Food

Expo West: Beyond chocolate and chia

March 21, 2012

Today’s guest post comes from the aptly-named Catherine Greener, the CEO of co-founder of consulting firm Clear Green Advisors. Cat, as she’s known, is one of the sharpest people in the world of environmental consulting. A native of Detroit who is trained as a industrial engineer, she’s an expert in manufacturing, among other things, and began her career as a maintenance supervisor for Pontiac Motors. Cat knows how things get done, and she knows business, too–she has an MBA from Michigan and has advised Procter & Gamble, FedEx, Shell, Nissan and Ingersoll Rand, among others. She filed this report after a trip to Natural Products Expo West, a giant trade show held every year in Anaheim, CA.

Back at my desk in Boulder after three days at Natural Products Expo West, the largest convention of people in the natural, organic and supplements industries, I am tired and I have a list of people to email or call. But I am filled with an optimism that is rare after attending a trade show.

At Expo West, as it’s known, about 50,000 or so vendors, retailers, buyers and product seekers convened in Anaheim to learn about emerging ideas and and exciting new products in these high growth businesses, which encompass everything from raw organic energy bars to shampoo made from beer. I took the opportunity to listen to legends like Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm, meet authors including Paul Greenberg (Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food) and enjoy a beer with Adam Lowry, Co-founder of Method, one of the leaders of a new wave of young entrepreneurs.

Expo West overwhelms the senses. The vast convention center is filled with organic chocolate that will stop you in your tracks, essential oils, raw vitamin drinks, gluten-free grilled cheese sandwiches— and something even for the eyes—the chance to be photographed with Fabio.

I attend Expo West to see trends. This year’s product trends were easy to spot: raw, GMO-free, gluten-free (and delicious) and Chia, which is not just for “pets” anymore, but is being added to foods for its health benefits (Omega-3′s and fiber).

But for me, at least, the most interesting trend at this year’s Expo West had nothing to do with products; it had to do with the companies that were exhibiting–the emergence of the Benefit Corporation, or “B-Corp”.

King Arthur Flour proudly displayed their B-Corp logo next to their other 3rd-party certifications.  Why should this matter? Shouldn’t only the quality of the product matter to the shopper? “Consumers are interested in the type of company that you are, just as much as the kind and quality of the product that you make,” explains Tom Payne, Director of Marketing, at King Arthur Flour.

I may be going out on a limb, but it feels like a movement is growing here. Companies that are good for the world want to “occupy your cart, refrigerator or cupboard.” And shoppers seem ready to listen.

Consumers want to know more–not just about what they are buying, but who they are buying from. They want to know if there is “pink slime” in their kid’s lunch, or if their cans have BPA in the liner, and, if so, why a company felt the need to use it there. If a company can assumer its customers that it is providing them with the most natural and healthy product possible, and that it cares about the community and the planet, and that it embraces a new way of doing business, it can build a powerful brand around transparency, authenticity and trust.

I look forward to Expo West 2013. As for trends, I think we are going to see even more Certified B Corps. It’s the right marketplace. It’s the right message.

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A kinder, gentler hot dog

February 22, 2012

Melissa and Aaron Miller of Kinsman, Ohio recently received Food Alliance certification for their pastured pork and lamb.

Consider meat. It’s bad for the planet. It’s bad for your health if you eat too much of it, which most Americans do. (We eat three times more than the global average.) As for animal welfare, trust me, you don’t want to think about it.

Helene York is a vegetarian, but as director of strategic sourcing and research at Bon Appetit Management Co., a big food-service company, she needs to think about meat. This week, Bamco made a serious commitment to change the way it buys pork, beef, poultry and eggs.

First, the company said, it will

stop serving all pork produced using the cruel and inhumane practice of gestation crates and all eggs, including “liquid” ones (those removed from their shells), from hens confined to battery cages by 2015.

This won’t be easy. About 90 percent of female pigs are raised in metal cages so small that a pregnant sow cannot even turn around. This commitment aims to eliminate one of the worst practices in the meat industry.

Bon Appetit said it will also aim to drive best practices by promising that, by 2015,

at least 25 percent of all our meat, poultry, and eggs will meet the highest animal welfare standards, as verified by the independent third parties Animal Welfare Approved, Food Alliance, Humane Farm Animal Care, or Global Animal Partnership. These four groups don’t just ban gestation crates and battery cages, they prohibit routine antibiotics and all hormones, and reward producers for allowing animals to engage in their natural behaviors.

The news from Bon Appetit, which provides cafeteria food and catering to more than 400 companies, colleges and other venues in 31 states, comes in the wake of an announcement that McDonald’s–which, of course, is much bigger — will ask its pork suppliers to phase out gestation crates. (A stunned Mark Bittman wrote OMG: McDonald’s Does the Right Thing.) Bon Appetit and McDonald’s made their announcements in conjunction with the Humane Society of the United States, an animal rights group. [click to continue…]

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Biotech crops are winning over farmers

February 7, 2012

Bill Gates with farmers in India

The debate over biotech crops has become predictable.

In his 2012 annual letter from the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, who has a near-religious faith in technology and innovation, argues that an “extremely important revolution” in plant science, i.e., genetically-engineered crops, can help farmers in poor countries by giving them access to new varieties of crops that will better resist disease and adapt to climate change.

Days later, the Center for Food Safety, a Washington watchdog group and persistent critic of Big Ag, pushed back, saying that biotech crops had failed to deliver on their promise to alleviate hunger, and that Gates would do better to support low-cost “agroecological techniques” that don’t depend on patented, genetically-engineered seeds.

The conflicting claims and supporting data are hard to sift through. Will disease-resistant biotech cassava answer the prayers of Christina Mwinjipe, a farmer in Tanzania, whose crops are threatened by diseases, as Gates writes? Or will patented genetically engineered crops prove disastrous for the 1.4 billion farmers in  the global south who now save seeds from one season to the next, as Andrew Kimbrell, executive director for the Center for Food Safety, argues?

The voices of farmers are rarely heard in these debates. (They’re probably working too hard.) But data released this week indicates  farmers, through their actions, are voting for biotech crops.

Last year, farmers planted an additional 12 million hectares of biotech crops, an increase of 8 percent over 2010, according to the annual biotech crop report of the ISAAA (International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications).

Most of that growth — 8.2 million hectares — came from the developing world, lead by Brazil and  India, the report says. The growth rate for biotech crops in developing countries was 11 percent, twice as fast and twice as large as industrial countries at 5 percent or 3.8 million hectares.

“Unprecedented adoption rates are testimony to overwhelming trust and confidence in biotech crops by millions of farmers worldwide,” said Clive James, the report’s author, in a statement. It must be said that James is an unabashed supporter of biotech crops but as best I can tell, his numbers haven’t been challenged. [click to continue…]

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SABMiller: Beer at the bottom of the pyramid

January 12, 2012

In the developed world,  brewing giant SABMiller, whose global brands include Miller, Peroni, Grolsch and Pilsner Urquell, competes with the even bigger brewing giant Anheuser-Busch InBev, which owns Budweiser, Beck’s, Stella Artois and Michelob. They’re the Pepsi and Coke of beer, which, by the way, is the world’s third most popular drink, after water and tea.

But in Africa, SABMiller’s biggest competitor is the guy (or gal) who makes beer at home. That’s a big reason why the company, which had revenues of $28 billion last year, recently began selling Impala, a beer made from cassava, in Mozambique. Similarly, for about a decade, SABMiller has been selling Eagle Lager, a beer brewed with sorghum, in Uganda.

Using local like cassava and sorghum crops appeals to local tastes, supports local farmers and keeps costs down so SAB Miller can price its beer lower to compete with homemade brews.

“By using locally-sourced raw materials, we can make high-quality, but affordable products for consumers who would otherwise be drinking informal or illicit alcohol. So the long term commercial opportunities are significant,” Andy Wales, SABMiller’s global head of sustainability, told me in an email interview.

Beer at the bottom of the pyramid, you could call it.* [click to continue…]

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McDonald’s: Mainstreaming sustainability?

December 20, 2011

About 64 million people visit McDonald’s every day. That’s a stunning number. They’ll see changes in the year ahead, some driven by a renewed sustainability push at the $24-billion fast-food giant.

LED lights in new and renovated stores. “Greener” packaging. Eco-labels on fish sold in Europe.

None of this is earth-shattering or, more importantly, earth-saving, but it’s the start of something big, says Bob Langert, McDonald’s v.p. for sustainability.

“We’re on a path to mainstream sustainability,” Bob told me by phone the other day. “This is transformational for us. We want to be bolder, and we want to make a bigger impact.” Most important, he said, the company wants to embed sustainability into its operations and, eventually, into its brand.

Business-friendly environmentalists who work with McDonald’s–groups like the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and Environmental Defense Fund–will applaud any sign that the company is ready to integrate sustainability into its core business and dig deeper into its supply chain to find ways to raise beef and chicken that are better for the planet. Skeptics, and there are many, will call this greenwashing, or perhaps “farmwashing,” a term I hadn’t heard until yesterday when I saw this anti-McDonald’s posting in Grist.

In a way, McDonald’s is like Walmart–it’s never going to be beloved in the Whole Foods-shopping, arugula-eating, tony precincts of Berkeley, Brooklyn or Bethesda. But the company is much too big to ignore or wish away.

Today, McDonald’s released its 2011 Sustainability Scorecard. Under the umbrella of sustainability, the company includes environmental responsibility, its supply chain, nutrition and well-being, employees and community grants and programs, albeit in a way that highlights accomplishments and isn’t easily transparent. (Please let me know if you can find an accounting of the company’s carbon footprint or a greenhouse gas reduction goal, because I couldn’t.)  But McDonald’s can feel good about a couple of big initiatives in the year just past. [click to continue…]

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Have I fallen in love with Walmart?

December 4, 2011

In 2006, I wrote a cover story for FORTUNE with the headline: Wal-Mart Saves the Planet. Since then, I’ve written dozens of stories about the retail giant. I’ve reported on Walmart’s impact on the gold mining industry (Green Gold in FORTUNE), its efforts to protect child laborers in Uzbekistan and salmon fisherman in Alaska (Walmart: A bully benefactor on Fortune.com), the launch of a path-breaking sustainability index (Inside Walmart’s sustainability index at GreenBiz), LED lights in Walmart parking lots, the company’s CSR reports, etc. I’ve been critical at times–pointing to Walmart’s BIG problem: climate change and writing that Walmart CEO (Mike Duke) has a problem with gays–but most of my coverage of the company’s sustainability effort has been laundatory.

Now here comes Stacy Mitchell, a smart reporter, with a six-part series in Grist called Walmart’s Greenwash: Why the retail giant is still unsustainable. She assails Walmart for promoting suburban sprawl, making only token efforts to buy renewable energy and selling cheap throwaway stuff. She also faults mainstream environmental groups for focusing “on the small bits of good that Walmart could do—reduce PVC in packaging, for example—while ignoring the much larger consequences of its ever-expanding business model.” She also says that she has been “shocked by just how much of a public relations boost the media have given the company and how little public accountability they have demanded in return.”

These are serious criticisms that deserve a responses. Stacy highlights some important points. Fundamentally, though, we disagree about Walmart, and this post (it’s necessarily longer than most) is an attempt to explain why. Some of our differences are probably a result of what psychologists called confirmation bias, which describes the way all of us seek out, sift through and read evidence in ways that confirm our preconceptions. Confirmation bias is a problem in journalism, politics, economics and even in the so-called hard sciences.

Stacy Mitchell

I’m sure that my experience with Walmart has left me vulnerable to confirmation bias. I’ve visited Bentonville, gotten to know executives at the firm, and the company has participated in Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference, which I co-chair;  my career and reputation have been helped by my reporting on the company. I suspect the same is true of Stacy, who wrote a book in 2008 called Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses. She has “advised numerous communities on strategies and policies to limit chain store proliferation and strengthen locally owned businesses,” according to her bio.

So read on (skeptically) as I try to sort through some of the issues she’s raised. [click to continue…]

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Crony capitalism at Safeway

November 29, 2011

A beautiful new Safeway opened recently in Bethesda, MD, where I live. It’s  just a couple of blocks from a nearly-new Giant supermarket. To attract shoppers, Safeway sold turkeys before Thanksgiving for 39 cents a pound. Maybe it was 33 cents. In any event, I hope we can all agree that this kind of thing–namely, competition–is what makes America great.

Except, that is, if you live nearby in Washington, D.C., where, as The Washington Post reports today, Safeway poses big hurdle to plan for Southeast Wal-Mart.

Walmart, it so happens, wants to open a new store at a long-neglected shopping center known as Skyland in one of the low-income precincts Washington. The trouble is, a Safeway across the street has a covenant from the 1990s that prevents a competitor from locating in Skyland. Safeway, to its credit, has 15 stores in the district and is one of the city’s biggest employers. But why it was given a promise that no competitor would locate nearby is anybody’s guess.

D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s office says hizzoner is trying to work out a compromise with Safeway.

Craig Muckle, Safeway’s manager of public affairs, tells The Post:

We want to be cooperative, but there is a reason that the covenant is in place to protect our interests.

Give him credit for honesty, if not for his faith in markets. He goes on to explain that city neighborhoods, unlike the suburbs, may not have enough buying power to support two big grocery stores.

In the city, with one possible exception, there is no grocery store directly across the street from another grocery store….To have more than one…someone may survive, someone may not.

Quelle horreur! Competition that results in winners and losers is evidently fine when it comes to the Superbowl, political campaigns and even suburban shopping, but not when it comes to buying groceries in your nation’s capital.

 

 

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Unilever CEO: “Don’t stay on the sidelines”

November 22, 2011

As a global consumer products giant, with $44 billion euros [nearly $60 billion] in 2010 revenues, Unilever has a big impact on how and what people buy. Two billion consumers use a Unilever product on any given day. If you use Lipton Tea, eat Hellman’s mayonnaise or Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or use Dove or Lifebuoy soaps or  Suave hair products, you’re among them.

Paul Polman, Unilever’s CEO, embraces the idea that his company can make the world more just and sustainable. Unilever buys about 4-5% of the world’s palm oil, so it has promised to purchase all its palm oil from certified sustainable sources by 2015. It buys about 7% of the world’s tea, making it the world’s largest buyer, so Unilever aims to have all the tea in all Lipton tea bags sourced from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ estates by 2015, and 100% of its tea sustainably sourced by 2020.

“We have to take that responsibility,” Polman said today (Nov. 22) during a webcast called Sustainable Living: Mainstream or pipe dream?  The webcast, organized by the Guardian Sustainable Business, was held a year after Unilever released its sweeping Sustainable Living Plan, in which it promised to cut the environmental footprint of its products in half, help more than 1 billion people take action to improve their health and well-being, and source 100% of its agricultural raw materials sustainably. [See my 2010 blogpost, Unilever's big, broad, bold sustainability plan.]

But there are limits to what even a big company can do, so Unilever has begun thinking seriously about how to change consumer behavior around sustainability. Today, it released a new report called Inspiring Sustainable Living [available for download] which identifies five levers for change: Make it understood, make it easy, make it desirable, make it rewarding, make it a habit. [click to continue…]

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Sustainable sushi is not an oxymoron

November 1, 2011

Environmentalist and UC Berkeley grad Kristofor Lofgren moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2006 to go to law school. Today, he owns Bamboo Sushi, a cozy, stylish eatery that’s been rated as the most sustainable seafood restaurant in the U.S.

Bamboo Sushi’s bona fides are overwhelming: Powered by wind energy, certified by the Marine Stewardship Council and legally constituted as a B Corp., Bamboo Sushi has partnerships with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Blue Ocean Institute and Salmon Nation. Then there’s the paper on which the 23-page menu is printed, the reusable chopsticks made of teal, the wood tables….

“Every aspect of the restaurant is certified by an independent third party,” declares Kristofor, sounding like the lawyer he didn’t become.

But what about the food? Well, Bamboo Sushi catered a reception (sponsored by FMYI) at last week’s Net Impact conference in Portland, winning raves from out-of-town visitors like me.

More important, reviewers praise the food, as do diners on sites like Yelp. GQ’s well-known food critic Alan Richman named the restaurant’s Alaska Black Cod with Smoked Soy and Roasted Garlic Glaze one of his five best dishes of 2010, writing: [click to continue…]

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Big Sugar, free markets and Monica Lewinsky

October 25, 2011

Next time I unwrap a candy bar, I’ll think about sugar, free markets, the Florida Everglades and Monica Lewinsky.

Why? Because although the sugar in that candy bar may be natural, its price is entirely artificial–depending, as it does, on government trade barriers, price supports and subsidized water, as well as the fact that the sugar industry is paying only a fraction of the costs of cleaning up pollution in the Everglades.

Put simply, crony capitalism is alive and well in the sugar business.

“The sugar industry doesn’t make its money from agriculture,” declares David Guest, a lawyer with Earthjustice and an outspoken critic of Big Sugar. “They make it from government.”

That’s an exaggeration, of course. The Florida industry grows lots of sugar, invests hundreds of millions of dollars in new equipment and employs thousands of people, as I learned last week  during a day-long tour of the Lake Okeechobee region of south Florida, as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Miami. We met Guest from Earthjustice (“because the earth needs a good lawyer”), officials from Florida water agencies and the Army Corps of Engineers, an Audubon society biologist and, most interestingly, Judy Sanchez, senior director of public affairs for the U.S. Sugar Corp. [click to continue…]

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