“Food Leaders are De Facto Climate Leaders”

“Food Leaders are De Facto Climate Leaders”

by | May 6, 2016

carbonfootprintgraphic

Image from Healthcare Without Harm

Healthcare Without Harm published an excellent article last month about the role of hospital foodservice in climate change: Nourishing Patients and the Planet: The Role of Hospital Food Service in Climate Leadership.  Featuring the work of the University of Washington and University of Vermont Medical Centers, it’s an important read that applies to all foodservice operations.

Here’s an excerpt:

Food is the best medicine. It’s why foodservice professionals work tirelessly to ensure their facilities purchase the freshest food to serve patients, staff, and visitors. They have even broadened the scope of “healthy” food, taking into consideration where it comes from, and how it’s grown or raised. They strive to provide the people who eat at their facilities with organic, local and sustainable products. In the work that they’re doing every day to make food healthier, they’re also helping to lead the charge against climate change, the greatest public health threat — -and opportunity — of the 21st century.

When considering what it means to grow and produce sustainable food, climate change may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Yet industrial agriculture is one of the biggest contributors of carbon emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that agriculture and associated land use changes are responsible for 24% of global emissions — greater than emissions from industry and greater than the combined emissions of transportation and buildings.

If food procurement remains entangled in industrial agriculture, this is in direct contradiction to health care’s healing mission. The healthcare sector can use its annual buying power of $12 billion (in the United States alone) to reduce the climate impact from agriculture by purchasing and serving foods that are protective of the climate.

Hundreds of hospitals across the United States are changing their purchasing practices to take into account these critical issues — having completely transformed their food services or starting to take steps along that trajectory.

Serving over three million customers per year combined on opposite coasts, the University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) and the University of Vermont Medical Center (UVM) purchase, produce and serve an enormous amount of food — and as a result have a significant environmental impact. That impact is a positive one thanks to decisive ecologically-informed interventions throughout their food service such as meat and food waste reductions, and local and sustainable food purchasing practices. These two facilities demonstrate how foodservice work can lead to reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — a definitive step towards reducing a facility’s footprint and mitigating climate change.

Read the full article on Medium.

Conversations Across the Supply Chain

Conversations Across the Supply Chain

by | Mar 21, 2016

I’m on the road this month, attending events for institutional foodservice operators, local food suppliers, and a conversation about reducing food waste hosted by Panasonic’s Innovation Lab.

Universities, schools, healthcare facilities and other non-commercial foodservice operations spend $48B on food each year.  This kind of purchasing power creates significant leverage for changing the food system.

Economic leverage is important. But the story we don’t often hear is about another kind of impact, from the chefs, dietitians, procurement specialists and other foodservice workers that affect people’s lives.  Most of us have eaten food prepared by foodservice professionals at different stages in our lives, at school and college, in a hospital, at work, in the military or at an assisted living facility.

I attended two conferences earlier this month that helped me think about the impact of foodservice operators – Menu Directions and the NACUFS Midwest Regional Conference.  These are trade shows, with workshops, keynotes, exhibitors, awards and lots of sponsorship plugs.  Make no mistake – it’s big business, with a wide swathe of influence.

Join Us for these Presentations

 

March 24 — Good Food Festival & Conference

Building Scale into the Local Food Supply Chain

March 30 – April 1 — National Food Hub Conference

As Local Goes Mainstream, What Is Your Food Hub’s Real Value Proposition?

Customer Journey Mapping:  Drill Down on Customer Experience to Increase Sales, Improve Service, and Extend Impact

Institutional food often gets a bad rap, sometimes deservedly so.  But most people choose careers in foodservice because they care about taste, nutrition, health and the quality of the experience they provide for their customers. Here’s some of what they do, every day:

  • Provide the fuel that enables people to learn and their bodies to grow and heal.
  • Teach young people about nutrition and wellness, and build eating habits that can last throughout their lives.
  • Create workplace environments that encourage employee wellness and social interaction that enhances collaboration and productivity.
  • Employ tens of thousands of students in part-time jobs that develop skills and help pay for their education.
  • Provide meals to children who might not have access to any food at home, and work on innovative programs to expand access to free meals.
  • Educate students and employees about farming and cooking through school and community gardens, farm visits, cooking classes and food-related curricula.

The foodservice programs of the 21st Century are simultaneously being pushed to evolve by a new generation of eaters who want better food, and educating eaters who will continue to drive change in the future.

There has been increasing awareness of the crazy reality that we waste one third of the food produced on our planet.  There is a growing number of new initiatives focused on addressing food waste.  Panasonic’s Innovation Lab hosted a discussion about food waste in San Francisco last week, bringing together people who work with hardware, software, hospitality, foodservice and production who are looking at ways to reduce waste through their businesses.  Rather than structuring formal panels or presentations, Panasonic hosted a small dinner and seeded the conversation with questions at each table.  It led to a deeper dive into the topic than the typical side conversations at a conference or formal meeting, putting people together with expertise in different areas to learn from one another and kick around options and ideas for a couple of focused hours.  (I’ll share more about the follow up discussion and Local Orbit’s work to address food waste in a future post.)

This week, I move to discussions with the supply and logistics side of the industry.  I’m moderating a panel about scaling up local food supply chains at the Good Food Festival & Conference in Chicago, with panelists from Amazing Grace Farm, Cherry Capital Foods, Testa, and Mutch Better Foods.

The Local Orbit team heads to Atlanta next week, for the National Food Hub Conference.  I’m thrilled to be moderating a discussion with three food chain powerhouses from across the country: Laura Edwards-Orr of Red Tomato, Diana Endicott of Good Nature Family Farms, and Nicole Mason of Veritable Vegetable.  Our topic: As Local Goes Mainstream, What Is Your Food Hub’s Real Value Proposition?

With Local Orbit’s Product Manager, Kate Barker, Program Manager, Conor Butkus, I will be leading a half-day workshop, Customer Journey Mapping:  Drill Down on Customer Experience to Increase Sales, Improve Service, and Extend Impact.

The complex relationship between food consumption, food production, and physical, environmental and community economic health, is one of the central issues of the 21st Century.

Across the supply chain, I’m encouraged by recent conversations with people who are reinventing the way they operate to address these challenges – from foodservice professionals who influence people every day, to large corporations focused on both employee engagement and new business opportunities, to food producers and logistics providers creating new ways to bring healthy, local and sustainable food to market.

Questions to ask when choosing a CRM or other business software

Questions to ask when choosing a CRM or other business software

by | Mar 11, 2016

Simplicity Quote

There was a thread on the National Food Hub community of practice list this week about Customer Relationship Management tools (CRM’s).  I added a response which can be used when thinking about any new tool, and thought it would helpful to post it here.

At Local Orbit we evaluate a lot of tools.  When we are comparing different services, we come up with a list of questions to consider when deciding what provider to choose.  Here are some things to consider when deciding which CRM to use:

  • Are you looking for something to support sales or ongoing relationship management?
  • How does your team currently work? Do you want the CRM to integrate with your email system, or do you want your team working from within the CRM?
  • What other tools do you use and how do you want the CRM to work with them?
  • What kinds of information do you want to capture? How granular do you want the data? How do you want to be able to search and find information as the quantity of data increases? (Think at least 3 years ahead.)
  • Do you need user permissions, to restrict access to any functions or information to different team members?
  • What’s the financial ROI you expect to see from a CRM? Will it increase sales? Keep your headcount down due to efficiencies? Help you manage and increase outside fundraising or media exposure? Etc.

Once you answer the core business process questions, there’s a list of specifics you can use to assess each CRM.  In addition to cost, these may include:

  • What’s the user experience? Will your team want to use it? Is it easy to set up rules to ensure that you’re capturing all the information you need?
  • How much time does it take to get up and running as an organization – and to train new team members?
  • What processes will you need to change internally? Is it a good time to modify any of your processes? Similarly, how can you set up the CRM to support and enhance your current processes?
  • What integrations does it offer out of the box? Is there a marketplace of supporting services? Can outside developers create add-ons or integrations?

I have worked with with Nutshell, Capsule, Batchbook, Salesforce and a number of other CRM’s. Local Orbit currently uses Pipedrive, which best fits our current and future business needs. All of the services mentioned are worth considering, but I don’t recommend Salesforce for small organizations because of the complexity, the cost of training and onboarding, and the price tag (unless you’re a non-profit).

Tools like Hubspot and Marketo are also powerful – but they are focused on marketing automation, which is probably not relevant to most food hubs. They’re also expensive.

Our highest priority, when we make a decision, is simplicity and thoughtful design. Complicated tools or clunky user experience are very costly over time.

Can Local Food Help the California Drought?

Can Local Food Help the California Drought?

by | Feb 18, 2016

Local Orbit Drought Infographic

The National Drought Mitigation Center reports that even with short-term rainfall this winter, severe drought will continue throughout much of California. How can local food systems help address this? By increasing the supply of these same crops, grown locally.

Many of the crops imported from California can be produced more sustainably throughout North America. We can see from our data that suppliers in the Local Orbit network are already doing this.

Data is one of the most powerful tools in the new food economy. Good data is critical to effective supply chain design and management. And changing conventional supply chains is essential to addressing drought and other environmental crises.

Local Orbit can help buyers identify where crops are being produced, when they’re available, what it will cost – and where there is an opportunity for buyers to work with farmers to increase production.

Small Farm Tech: Food’s Past and Future at Work

by | Oct 29, 2015

from Daniel Matthews’ article on Triple Pundit

It’s easy to think of the small farm as a bastion of The Way Things Used to Be. And it’s comforting. But the reality of small, organic farms is that they are constantly seeking new ways to do more with technology. They’re seeking to increase production, build advanced networks with other farmers, and improve their reach to the consumer.

Post-Production tech
In terms of networking, marketing, and selling, there are a ton of resources for organic farms. One primary example is Local Orbit. This site claims to, “Support the innovative business models and regional diversity that are hallmarks of the New Food Economy.” Here, the internet is the technology. Local Orbit is a network harnessing the internet, allowing farms to sell in multiple marketplaces from one account. It also supports farms with a built-in suite of back-end tools for marketing products, tracking customers, updating and monitoring inventory, and organizing delivery.

Other important apps include Square, the mobile card-payment system, which makes selling at farmer’s markets so much easier. To notify loyal customers about the upcoming market, the farmer can use the FarmFan app. FarmFan automatically texts participating customers an hour before market as a reminder. According to FarmFan, text messages have a, “97% open-rate within 3 minutes of sending,” and are incredibly effective. Once the customer checks in at the market they can receive loyalty rewards.

New economies
The sharing economy and the new food economy, when we get to the root of it, are the same thing. Both represent a modern modification of pre-industrialized work. Both take advantage of evolving tech to facilitate independent transmission of ideas and technologies peer-to-peer. And, both rely on cooperation, a proactive consideration for sustaining local economies and cultures.

Read the full article on Triple Pundit.

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