Fenugreen, the company behind the revolutionary FreshPaper — an inexpensive, compostable, recyclable, organic paper insert that reduces food spoilage — this week announced The Fresh Prize, a $15,000 award to support similarly brilliantly simple solutions.Sponsored by Fenugreen, along with Toyota and the Women in the World Foundation, the Fresh Prize is now accepting nominations for “fresh ideas that are changing your life, your community, your world.” The site insists there are no requirements or limits and lists no other criteria for qualification.
WASTE NOT -
Waste-to-energy is a trend we’re happy to see growing like wildfire, with new initiatives seeming to pop up weekly that turn waste generated by everything from food and alcohol to heat, humans and
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE -
Buying organic tomatoes may not be a big deal. They taste better and they’re better for both your health and the planet; enough reasons to justify paying a price premium. No wonder organic food is leading the growth of sustainable consumption.But it isn’t always that easy to make the more sustainable lifestyle choice. You may have found yourself feeling bad for using your car instead of public transportation. While staring at an organic cotton T-shirt, you may have wondered if you should buy it or go for the cheaper standard cotton version a couple racks away. It's often an uncomfortable struggle between collective and private benefits: the planet versus your wallet.
Notoriously hated by children, Brussels sprouts will be doing something a little more exciting this year than lining the edges of plates on Christmas day.A team of scientists and engineers from The Big Bang UK Young Scientists & Engineers Fair has created the world’s first battery made entirely of Brussels sprouts, which is being used to light an 8-foot Christmas tree.
NEW METRICS -
A new Green Coffee Carbon Footprint Product Category Rule (CFP-PCR) was published this week, providing the first CPR for the calculation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from coffee production. The Green Coffee CFP-PCR rule was initiated by SAI Platform’s Coffee Working group members, including illycaffé, Nestlé, Tchibo, Mondelez and Lavazza, and standard-setting bodies 4C, Fairtrade International, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ Certified, in collaboration with the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH).
MARKETING AND COMMS -
Earlier this week, Coca-Cola released its 2012/2013 Sustainability Report, which outlined progress the global beverage giant has made in the areas of water conservation and restoration, supporting sustainable community initiatives and empowering female entrepreneurs around the world.We caught up with Coke’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Bea Perez, for more on the company’s progress to date and the work that’s left to be done.
SUPPLY CHAIN -
SAP has joined forces with the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) and the Manuel Mejía Foundation to provide coffee farmers with the technology and training they need to develop more sustainable business practices.Technology continues to be scarce among rural communities in Colombia, SAP says. To help change this reality, the company supplied technical training to more than 500 coffee growers, teaching them how to effectively use mobile tablets and computers to access the “coffee portal,” which provides useful information on coffee market news, geographical farm data, coffee purchasing conditions, incentives and support programs.
SUPPLY CHAIN -
UK brewery Adnams has become the first brewer to measure the carbon footprint of its entire range of bottled beers, estimating that one bottle is equivalent to traveling 5.3 miles by train.The Southwold-based brewer says after a “rigorous six months of data collection and analysis and a further six months for verification and auditing,” the analysis measured the carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions (CO2e) for the whole lifecycle of each beer, from the growth of the grains to the brewing and packaging, through to the distribution, retail, consumption and disposal of the bottle. Adnams performed the analysis with the help of the Adapt Low Carbon Group at the University of East Anglia.
General Mills says it has improved the health profile of 73 percent of its U.S. retail sales volume since 2005, which includes enhancing nutrition such as increasing protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals, or reducing limiters such as calories, sodium, sugar and fat.In fiscal 2013, the company claims it improved more than 20 percent of its U.S. retail sales volume and the nutritional improvements touched all General Mills U.S. retail platforms, including Baking, Cereal, Dairy, Meals and Snacks.Reductions in sodium and calories, and increases in whole grain were among the main health improvements General Mills achieved in fiscal 2013. As with past years, all reported improvements were significant, meaning a 10 percent or more improvement was achieved.
WASTE NOT -
UK paper manufacturer James Cropper has developed another innovative recycling process that incorporates cocoa husk waste from chocolate production into unbleached cellulose fiber to produce a food-grade paper. The company says turning the otherwise wasted skins of many of the 3.5 million metric tons of cocoa beans produced each year into paper could be a significant breakthrough for the food and packaging industries.The paper is now in production and certified for use in the food supply chain, including as wrapping for chocolate bars.
WASTE NOT -
Today, UK grocery retailer Tesco unveiled food waste figures for its operations and supply chain, alongside figures that show 68 percent of bagged salad in particular is wasted and that 35 percent of this waste occurs in the home.As a first step in reducing this waste, Tesco announced it will end multi-buys on large bags of salad and is developing mix-and-match promotions for smaller bags in a bid to help customers reduce the amount they are wasting at home.Bagged salad is just one of the 25 best-selling grocery products that Tesco has tracked from farm to fork to gain a detailed understanding of where food waste occurs. This is part of the grocer’s commitment to lead in tackling food waste and to work with suppliers and customers to address this.
MARKETING AND COMMS -
Bar none, the most persistent challenge that the sustainability movement faces is how to prove the business bottom line benefits of sustainability activities. This is particularly acute for small and medium-sized companies, for whom survival is the number one priority. When looking at who engages and communicates sustainability activities, a disproportionate number of them are large corporates with dedicated sustainability/CSR budgets, as covered in our previous post. All too often, sustainability is a ‘tack-on’ to what business normally do anyway, and not the reason for being.
WASTE NOT -
Nestlé today announced it will achieve zero waste in all 150 of its European factories by 2020, meaning no factory waste will go to landfill or be incinerated without energy being recovered from the process.“The decision to achieve zero waste illustrates Nestlé’s commitment to environmentally sustainable business practices,” said Laurent Freixe, Nestlé Executive Vice President and Zone Director for Europe. “We already have over 25 factories in Europe that do not dispose of waste into the environment.“By relentlessly eliminating all sources of waste, or by recycling or recovering energy from unavoidable residues, I am convinced we can achieve the same for all our European operations,” Freixe said.Cleaning up
PRESS RELEASE -
According to Feeding America, one out of six Americans, one out of five children and about three million senior citizens lack adequate access to affordable and nutritious foods. This equates to approximately 47 million people considered to be food insecure. The urgency is acute and screams for more innovative approaches to help fill the shelves of foodbanks. One such idea emerged at meeting back in 2010 in Madison, Wisconsin between Professor Jed Colquhoun from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, fresh produce companies, Del Monte Foods and other processors, a group of Wisconsin growers, and Second Harvest, a subsidiary of Feeding America, the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity.
America’s largest supermarkets and retailers, including Walmart and Whole Foods, are failing to take meaningful steps to replace climate-damaging hydroflourcarbons (HFCs), according to a new report released today by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a U.S.- and London-based nonprofit committed to exposing environmental crime.
BEHAVIOR CHANGE -
“We need to do something about the environmental damage in our heads.”(Time, 24 May 1993).
MARKETING AND COMMS -
While it might not win any Academy Awards, certainly the best title for a movie this year has to be the food industry critique, GMO OMG. On the surface, it is an attack on genetically modified seeds and what they are doing to our health. Underneath, it is an emotional play on a father’s frustration with the clarity of our food system. What is in our food and where does it come from?
COLLABORATION -
Mondelez International has announced an agreement with the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI) and suppliers Armajaro and Olam to promote sustainable Indonesian cocoa farming, improve cocoa bean quality and support the development of Indonesian cocoa communities.
MARKETING AND COMMS -
Continuing a positive trend of transparency in the food industry, Starbucks' latest campaign focuses on the quality and sourcing of its coffee beans, as sustainability and health concerns continue to motivate consumers to ask, "Where does this come from?"Launched on Sunday during the Emmys, the new documentary-inspired TV ad shows the heritage of the cafe chain's Arabica coffee beans. "The bean matters, because you cannot roast in quality, you cannot roast in complexity," the voiceover says as black-and-white footage of coffee plantations and the roasting process runs.
MARKETING AND COMMS -
Chipotle keeps sticking its neck out for "sustainable," locally produced food — now with an animated short-film attack on "Big Food" and with the promise of more expansive and aggressive efforts to come."The Scarecrow" is a 3-1/2-minute film that Chipotle Mexican Grill released online last week that depicts what the brand calls "a dystopian fantasy world" in which "all food production is controlled by fictional industrial giant Crow Foods. Scarecrows have been displaced from their traditional role of protecting food, and are now servants to the crows and their evil plans to dominate the food system."