food+Tech Connect and The Future Market are hosting Biodiversity: The Intersection of Taste & Sustainability, an editorial series featuring interviews with over 45 leading food industry CEOs, executives, farmers, investors and researchers on the role of biodiversity in the food industry. See the full list of participants and read about why biodiversity in food is important here.

Below, we speak with Douglas Gayeton, director of The Lexicon of Sustainability, about how the organization’s Rediscovered Food Initiative is promoting use of 25 neglected and underutilized foods from across the globe through a multi-platform content series. The goal of the initiative is to shift consumers’ diets away from ultra-processed foods, while also helping farmers grow locally produced crops that provide greater biodiversity and resilience, are adapted to climate change, help conserve resources and contribute to regionally-based economic models that promote food sovereignty. The initiative includes a long roster of partners, including Google, The Culinary Institute of America, Slow Food and more.

Gayeton also talks about the need for economic drivers to create a more biodiverse food system, especially when it comes to our seed research, farmer adoption of diverse cropping systems and distribution systems.

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Danielle H. Gould: What is The Lexicon of Sustainability Doing to promote biodiversity?

Douglas Gayeton: Our work with the Rediscovered Food Initiative, which is aligned with SDG 2.5, focuses on shifting global agricultural systems, which primarily focus of the production of four commodity crops, toward a return to bioregionally adapted and native crops that offer greater plant diversity, better nutritional outcomes, and enhanced food security.

DHG: How does Lexicon of Sustainability define and think about biodiversity?

DG: One way natural systems achieve a point of equilibrium, or balance, is through biodiversity. From a purely economic standpoint, this expressed through risk diversification. In the face of certain stressors– environment, predator, resource competition, etc.–biodiversity offers a tool of resilience. This will become increasingly valuable given our uncertain future in a time of climate change.

DHG: What does an ideal biodiverse food system look like? How do you measure biodiversity, and when will we know when we’ve arrived at a “good” level of biodiversity?

DG: To achieve a more biodiverse food system, a number of mechanisms need to fundamentally change, and this will only happen if each of these shifts are driven by real economic returns.

1. To start, we need greater availability of open source seeds, more research by plant breeders and geneticists on a wider array of crops and a more robust system for sharing knowledge and expertise in the preservation and distribution of gene plasm.

2. Second, we need economic models that encourage farmers to adapt more diverse cropping systems. This could be as simple as introducing cover crops or crop rotations that include a wider range of crops (introducing millet and cover crops into a soy bean/corn rotation in the US, for example). It could expand in the Global South to embrace growing less commodity crops for export and more indigenous or traditional crops to feed local markets. In both cases, if farmers don’t see improved economic returns, biodiversity at scale won’t happen. Farmers are risk adverse and larger driven to make decisions based on what their neighbors are doing. It’s said that in farming regions, change is slow. It happens one death at a time.

3. Finally, we need distribution channels and consumer demand for a more diverse diet.

DHG: What’s at stake for society if biodiversity is reduced? Are there examples where a lack of biodiversity has caused problems within an ecosystem or community?

DG: Biodiverse agricultural systems have the potential to be regenerative, to build soil organic matter. This reduces a farmer’s reliance on chemical inputs.

The corn/soy production cycle we see in the American Midwest has created a number of problems. For example, it depends on chemical fertilizer inputs which invariably runoff into local water systems. In the Midwest, this nutrient loading of phosphorus and nitrate into waterways feeds into the Mississippi River, where it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico creating dead zones the size of New Jersey each year.

More diverse systems can enhance soil health, retain more water, reduce insect predation (and the pesticides used to combat them), reduce weed pressure (and the herbicides used on them) and provide a natural form of crop insurance in a time of greater weather uncertainty.

DHG: What is the scientific and/or business case for a biodiverse food system?

DG: Risk diversification. Crop insurance. Better health outcomes. Built soil organic matter. Strengthen ecosystem services.

DHG: What investments need to be made to create a more biodiverse food system?

DG: Education. The support of new markets, technologies, products and services provided by crops that aren’t soy, wheat, corn or rice. Case in point: pea protein isolate.

DHG: What are some of the most important things food manufacturers, chefs, retailers, farmers, and other key parts of the supply chain can do to support biodiversity?

DG: Become educated. Make purchasing and product decisions based on the support of regenerative farming practices and the consideration of a wider range of source ingredients.

DHG: Where can eaters and food industry professionals go to learn more about biodiversity issues and what they can do to help?

DG: The Rediscovered Food Initiative is producing books, television shows, traveling exhibits, school curriculum and websites that will share what success looks like in agricultural systems that become more diverse.

DHG: Are there certifications or other signals that can help the average consumer determine what kinds of foods are helping promote biodiversity?

DG: Not really. The certified organic label represents an agricultural model that uses both cover crops and crop rotations, but most consumers will not really grasp this distinction.

DHG: What are some examples of food products that promote biodiversity?

DG: Most of what we eat is the result of some sort of monoculture. When we eat a tomato, for example, or a walnut or a banana, it’s nearly always the case that this food came to use from a large scale producer who essentially focused on one crop. Since we buy our food based on price and not quality, producers must specialize to keep costs down; even if we strive to have a diverse diet, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the individual foods we eat are the bi-product of a biodiverse agricultural system.

DHG: If we get to a perfectly biodiverse food system, how would that change the typical selection of products we see in a grocery store?

DG: It would mean more problems for grocers because a grocery store would have less shelf stable foods, more perishable fresh foods, more diversity within individual crops (five types of zucchini, for example). However, this assumes that consumers want a more diverse diet. Since we have slowly eliminated the number of foods we eat from our diet, and increased our reliance on processed foods, we have to essentially re-educate (and reintroduce) consumers to a food lifestyle that has largely been forgotten. Since this new food system would require also more time in the kitchen, the likelihood of a this behavior shift happening will present a number of challenges.

DHG: What, if any, exciting products, technologies or services are you seeing that support a more biodiverse food system?

We are currently tracking 25 crops that have the potential to be true disruptors in the global food space.

DHG: What is your vision for what a more biodiverse food system looks like in 10-15 years?

DG: Less agricultural production for export. A greater return to regionally-based agricultural systems that provide nutrient security.

Read all of the interviews here and learn more about Biodiversity at The Future Market.

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Douglas Gayeton, Director of The Lexicon of Sustainability

Douglas is a taxonomist, filmmaker, photographer and writer specializing in impact storytelling in food and water. He has written and directed film series for PBS and HBO and Conde Naste. His stories and iconic photography about agriculture and food systems have appeared in thousands of pop up art shows, a concept pioneered by the Lexicon. Douglas is the author of SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town, and Local: The New Face of Food & Farming in America. His photographs are held museums and private collections around the world.

Douglas’ life with the creative arts is informed by his early life as a professional skateboarder. As a technical media pioneer, he has worked in Europe, China and the Middle East. As a taxonomist, his focus is the environment and he gleans inspiration from life on a farm as a husband, father and wrangler of goats.

The post Rediscovered Food Initiative on Promoting 25 Underutilized Foods appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The conversation about the future of food has exploded over the past half decade. Much ink has been spilled examining virtually every new food innovation from lab grown meat, to soil-free indoor farms, to new forms of genetically modified foods.

One of the forces behind this food tech movement are a legion of starry-eyed entrepreneurs fueled by millions in venture and corporate funding, looking to transform this $5 trillion industry into one that’s more efficient, sustainable, delicious, and healthy.

But just as many of these new, high-tech ideas will have a big impact on the future of food, so will many older, lower-tech ideas that have resurfaced into the zeitgeist. One quick walk down the supermarket aisles is a reminder of how the food industry aspires to produce simpler, more wholesome food that evokes attributes of the past, before food became an industry.

Organic. Free Range. Grass-Fed. The premium buzzwords of today simply describe how all food, by default, was made yesterday. What’s old has become new, but as we continue this conversation about the ideas that will carry us into the future, one very old concept is surging back into the food dialogue: food biodiversity.

The Intersection of Taste and Sustainability

Food Biodiversity, or more specifically, agrobiodiversity, is defined as the variety and variability of the plants, animals, micro-organisms, and biocultural systems linked to food. That’s the technical definition.

This variety and variability brings strength and resilience to food ecosystems, as it’s much harder to bring down a system where a diverse constituency of organisms both support and compete against one another to advance the health of the ecosystem.

The Irish Potato Famine is a stark reminder of what can happen when a critical food source lacks biodiversity, as a single disease was able to wipe out enough of the monocultured potato supply that 1 million people died of starvation and sickness.

Biodiversity is crucial to the health and safety of our food supply. But to us, biodiversity in food means something even more. Biodiversity sits at the intersection of taste and sustainability, where we can simultaneously satiate an eater’s desire for new, interesting foods, while supporting a more diverse cornucopia of foods being cultivated in the world.

Globally, 75% of our food comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species. This enormous level of consolidation around just a handful of food sources not only magnifies the impact of any attack on the food supply — like the Irish Potato Famine — but it also consolidates our taste buds around just a few flavor experiences.

Of course, these few ingredients are remixed within the industrial food complex as a diverse ecosystem of brands, which gives the illusion that we’re eating from variety, but there is so much more to taste and experience in the world.

Eating from a more diverse selection of foods can reduce our reliance on the small handful of industrialized crops for our sustenance. For example, creating more demand for foods like Moringa, a nutrient-dense superfood from Southeast Asia, Fonio, a drought-resistant ancient grain from West Africa, or Kernza, a deliciously sustainable grain from the United States, provides a chance to simultaneously enrich our bodies, our planet, and the communities that cultivate these foods.

These foods are all great places to start, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg, as we humans in aggregate only eat 150 out of 30,000 edible plant species which leaves an entire world of flavor to explore.

Sustainable, Biodiverse, and Selfish

Forging a closer union between food that sustainably bolsters biodiversity and food that’s selfishly delicious, is a formula that will enable the sustainable food movement to truly attain scale and longevity. You can get a lot of people on board for a cause rooted solely in altruism, but you can get even more if you can also tie that cause to a selfish benefit.

These two causes — one altruistic, one selfish — need not be mutually exclusive. For example, Patagonia Provisions’ Long Root Ale, the first beer to be made from the environmentally enriching grain, Kernza, is a great example of how we can do right by our taste buds and the planet. A more biodiverse food system simply grows our opportunities for more products like Long Root Ale.

This approach of making more irresistibly delicious foods, that enrich the individual, from more sustainable or regenerative ingredients, that enrich the planet, is necessary to further mainstream the idea of food that’s great for people and planet.

In food, great taste gives you the license to promote other virtuous causes, and flavor is the vehicle that will bring us to a more biodiverse and sustainable food system.

To Learn More About Food Biodiversity:

• Biodiversity, an online exhibit at The Future Market
• Join the conversation at #biodiversefood

The post The Future of Food is Biodiverse appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The food industry has increasingly prioritized sustainability, as eaters care more about where and how our food is produced, as well as who produces it. There is even growing interest around soil health and the potential for agriculture to regenerate the health of the planet, not just sustain the status quo. There has been far less attention, however, to the diversity of what’s being grown.

About 75 percent of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species. Almost half of our plant-derived calories come from just three foods: wheat, corn and rice. While estimates vary, it is believed that there are over 30,000 edible plants, and we only eat 150 of them. Thirty percent of livestock breeds are at risk of extinction, and six breeds are being lost each month.

This concentration around just a few food sources puts our food system at risk, as evidenced by the story of the Cavendish Banana and The Irish Potato Famine. It also robs eaters of awesome, nutrient dense foods and flavor experiences.

How did we get here? Historically, the food industry prioritized commoditization, mass yield, and uniformity over flavor, nutrition, and sustainability. As a result, we are losing plant and animal species at an alarming rate, while diet-related disease, obesity, and micronutrient deficiencies are on the rise.

Now, we as an industry have a chance and a responsibility to make things right.

The Future of Food is Biodiverse: Where Flavor and Sustainability Meet

Building a food industry that promotes agrobiodiversity – the variety and variability of plants, animals, microorganisms and biocultural systems linked to agriculture and food – makes our food system more sustainable and allows us to delight eaters with new and exciting foods from a diverse set of cultures.

As an industry, agrobiodiversity ensures supply chain resiliency and food security by safeguarding the genetic material needed to ensure crops can evolve in the face of pests and disease, climate change and extreme weather. A biodiverse food system also supports economic development, enables greater dietary diversity, which leads to better health, and helps preserve cultural traditions, techniques, and flavors.

39 Industry Leaders Explore Biodiversity in Food

Intellectually, you might agree with our premise that the future of food is biodiverse, but what does it mean in practice?

To help us understand what a biodiverse food industry looks like, we’ve partnered with The Future Market to host an editorial series from January 7-31 inviting leading CEOs, executives, farmers, investors and researchers to share insight into their thoughts and strategies for supporting biodiversity in food. Check out our incredible list of contributors below and read all of the interviews here.

The Future Market at Fancy Food Show

The Future Market is producing a Biodiversity Exhibit at The Winter Fancy Food Show January 13-15. The exhibit offers a deep dive into biodiversity in food and explores what a more biodiverse grocery aisle might look like. It will feature 9 new concept products, 26 biodiverse crop spotlights, and a digital shopping experience filled with concept product ideas for the next 5-25 years. See content from the exhibit and learn more here. We hope to see you there!

Editorial Series Contributors:

Read all of the published interviews here.

• Aerofarms – Marc Oshima, Co-Founder & CMO
• Applegate – Gina Asoudegan, Vice President, Mission and Innovation
• Back to the Roots – Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Vélez Ramírez, Co-Founders
• Believe in Bambara – Tamara Cohen, Co-Founder & Chief Commercial Officer
• Bowery Farming – Susan McIsaac, Head of Agricultural Sciences
• Burlap & Barrel – Ethan Frisch, CEO
• Crops For The Future – Professor Sayed Azam-Ali, CEO
• Dig Inn – Larry Tse, Farm Manager, and Taylor Lanzet, Director of Supply & Sustainability 
• Edenworks – Jason Green, Co-Founder & CEO
• Farm.One – Rob Laing, Founder & CEO
• Food Systems 6 – Renske Lynde, Co-Founder & Managing Director
• Food Tank – Danielle Nierenberg, President
• FoodShot Global – Victor Friedberg, Chairman and Founder
• General Mills, Natural & Organic Operating Unit – Shauna J. Sadowski, Head of Sustainability
• Global Crop Diversity Trust – Marie Haga, Executive Director
• GODAN – Andre Laperriere, Executive Director
• Gotham Greens – Viraj Puri, CEO
• Health Warrior – Casey Emmett, Director of Strategic Sales
• Impossible Foods – Pat Brown, Founder & CEO 
• Institute for the Future – Sarah Smith, Research Director, Food Futures Lab
• KAIBAE – Barbara Berger Maes, Dr. Luc Maes & Thomas Cole, Co-Founders
• Kuli Kuli – Lisa Curtis, Founder & CEO
• La Quercia – Herb Eckhouse, Co-Founder
• Lexicon of Sustainability – Douglas Gayeton, Director
• MAD – Melina Shannon-DiPietro, Executive Director 
• Masumoto Family Farm – Nikiko Masumoto, Farmer, Artist, Community Leader
• National Young Farmers Coalition – Lindsey Shute, Executive Director & Co-Founder
• Rebbl – Sheryl O’Loughlin, CEO 
• rePlant Capital – Robyn O’Brien, VP
• Row 7 Seed Company – Charlotte Douglas, COO
• SDG 2 Advocacy Hub – Paul Newnham, Director
• Sir Kensington’s – Rebecca Gildiner, Impact Strategy Manager
• Slow Food USA – Richard McCarthy, Executive Director
• Starbucks – Michelle Burns, Senior Vice President, Global Coffee & Tea
• Sweetgreen – Nicolas Jammet, Co-Founder & Chief Concept Officer
• Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University – Kathleen Merrigan, Executive Director
• Tender Greens – Erik Oberholtzer, CEO
• Thrive Market –  Nick Green, Co-Founder & CEO
• Wholesome Wave – Michel Nishan, Chef, Author, Food Equity Advocate, Founder & CEO
• Yolele – Philip Teverow, Co-Founder & CEO 

The post Introducing Biodiversity: The Intersection of Taste & Sustainability appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

This is a sponsored post by Tony Carey for Partnership For a Healthier America. 

Imagine a world where good food is the norm. Instead of carry-out pizza, it’s pizza with good-for-you-ingredients.  There are no more chairs at corporate offices — they’ve been replaced with treadmill desks. And most importantly, in this world, our children are growing up free from the chronic diseases that are costing millions in healthcare, threatening the very security of our country and shortening the lives of our loved ones.

What if the biggest offenders are actually the solution, and rather than the government or well-meaning NGOs solving the obesity crisis that plagues our nation, it’s the private sector that has the power and takes on the responsibility of creating a better, healthier country?

The reality is, the private sector has the power, the scale, and resources to greatly influence the health of communities across the country. Partnership for a Healthier America has long seen the opportunities for these organizations – from CPGs to the convenience store industry – to evolve and innovate in ways that better support the accessibility and affordability of healthier options wherever families are. And, consumers are demanding it. This is the first generation that may not outlive their parents, and consumers recognize that providing better-for-you items are imperative to changing the course of children’s futures.

It’s important that each of these stakeholders – government, academia, public health and the private sector – come together to explore and innovate, to understand the untapped opportunities for better outcomes.

PHA’s Innovating a Healthier Future Summit, May 2 – 4, is an opportunity to do just that. This  annual Summit brings together industry leaders, experts, and change agents to share best practices, thought leadership and cutting-edge innovations to bring solutions to some of the toughest challenges facing the industry today, knowing that no single business model or sector are off-limits to a raw burst of change. From Ido Leffler, Co-founder and Chairman of Brandless to Dr. Mehmood Kahn, Vice Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer, Global Research and Development, PepsiCo, this one-of-a-kind conference, is the place to be for anyone wanting to change the health of America’s children.

If we want to see real change, we need to work together. The future of our country depends on it.

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Toni Carey, Senior Manager, Communication & Marketing at Partnership for a Healthier America

Toni Carey is senior manager of communications and marketing at Partnership for a Healthier America. A passion for health and fitness led to her co-founding Black Girls RUN!, a grassroots organization that inspires African-American women to live a healthy lifestyle. Now at more than 200,000 members, the organization has been recognized nationally for its grassroots approach to community health.

Previously, she was the brand director for Camber Outdoors, a nonprofit elevating women’s equality through leadership and participation in the outdoors.

The post Corporations Can Change the Course of Children’s Health appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

In tandem with the launch of the Food+Tech Job Board, we are thrilled to launch the Food Startup Growth Series. This series will give you an inside look at the strategies, challenges and best practices of fast-growing food startups.

The $11 billion U.S. food delivery market is crowded and fast-growing. Mealmade, a San Francisco-based meal delivery startup, is differentiating itself by offering healthy meals for people with specialized diets, like gluten-free, paleo, autoimmune protocol and vegan. Delivery is available for lunch and dinner, featuring entrees like Chicken Tikka Masala and Carnitas Tacos. All of its meals are cooked to order in the company’s kitchen using 100 percent gluten, soy and dairy-free ingredients. Furthermore, its proteins are all grass-fed, free-range or sustainably-caught.

Since launching in October 2015, Mealmade seen 15 to 20 percent growth month-over-month. Now it’s in the process of launching an app, expanding delivery service to the weekends and opening a brick-and-mortar retail space for pick-up and counter service.

I spoke with founder Jeff Nobbs to learn more about why Mealmade is launching a brick-and-mortar space, how he’s able to offer meals at an affordable price-point and what kinds of employees make a great fit.

Mealmade is hiring a full-stack marketer here and spread the word!
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Sari Kamin:  What’s keeping your team busy right now?

Jeff Nobbs: Mealmade is moving into a new restaurant space in March, with a brick and mortar “traditional” retail presence. Customers can order delivery through our website (or soon-to-launch app) or walk-in and pickup their order, or even order at the front counter and dine in! Between the new space and developing our mobile app, we’ve been busy!

SK: What are your growth goals for the next 12-24 months, and how do you plan to achieve those goals?

JN: We’ve grown 15-20 percent per month since launching and plan to continue that growth. Almost all of our growth to date as been through word of mouth. With the addition to scalable online advertising, a mobile app, weekend deliveries (we currently only open on weekdays), and a brick-and-mortar presence, we plan to accelerate our growth.

SK: What is the motivation for opening a brick and mortar space? How does this set you apart from other food delivery services?

JN: Nothing about our mission revolves around delivery, but it’s our current strategy. Our mission is about getting healthier better food into the hands of more people so delivery was a really easy to way to start. Brick and mortar is the next step along with catering and we’re getting ready to launch both. We’ve had a lot of customers let us know that they don’t order lunch from us because their office provides catering, and we want to be there for them.

SK: What does your company culture look like?

JN: We think company culture is the result of the people we hire. We look for ambitious, intelligent people who are passionate about healthy eating and living, and embrace technology. As a result of building around these premises, our culture is one that values open communication, transparency, respect and hard work.

SK: How are you preserving your company culture as you scale up?

JN: By defining our values, and constantly repeating them:

1. We always ask, “What would delight the customer?”
2. We exceed expectations.
3. Everything we do is as good as our food.
4. We treat each other with respect, openness, honesty, and aren’t afraid to give feedback.
5. We solve problems.

SK: What do you know now that you wish you would have known when you started scaling your company? What are the biggest challenges and lessons learned as you’ve grown your company?

JN: Operations are everything in this business. We should have started documenting everything we do as a company, earlier. Our processes drive our business. When one process doesn’t happen or happens incorrectly, it leads to a domino effect of other things going wrong. Having so many moving parts is challenging, but also allows us to do a lot with a little when processes are well defined.

SK: Buying free-range, sustainably sourced, and grass-fed ingredients can be cost-prohibitive. How do you manage to keep your price point so low?

JN: If our food were served in a dine-in restaurant it would be 2 to 3 times the price. We work really hard with distributors and we didn’t need to pay for an expensive retail location to begin with. We also don’t have a full-time wait staff that we are paying salaries for so we’re able to decrease the price for customers. But the main difference is our average order value. From the beginning, we charged $5 for delivery and that, coupled with the quality of our food, incentivizes people to order more. Our average order is almost $40. Our food costs are a little higher but we make up for that with almost everything else.

SK: What will someone who works for you be able to add to their resume?

JN:  It will invariably start with “I wear a lot of hats…”

SK: What kind of training do you offer for new employees who may be switching from other industries or who are just out of school?

JN: We detail out every process that drives our company. These processes are documented and act as the foundation for learning the ins and outs of working at Mealmade. Besides these processes, a week of training and the new employee is ready to start contributing!

SK: What’s your favorite interview question?

JN: What’s your most controversial belief?

SK: What positions are you hiring for?

JN: We are looking for a full-stack marketer to lead all aspects of marketing and accelerate our growth.

SK: Your menu offerings change daily. What is your menu planning process like?

JN: Every day we rotate in between 2-5 new items and rotate out old items so over the course of a week and a half our menu completely changes. Our chef and I look at what’s in season and we listen to what customers say they like. We are doing paleo in a way that’s not boring. It’s never going to be just chicken breast and steamed vegetables. We’ll do a bunch of R&D around things that sound good to us, like French toast. It keeps things really interesting and fun.

SK: Why do you think it’s exciting to be working in food right now?

JN: You are what you eat. We’re defining what people are and how they feel. We’re in the midst of a food revolution and we want to play a role in how the future of food is defined.

SK: Is there anything else you want us to know about MealMade that we haven’t covered?

JN: Everyone on our team is obsessed with healthy food and really cares deeply about sustainability. The fact that we all care so much about the mission of the company is what has allowed us to grow very quickly. We are our customers so we can think about what we want to provide as a company and that’s generally what our customers want too.

Check out more exciting food tech, design, management, operations, development and food science positions on our new job board  Food+Tech Jobs.

The post Paleo Meal Delivery Service Mealmade Launches Brick-and-Mortar Outpost appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

One-size-fit-all diets don’t work, which is why SNPitty is looking crack the personalized nutrition code. Designed to help people loose weight and keep it off,  the company sequences your DNA to develop a program that works best with your metabolism, delivers personalized, nutritionist-developed shakes and bars to your door and provides ongoing app-based, psychologist-designed coaching to help you overcome your cravings. The product is currently in Beta.

As we get ready for FoodBytes! San Francisco, the premiere food startup pitch competition taking place in San Francisco on March 16,  we are spoke with SNPitty President Landon Steele, who will be pitching at the event. Our interview is below and has been edited slightly for clarity.

Want to see SNPitty and 19 other game-changing food and ag startups pitch? Snag your ticket to FoodBytes! SF on Thursday, March 16 for 20% off with the code FTC HERE!

_________________

Danielle Gould: What problem does your company solve?

Landon Steele: We solve the problems of weight-loss and weight maintenance. Obesity is an increasing pandemic and current approaches are not working. We take an ultra-personalized approach combining genetics, psychological profiling (food personality), personalized meal replacement, and neuroscientist developed coaching.

DG: Why is your team qualified to solve those problems?

LS: The founders have a personal passion for the product, having both had our own weight-loss and associated health journeys. We want to use science to make it easier for others. We are biotech and health-care veterans with experience building companies from the ground up. Tony has a PhD in molecular genetics, and Landon has a Master’s in biochemical engineering. Tony was most recently VP of Business Development at Solazyme (now TerraVia), and Landon was COO and founder at a healthcare company that recently had a successful exit.

Our scientific advisory board are luminaries in their fields. We have connected the most progressive thinkers in this area to create a revolutionary solution to one of the world’s most intractable problems – how to lose weight and keep it off. Our business advisory board includes PR and marketing, software engineering, product design and business strategy.

DG:  Who are your target customers?

LS: Our target customers are older (35+), mass affluent and interested in weight loss. Traditional weight loss companies target women more than men, but we believe that SNPitty’s high tech approach will appeal to both. We have directly addressable market of over $3 billion just in the US.

DG: How does each component of your service work (i.e. DNA test, your algorithms, meals and coaching)?

LS: 1. “Test You”: We test the following to develop a unique report on the diet that will work best for your metabolism.

• Your genetic profile is assessed using an in-home saliva kit (similar to 23AndMe and Ancestry.com)
• Your food personality is assessed using online structured psychologist designed questionnaires
• Your baseline weight and activity are assessed using simple questionnaires and (eventually) via smart phone and wearable integration
• Your life-style preferences (e.g. vegetarian, like to cook) are measured via a simple questionnaire.

2.  “Feed You”: We provide personalized prepackaged breakfast and lunch meal replacements (shakes and bars). We also provide personalized recipes from a curated database of 1.5M recipes (via partner).

3. “Support You”: We offer you personalized, psychologist-designed, app-based coaching (via a partner with
experience in app based health-care compliance). You also have access to a personalized gamified way to reduce unhealthy food cravings (currently subject of a patent application) and community support.

DG: What research do you use to inform nutritional recommendations?

LS:  We use a combination of primary peer reviewed academic literature and proprietary research from our scientific advisory board as the basis for our recommendations. For example, in peer reviewed studies, subjects on a gene appropriate diet have had 220% more fat loss than those on a gene inappropriate diet. App-based, gamified training has been shown to reduce cravings for unhealthy foods; brain imaging studies showed a change in reward centers, and the subjects lost more weight than controls! SNPitty will bring this cutting edge research out of the lab and to consumers. This is the subject of a patent filing.

DG: What specific genes do you evaluate to personalize recommendations?

LS: Many of the genes we use to personalize weight-loss recommendations are derived from primary research and prospective clinical trials in the genetics of weight-loss. However, the way in which we combine these is proprietary and the subject of patent filings, so we cannot disclose them at this point.

DG: Have you conducted clinical trials for SNPitty? If so, what were the results and have you published the results in a peer-reviewed journal? If not, do you have any plans to offer a clinical trial?

LS: Members of our scientific advisory board have carried out clinical trials on the nutrigenetics of and psychology of weight-loss. We are leveraging these and other proprietary studies to create the SNPitty platform. We have filed IP and plan to carry out clinical trials using customer volunteers.

DG: Let’s talk food. Who designs your meals? Where is the food produced? How is it delivered?

LS: We are working with a number of food partners to develop delicious personalized meal replacements that match our gene appropriate nutrient profiles. For example, one such partner is Step One Foods, the leading therapeutic food brand in the US. We are co- developing delicious, convenient, personalized meal replacements bars.

DG: What challenges are you facing with launching SNPitty, and how are you overcoming them? Do you anticipate any regulatory hurdles?

LS: Our biggest challenge at this point is raising the capital to turn our vision into a huge commercial reality. We are have had tremendous response from every consumer we have talked to both informally and as part of focus groups. Now it is time to find the right early investors who understand our big vision, and who can provide the funds and mentoring to launch the product into the stratosphere. We have regulatory experience (novel food ingredients, skin care and healthcare) and we don’t anticipate undue regulatory hurdles

DG: What differentiates SNPitty from other personalized nutrition startups like Habit and DayTwo?

LS: While SNPitty’s approach is unique and differentiated, we believe that personalized nutrition is a whole new industry with explosive growth potential, and there is room for many players Specifically, neither Habit nor DayTwo focus on weight-loss and weight maintenance. Neither incorporates psychology as part of their personalization and neither has packaged meal replacements as part of their business model (Habit is planning fresh meal delivery, similar to Munchery).

DG: Why are you participating in FoodBytes! San Francisco?

LS: We were excited to find FoodBytes since they and their audience are in our sweet-spot at the intersection of delicious food and science, just like SNPitty. We know that innovative food companies are looking for cutting edge approaches to help people take control of their weight and their wellness. FoodBytes will be the catalyst for a healthier future for SNPitty’s customers!

Learn more about FoodBytes! and the companies pitching here, and snag your ticket for $35 off with the code FTC here. 

The post SNPitty Will Use Your DNA to Create a Personalized Nutrition Weight Loss Plan appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Dishes that promote more sustainable food systems: (clockwise from upper left) Bone marrow & parsley salad, St. John; beet infused asian carp, Miya’s; carrot tartare, Eleven Madison Park; rotation risotto, Blue Hill.

In the recent history of fine dining, there have been a handful of notable dishes that transcend the table and make a statement about how our food system should operate. To name a few:

• Nose-to-Tail, Circa 1994: Chef Fergus Henderson, of St. John in London, opens his restaurant and becomes a vocal proponent of nose-to-tail eating. He turns bone marrow into a luxury dish and delights farmers and butchers everywhere by getting the public to celebrate more parts of the animal, reducing food waste and bringing additional income to those who make meat.
• Invasavorism, c.2010: Chef Bun Lai, of Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Connecticut, starts serving invasive species — like Lionfish, Asian Carp, and Knotweed — on his menu as a way to use aquatic bycatch and to strengthen the local food system.
• Plant “Proteins”, c.2012: Chef Daniel Humm, of Eleven Madison Park in New York City, mesmerizes diners with a beef-tartare-inspired dish entirely made from carrots. The dish is served tableside with your server grinding whole carrots through a meat grinder.
• Rotational Dining, c.2013: Chef Dan Barber, of Blue Hill in New York, creates his seminal, “Rotation Risotto” dish. A mix of “soil-supporting grains and legumes, cooked and presented in the manner of a classic risotto,” it’s a delicious plate that reinforces rotational agriculture that’s better for the soil.

All of these chefs have used their platforms as restaurateurs and influencers to promote mindful deliciousness. For those lucky enough to have been to these restaurants, the ability to dine on something so pleasurable while supporting sustainability feels like you’re getting away with something.

But we (eaters, cooks, farmers, food makers, food media, etc.) can’t let the kind of food you see at those restaurants start and end there. For every cupcake, avocado toast or cronut that catches on like wildfire, we need more dishes that feature offal, bycatch, plant based foods and rotation crops to also dominate menus everywhere.

The above examples are dishes that only a tiny fraction of the world can experience. In their current form, they may never scale beyond the small group they were designed for. It’s great that these chefs have a media platform to talk about the ideas underlying these dishes, but the food system by-and-large doesn’t feed people like this. Outside of major metro areas there are many who have never heard of these chefs and their ideas.

How might we democratize the most high-minded food ideals practiced in Michelin starred kitchens so that everyone can have them? I’m not talking about lobes of foie gras topped with quenelles of caviar, but dishes like Rotation Risotto, which promotes rotational agriculture and biodiversity.

How do we get someone like General Mills to put Rotation Risotto in every Wal-Mart? How do we get Tyson to make offal a billion dollar consumer product? How do we get Red Lobster to serve bycatch? How do we get McDonald’s to put a veggie burger on the menu in America?

We at the Future Market explored this question with our Crop Crisp prototype product. With Crop Crisps, a mass-market cracker was made in four flavors where each flavor was based on a crop in a four-crop wheat rotation.

Crop Crisps are the CPG version of the Rotation Risotto, in cracker form. While our limited edition run was handmade in Brooklyn, the design of the box suggests a mass produced product similar to what you see in a Wal-Mart or Costco. We did this intentionally because we wanted to show what it would look like when progressive ideas make it into the mainstream, like how a Gucci sweater can eventually trickle down to the Gap.

Crop Crisps: a Future Market concept product. Each cracker flavor is based on a different crop from the same four-crop rotational planting.

Great new dishes with the power to shift the food system will always emerge from places like Blue Hill and Eleven Madison Park. But to truly shift the food system we have to move these ideas to the masses.

Everyday eaters can help these dishes make the jump into the mainstream. How? Next time you’re at a butcher shop, ask for an “off” cut of meat. Any butcher worth their salt will eagerly talk you through how to prepare it. Next time you’re eating something with a great story like Rotation Risotto, share the story on your social networks, not just a FOMO-inducing beauty shot.

It may sound like a series of small actions, but remember that the cupcake, avocado toast and cronut all caught on after a steadily growing stream of social posts. These trends tend to go viral once an editor at Food & Wine decides to write about why their Instagram feed is covered in avocado toast, but it all starts with the people making noise.

We as eaters have the power to decide what the next food trends are. Isn’t it time we start promoting more trends that can impact the food system?

This is also posted at The Future Market.

The post Good Food, Trickling Down appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

“In a startling development, almost unheard of outside a recession, food prices have fallen for nine straight months in the U.S. It’s the longest streak of food deflation since 1960,” reports Bloomberg.

Food prices have never been lower, but food prices are not the same as food costs.

These low prices — not just today, but for the past few decades — obfuscate the true cost of food in terms of the environmental and health impacts they make on our society over time. Negative externalities like fossil fuel consumption, air and water pollution, soil degradation, and poor labor practices are all food costs that aren’t reflected in the price tag.

Without a way to bring the impact of these abstractly large negative externalities down to the human scale, it’s a struggle to viscerally connect the actions of an everyday grocery shopper to these big systems issues.

Take a box of corn cereal for instance: The corn was likely grown in a monoculture sprayed with pesticides that can seep into groundwater and have harmful implications for farmworkers. Using petroleum-based fertilizers to increase yield just bolsters our appetite for fossil fuels. The price of that corn is even cheaper when you consider the heavy government subsidies to promote corn production.

The prices are low because this way of farming results in significant yields. But at what broader cost to the ecosystem and society does this maniacal focus on yield create? What’s the aggregate cost of global warming caused by fossil fuel-based transport and production methods? What’s the aggregate cost of water purification needed to remediate the effects of pesticide ridden runoff? What’s the aggregate cost on healthcare from making junk food insanely cheaper than real food?

How might we better represent the impact of buying a particular food product on the food system?

What if we could represent this on the label so everyday consumers could easily understand the cost of their food beyond what the cash they shell out at the checkout? Might it look like this …

The True Cost of a box of Corn Cereal. How might we account for the environmental impacts of monoculture food products?

Or like this…

We humans are hard-wired to overemphasize short term effects over long term ones. When we smoke, we don’t think about the lung cancer, we think about the relaxation. When we sit on the couch, we think about the tv show, not the weight gain.

Food is no different. We touch food so frequently that it’s sometimes hard to stop and think about these hard issues in each purchase. Our brains would shut down if we had to think about the full impact of the supply chain on a box of cereal each week at the supermarket.

While people are becoming more mindful about the bigger effects of the food they buy, there’s a lot of room to improve on how we boil down the true systems impact of a food to the individual product.

In 1990, the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act mandated Nutrition Facts labeling, changing the game forever for how we think about buying food. Food and health felt more connected as a result of the nutrition facts label. Looking toward the future, as public health and the environment are increasingly being linked to our food choices, isn’t it time we start to rethink how to represent food’s real impact on our world on the label and the price tag?

This post originally appeared on The Future Market.

Receipt & Nutrition label stats based on the following:

ACME INDUSTRIES CORN CEREAL

Acme Industries Corn Cereal — $5.29
Monoculture Nitrogen Loss Fee (per 1 ton soil)* — $0.63
Corn Subsidy Refund (25% COGS)** — $0.13
Pesticide Hazard Surcharge (Per US Citizen / 1,000)*** — $0.66
GMO Corn License Fee # 1ZX78211A (Flat Fee) — $2.25
TOTAL — $8.96

*Monoculture Nitrogen Loss: USDA-NRCS studies estimated a loss of 1 kilogram (2.32 pounds) of nitrogen and .45 kilograms (1 pound) of phosphorus for each ton of soil eroded, costing farmers US$.63 and US$.64, respectively, in 2012. (FoodTank – Page 24 )

**About $13.9 billion of net farm income this year will be federal payments, or about 25 percent of total profit estimated at $54.8 billion, according to estimates by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (Farmers Get Biggest Subsidy Check in Decade as Prices Drop — Bloomberg)

***Endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in pesticides are estimated to cost the European Union €157 billion (US$209 billion) in actual health costs and lost earnings per year, due to their linkages to cancer, birth defects, infertility, and learning disabilities. (FoodTank – Page 11 )

COLA NUTRITION LABEL

Serving Size: 1 Can

Amount per Serving*
Calories — 140
Total Fat — 0g — 0%
Sodium — 45mg — 2%
Total Carb — 39g — 13%
Sugars — 39g
Protein — 0g

Annual Weight Gain Amount** — 0.25 lb
Diabetes Type II Risk Increase*** — 26%
Heart Attack Risk Factor Increase**** — 20%
Gout Risk Factor Increase***** — 75%

*Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

** “A 20-year study on 120,000 men and women found that people who increased their sugary drink consumption by one 12-ounce serving per day gained more weight over time — on average, an extra pound every 4 years — than people who did not change their intake.” (Sugary Drinks and Obesity Fact Sheet | The Nutrition Source | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

*** “People who consume sugary drinks regularly — 1 to 2 cans a day or more — have a 26% greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes than people who rarely have such drinks.” (Sugary Drinks and Obesity Fact Sheet | The Nutrition Source | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

**** “A study that followed 40,000 men for two decades found that those who averaged one can of a sugary beverage per day had a 20% higher risk of having a heart attack or dying from a heart attack than men who rarely consumed sugary drinks. A related study in women found a similar sugary beverage–heart disease link.”(Sugary Drinks and Obesity Fact Sheet | The Nutrition Source | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

***** “A 22-year study of 80,000 women found that those who consumed a can a day of sugary drink had a 75% higher risk of gout than women who rarely had such drinks. Researchers found a similarly-elevated risk in men.”(Sugary Drinks and Obesity Fact Sheet | The Nutrition Source | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

The post What if Labels Showed the True Cost of Food? appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Guest post by Civil Eats. The opinions expressed are not necessarily the opinions of Food+Tech Connect. 

Like many of you, we feel heartbroken in the wake of this election, and our ideals as a country are being challenged. However, a new resolve has also emerged, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of this contentious campaign cycle. We see those around us pivoting and making personal commitments to new kinds of work to improve the lives of all Americans.

Journalism will play an important role over next four years and we believe that now more than ever we need to tell the stories of those who have been marginalized in our society, and those who are working to make change. We need to break down complex policy changes and shine a light on the people and elements of the natural world they impact the most. And with Trump’s transition team pledging to actively “fighting the so-called good food movement and undoing Obama-era agricultural and environmental policies,” now is the time to remember why this work matters.

When we founded Civil Eats in 2009, our idea was to support a growing community of people who were concerned about our food system. We wanted to profile people changing the food system from the ground up as well as covering Washington and the policy that has impacted what we eat.

We focused on individuals making change in their everyday lives because we believed that change truly happens on the ground. From sustainable agricultural practices, food justice, and nutrition, to state and federal policy, Civil Eats has reported on the most important food and agriculture stories of our time. And the site has become a trusted news source producing meaningful, nuanced content, which is overlooked in our current media landscape. It’s for these reasons that we were awarded the James Beard Foundation’s Publication of the Year in 2014.

Since then, Civil Eats has continued to break important food policy news and spark positive change. The site was the first to break the news that FDA will start testing for glyphosate in food. And it was the first national news site to report on the Navajo Nation’s new junk food tax (with media partner Mother Jones) and helped catalyze a conversation about dietitians rallying against Kraft’s new seal on its Singles.

The team has reported extensively on pesticide exposure and worker health, the move toward antibiotic-free meant and cage-free eggs, the impact of additives in food such as emulsifiers on human health, the fight for fair wages for food workers, and on the value of biodiversity on farms.

And unique in the food media space, Civil Eats has had an ongoing mission to cover issues of diversity and food justice in our reporting, and it has actively sought out reporters and commentators and leaders of color. We believe these very issues are at the very heart of the divide in our country today, and we will continue to create a platform for much-needed dialogue and discussion on race and food.

Like America, Civil Eats is now at a crossroads. As an independent media outlet, we’ve never taken outside funding or advertising. Instead, we rely on support from foundations and our readers, and raising money for good reporting is getting harder every day. Our current president-elect ran a campaign that consistently maligned the media, and some say social media and the misinformation spread there won him the presidency. Some smart people fear that good journalism is not long for this world.

We know that’s not true. We need good journalism now more than ever as many of the policies that have improved the food system over the past eight years will likely be challenged in new ways. We want to be there to hold this administration accountable, but we need your support in order to do that. Today, Americans need to be more creative than ever before when it comes building a better country for all, and the food movement holds so many shining examples. We hope that Civil Eats can continue to cover these and other important stories.

Please consider attending our first, in-person benefit in San Francisco on Tuesday, November 29, donating, and signing up for an annual subscription if you have not yet done so. We need your support now more than ever.

Together, we hope to continue to speak truth to power and fight for a better food system for all.

The post What Happens Next in the Food Movement is Why Civil Eats Matters appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Last month, The Future Market kicked off our Future of Food Dinner Series to bring the themes shaping the future our food system to life. The Future of Protein was the first theme in the series, held at the Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn on June 28. Part food conference, part dinner, part art installation, the Future of Food dinner series showcases the biggest ideas impacting our food system in an immersive, delicious dining experience. The goal for this dinner series is to bring the food innovations of tomorrow to life today through thought-provoking, memorable dining experiences.

Using Design & Experience To Explore The Future of Protein

From the massive impact conventional animal farming has on our ecosystem to the effects excessive meat consumption has on our health, there are few areas of food that touch our economy, environment and culture as deeply as protein. It’s clear that our current approach to protein production and consumption is unsustainable. A lot of the conversations around the future of protein are just that – conversations, research reports and articles. The Future of Protein dinner was all about highlighting the work of innovators rethinking protein in a way that that’s better for people, planet, and profit.

To imagine where our food system might be headed, it’s important to show where we’ve been. In seven courses, the Future Market team showcased the past, present and future innovations that have and will shape protein’s role in our food system. Each course represented the state of protein from a different time era starting in the post-industrial 1850s and ending in the year 2065.

The dinner was an edible exploration of everything from the impact of the green revolution to the role biodiversity, insects and cellular agriculture will play in feeding 9 billion people. We created a visceral experience that enabled our diners – Fortune 500 executives, innovators and eaters –  to touch, taste and experience what the future of protein might look like.

This kind of immersive storytelling is key to designing a better future for food, because it brings challenges and innovations of a global scale down to the human scale. We want to show people how massive shifts in the food system translate to an experience on their plate.

In the following post I will walk you course-by-course through the dinner. Protein is just the start of the Future of Food dinner series, so sign up to get notified about future dinners and workshops.

Brian Halweil, Editor-in-chief of Edible Brooklyn/Manhattan (center)

The Future of Protein: Course-by-Course

• Course 1: The Industrial Revolution – The Year 1850
• Course 2: The Green Revolution – The Year 1950
• Course 3: Today, In Transition – The Year 2020
• Course 4: Eating With Ecosystems – The Year 2030
• Interstitial Discussion #1: “You Are What You Eat Eats”
• Course 5: Insects Are the New Normal – The Year 2040
• Interstitial Discussion #2: Cellular Agriculture
• Course 6: Protein for 9 Billion – The Year 2065

You can also visit the Future Market for a full photo gallery.

The Future Market would also like to thank our gracious sponsors: Food+Tech Connect, Museum of Food and Drink, The Algae Factory, Bitwater Farms, Bugsolutely, Entomo Farms, Exo, Fleishers Craft Butchery, Highlands Dinner Club, The Honest Bison, One Hop Kitchen, Kobrand Wines (Bodega Chacra & Sequoia Grove Winery), Brooklyn Brewery, Mezcal Buenbicho, and New York Distilling Company.

Course 1: The Industrial Revolution – The Year 1850

“Wild Protein”
When protein was organic, non-GMO and grass-fed by default

• Dish: Bison, Shallot, Wild Greens, Mustard Seed
• Cocktail: Brandy Punch c. 1852 by Prof. Jerry Thomas
• Featured Conversation: Sean Lenihan, The Honest Bison

Diners were transported to the 1850s through the first 20′ video animation of the evening.

We start in a place where protein ran wild and free and the idea of mass-scale farming and processed foods was hard to imagine. Paradoxically, many of the aspirations from our current-day food movement aim to shift pieces of our food system back to this simpler time. Sourcing food from small, local farms was the norm and hunting wild animals like bison was a big part of our protein consumption.

A Conversation with Sean Lenihan, CEO of The Honest Bison

Sean Lenihan, founder and CEO of the Honest Bison, shared his vision for bringing bison back to our plates as a healthy, sustainable source of protein. Like their 1850s brethren, Lenihan’s bison are all grass-fed and humanely raised with “no grains. no hormones. no feedlots. no matter what.”  The first course featured tongue and skirt from the Honest Bison, accompanied by pickled shallots, wild greens and mustard seed.

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Course 2: The Green Revolution – The Year 1950

“Industrial Protein”
The rise of the industrial food system

• Dish: Grass-fed Salisbury Steak, Mixed Vegetables and Potato, served in a Future Market TV Dinner box.
• Cocktail: The Swimmer c.1964; Vodka, Beef Bouillon, Tomato
• Featured Conversation: Peter Kim, Museum of Food and Drink

Welcome to the 1950s Green Revolution. We’ll be dining in front of the TV now.

After World War II, the American agricultural system was transformed by the use of industrial inputs such as fertilizer. This shift, combined with government subsidies for calorie-dense crops like corn, wheat and soy, contributed to the creation of a farming system that produces large quantities of inexpensive calories. These cheap ingredients, in turn, constituted the basis for the production of a variety of highly processed foods, profoundly influencing what food is produced and consumed.

A Conversation with Peter Kim, Executive Director of the Museum of Food and Drink.

Peter Kim, Executive Director of the Museum of Food and Drink, spoke to us about those nascent days of the industrialized food industry. The TV Dinner is one of the most powerful symbols of how our industrial food impacted the way we ate. Food no longer needed to be made from scratch, which meant liberation from the kitchen for legions of homemakers in America. Kim noted that products like TV Dinners facilitated the industrial farming system where animals (and plants) were grown for yield and consistency. The protein system began to shift toward using concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), antibiotics, and other methods to efficiently produce food as much as possible with less regard for animal welfare or environmental impact.

To illustrate the industrialization of our protein, we designed handmade TV dinner boxes featuring grass-fed, dry-aged salisbury steak from Fleisher’s, a medley of farmers markets vegetables and mashed potatoes. Though the TV dinners of 1950 did not include grass-fed beef (a much more sustainable, healthful way to raise beef), we wanted to simulate one of the signature food rituals of the time while adhering to more progressive ideals about how our food is made. This dish demonstrates our hope that well-raised meat and vegetables can one day be conveniently accessible to everyone.

Diners could scan the entire face of the box to learn more about the impact of the Green Revolution, using an augmented reality experience we built in the AR tool, Layar.

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Course 3: Today, In Transition – The Year 2020

“Sustainable Hedonism”
Shifting toward a more plant-based plate

• Dish: 1 oz of Dry Aged, Grass-fed Ribeye + 58 oz of Energy Equivalent Vegetables.
• Wine: Sequoia Grove Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2013 & Bodega Chacra Barda 2013
• Featured Conversation: Danielle Gould, Food+Tech Connect

Today, In Transition: the scenery for our current day era, where we strive toward a more plant-based diet.

While most of us love our animal protein more than ever, we have become clear that we cannot continue to produce and consume it in the quantities we were raised to expect. The energy requirements and ecological consequences of mass production of animal protein are clearly unsustainable, especially as we look towards 9 billion meat-hungry humans by mid-century.

A Conversation with Danielle Gould, Founder of Food+Tech Connect.

Danielle Gould, founder of Food+Tech Connect, touched on $100s of millions of investment money that’s gone into the plant-based protein space with companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. While animal protein isn’t going away overnight – if ever – it’s clear that there is a strong movement toward a more plant-forward diet, where meat is still present, but the idea that meat is always center of plate is no longer the cultural default.

A 1oz slice of grass-fed, dry-aged ribeye. This was paired with a 58oz family style serving of vegetables, which requires approximately the same amount of gasoline equivalent energy to produce.

For this dish, we highlight the disparity in resources required to produce 1oz of beef versus 1oz of vegetable. Diners were served a 1oz piece of grass-fed, dry-aged ribeye alongside a 58oz family style serving of rice, eggplant, broccoli, and cauliflower that required approximately the same amount of gasoline equivalent energy to produce.

This course is all about the tensions and shifts in how we produce food today. The wine pairing showcases two different approaches to winemaking: Biodynamic (Barda) vs Traditional (Sequoia Grove).

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Course 4: Eating With Ecosystems – The Year 2030

“The Biodiverse Kitchen”
Bringing biodiversity back into our kitchens and diets

• Dish: 12 Diverse Proteins + Three Sisters Biodiverse Polenta
• Beer: An assortment of ten different Brooklyn Brewery Beers
• Featured Conversation: Bryan Mayer, Head of Butcher Education, Fleishers Craft Butchery

The Biodiverse Kitchen: the future of food is about producing and consuming food in a way that supports a more diverse ecosystem.

Seventy five percent of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants & 5 animal species. We live in a world centered on monocultures. Food and dietary trends reinforce the behavior of consuming one thing at a massive scale, instead of a more balanced diet that includes consuming smaller amounts of a wider range of foods. As we are discovering, this approach has created all sorts of problems related to artificial fertilizer use, pesticide use and disease prone-crops. Biodiverse agricultural systems bear the promise of creating more resilient and sustainable crops.

A Conversation with Bryan Mayer, Head of Butcher Education, Fleishers Craft Butchery.

Bryan Mayer, Head of Butcher Education at Fleishers Craft Butchery, joined us to share his thoughts on how the future of food is not one thing, it’s about growing and eating a little of everything. As a butcher, Bryan sees first-hand how certain celebrated cuts of meat (ribeyes, chops, etc.) are always in highest demand. But he implores us to expand our horizons and not only eat more less-demanded meat cuts like offal, but to eat a much wider range of food overall. By doing this, we can send a message to food producers that biodiversity and more sustainable systems are what the world demands.

For the year 2030 dish, we wanted to underscore how important it will be to eat smaller amounts of a wider range of proteins in the future. Instead of a larger portion of one kind of protein, diners were served small portions of 12 different proteins: beef oxtail, chicken thigh, bison brisket, chicken mousse, bluefish, smoked mussel, beef heart, beef cheek, bison filet, bison ribeye, pork shoulder and yak london broil.

Three Sisters Biodiverse Polenta was the accompaniment, which is made from corn, beans, and squash. Corn, beans, and squash, when planted together as companion crops, grow symbiotically and take care of each other and the soil much better when planted in sync vs separately. Three Sisters is a Future Market Concept Product illustrating a vision of what polyculture might look like in mass-consumer products.

A little of everything. Diners selected from a slate of 10 different beers from Brooklyn Brewery.

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Interstitial Discussion

“You Are What You Eat, Eats”
Evolving the state of animal feed

• Dish: Two Deviled Eggs, cricket-fed chicken egg vs. conventional chicken egg
• Featured Conversation: Sean McDonald, CEO of Bitwater Farms

A Conversation with Sean McDonald, CEO of Bitwater Farms.

Bitwater Farms works with poultry farmers to install modular cricket farms onsite, which are harvested as feed for poultry. Crickets eat a vegetable based diet and are fed to chickens. Extra crickets are bought back and sold into the growing edible insect supply chain.

During our interview with Sean McDonald of Bitwater Farms, dinner guests received a side-by-side comparison of two deviled eggs. One from a Bitwater Farms chicken farm, fed by crickets, and topped with crickets. And the other egg comes from a conventional farm without Bitwater Farms – topped with roasted ground soybeans to represent standard chicken feed.

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Course 5: Insects Are the New Normal – The Year 2040

“Family Meal of the Future”
Eating insects is the new normal

• Dish: Cricket Rotini, Mealworm Bolognese, Insect Rolls, Jackfruit Sausage
• Cocktail: Oaxacan Spaghetti Western; Mezcal Negroni feat. Mezcal Buenbicho
• Featured Conversation: Lee Cadesky, Co-Founder, One Hop Kitchen

A Conversation with Lee Cadesky, Co-Founder, One Hop Kitchen.

The vast majority of humanity eats insects regularly. And it turns out that insects are not only protein-rich, their cultivation also requires dramatically less energy and resource and produces far less pollution than the farming of livestock.

Lee Cadesky, Co-Founder of One Hop Kitchen, “the world’s first, best, and only insect bolognese sauce,” spoke to the audience about how his cricket & mealworm based sauces can save approximately 1,900 liters of water per jar compared to beef based sauces, and supply the same amount of protein with much less saturated fat and cholesterol.

Despite these benefits, some cultures in the world still hang on to a certain level of stigma when it comes to eating insects. For this reason, we created a dish rooted in comfort and familiarity: rotini with bolognese sauce, meatballs, and bread.

The twist: the rotini is made from cricket flour (by Bugsolutely), the bolognese is made with mealworms (by One Hop Kitchen), the meatballs made from jackfruit and shiitake mushrooms, and the bread was made from mealworm flour (by Entomo Farms & Exo). By the year 2040 or earlier, we envision a world where eating insects is comfortably mainstream.

The future of protein includes insects, brought to you by Bugsolutely, Exo, One Hop Kitchen, and Entomo Farms.

Insect course paired with Mezcal by Mezcal Buenbicho.

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Interstitial Discussion

Cellular Agriculture: Culturing Proteins

• Featured Conversation: Kevin Yuen, Modern Meadow

A Conversation with Kevin Yuen, Modern Meadow.

As we travel further into the future, we focus on the emerging innovation of cellular agriculture, the production of agricultural products from cell cultures. Modern Meadow, one such company at the forefront of the cellular agricultural movement, produces cultured meat and leather in Brooklyn, NY. Kevin Yuen from Modern Meadow was on hand to share a vision of what cultured protein could bring us in the future: a world where protein is more sustainably produced, animal welfare issues are reduced, food safety improves, and even protein nutrition can be tightly controlled.

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Course 6: Protein for 9 Billion – The Year 2065

“Aquatic Protein”
The protein power of sea plants

• Dish: Spirulina-Chocolate Ice Cream with Aquafaba feat. Algae Factory
• Beverage: Lighter Than Air, Gin Sour feat. NY Distilling Company’s Dorothy Parker

Our dessert showcased the magic of spirulina, one of the most protein dense foods available, with 57g protein per 100g (Beef is approximately 26g protein per 100g. We turned the already delicious chocolate algae bars from the Algae Factory into ice cream, topped with aquafaba (whipped chickpea water).

Crunchy protein for the future: Algae Factory spirulina sprinkles.

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Visit the Future Market for a full photo gallery.

Thank You to the Future Market team & collaborators: Ben Walmer, Neil Redding, Riccardo Accolla, Alrik Suvari, Chris “CJ” Jordan, Leonardo Urbina, Danielle Gould, Nina Meijers, Soomin Baik, Aeh Jay Hollenbeck, Jeffrey dePicciotto, Danny Zlobnsky, Julia Greene, Peter Droste, Nate Debos, Rudy Gould, Jason DeMera, Emily Law, Maaz Shahid, Carson Peterson, Romain Lacombe, Emily Dodd, Emily Dellas.

The post Dining on the Future of Protein appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Does Dig Inn have the answer to the cook shortage plaguing restaurants? Why is Food Network partnering with Instacart to launch a meal kit service? What can you learn from the way Chick-fil-A got its app to number one in the app store? Get answers to these questions and more in our weekly round-up of last weeks top food startup, tech and innovation news.

Want more? Feast your eyes on last week’s newsletter here. Or better yet, never miss the latest food tech and innovation news and trends with our bi-weekly newsletter. We track all the business, tech and investment trends in agriculture, CPG, retail, restaurants, cooking and health, so you don’t have to.

Our newsletter is the absolute easiest way to stay on top of the emerging sector, so sign up for it today. Already signed up? Share the love with your friends and colleagues!

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1. Announcing The 10 Startups Pitching at FoodBytes! San Francisco

We are thrilled to announce the 10 food, agribusiness, beverage and tech startups that will demo at FoodBytes! San Francisco.

2. Seaweed On Your Dinner Plate: The Next Kale Could Be Kelp – NPR

People have foraged wild seaweed off the Eastern Seaboard for centuries. But now a much more active effort to grow seaweed in the U.S. is afoot.

3. Can Dig Inn Create The Skilled Cooks It Lacks? – Edible Manhattan

Faced with a chef shortage, Dig Inn is rethinking the traditional restaurant labor model and training new cooks while providing a clear path for moving up the ladder.

4. Organic Food Company Back to the Roots Extends Series A Funding to $10M – Finsmes

The new funding came from Acre Venture Partners, S2G Ventures and Red Sea Ventures. The startup will use the funds to accelerate product development, scale distribution and continue growing its team.

5. Are Medical Foods the Next Big Trend for Packaged Foods? – FoodDive

Big food companies are making investments in R&D and products that meet medical and nutritional needs for people with certain diseases and conditions, a market that is worth an estimated $15B.

6. Why Is Chick-fil-A’s App Number One in the App Store? – The Atlantic

In three days, the app was downloaded over one million times. The chain promised a free chicken sandwich to people who downloaded the app and it saw huge success by targeting families.

7. The Periodic Table Of Food Tech – CB Insights

CB Insights charts the 100+ active food tech startups that have raised capital since January 2013.

8. Instacart and Food Network Join Forces to Launch Meal-kit Delivery Service – Business Insider

The personal grocery shopper and delivery service will integrate with the Food Network’s digital tools Recipe Box, which lets users plan meals, and Grocery List, which enables users to save shopping lists.

9. Microsoft Is Teaching Your Plants To Talk Back – FastCo.Design

How Project Florence, a sensor-loaded plant capsule that’s connected to a computer, could have incredible implications for the future of farming.

The post Food Network Launches Meal Kits With Instacart, Meet The New Kale, Dig Inn Invests in Its Cooks & More appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.