The Five Stones of Pro�Food - The Snap Blog - Sugarsnap - Fresh, Healthy Food from Farm to Table

The Five Stones of Pro�Food - The Snap Blog - Sugarsnap - Fresh, Healthy Food from Farm to Table

THE FIVE STONES OF PRO FOOD

THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2009 AT 7:25PM | ROB SMART

The first leap one must make in embracing Pro Food is that significant change is required in how we grow, process, distribute, prepare and consume food.

As nearly a month has passed since Pro Food Is was published, it is safe to report that people, mostly industry and corporate representatives, don’t see the need to change. They vigorously defend the status quo, while refusing to seriously consider the concerns of a growing percentage of consumers, entrepreneurs and sustainable food advocates. Worse, they regularly deflect any inquires by claiming that those asking questions and/or seeking change are “demonizing” farmers and taking away individual “freedoms” and “choices.”

What I fear the entrenched industrial food system is missing are historic indicators that should give them pause, at a minimum, and ideally get them to gain new perspective and seriously consider embracing some or all of Pro Food’s core principles. What they need to do is consider the following transcript from an interview in the film Blind Spot with Utah State University historian and anthropologist Joseph Tainter:

In ancient societies that I studied, for example the Roman Empire, the great problem that they faced was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo. Invest very high amounts in solving problems that don’t yield a net positive return, but instead simply allowed them to maintain what they already got. This decreases the net benefit of being a complex society.

While the dominate food industry players try opening their minds to the idea that their now-overly-complex system may be on the verge of collapse, Pro Food entrepreneurs are busy working to capitalize on emerging opportunities. Like the early days of the Internet, when foundational ideas were taking shape, today’s foodpreneurs sense openings throughout the food chain to disrupt the status quo. These foodpreneurs will be armed with Pro Food’s unique set of tools that will be difficult, if not impossible, for most industrial food companies to emulate.

I like to think of these tools as The Five Stones of Pro Food, each specially designed to attract mainstream customers, while striking at one of several core weaknesses of industrialized food (a.k.a., Goliath). Over time, as more Pro Food entrepreneurs jump in, building on earlier successes, Goliaths will begin to fall, some faster than others.

Stone #1 – Decentralization

The foundation of America’s economy is best represented by millions of small businesses that start, grow, prosper and fail every year. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) in 2006 identified nearly six million firms with fewer than 100 employees, representing 98 percent of all U.S. firms, 35 percent of all employees, and 30 percent or nearly $1.5 trillion in annual payroll.

A handful of these ventures, starting with nothing, grow to levels never imagined, e.g., Wal-Mart, which belongs to the elite class of U.S. firms employing over 10,000 employees (one of 953 such firms in 2006). With such growth, ownership nearly always moves from within the company to outside investors, contributing to these companies gradually losing sight of the path they took to such prominence and dominance in the first place. This trend is especially troubling with regard to food, something that every American needs to survive, which has ended up being controlled by few.

Thankfully, Americans love the underdog. We distrust power. We are inspired by Herculean efforts against equally big odds. And, at the end of the day, we value community over corporations.

ADVANTAGE, Pro Food

Stone #2 – Triple Bottom Line

While decentralization is an outcome of the Pro Food revolution, it’s the bottom line focus of Pro Food companies that will fuel momentum. And unlike the pure profit plays dominating today’s industrial food landscape, true Pro Food companies embrace a triple bottom-line approach to building great companies.

Haven’t heard of triple bottom line? You’re not alone, as corporate America, with few exceptions, hasn’t either. In the simplest terms, “triple bottom line (TBL) accounting means expanding the traditional reporting framework to take into account ecological and social performance in addition to financial performance.” You may also hear TBL referred to as “corporate social responsibility.”

While some companies, e.g., Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Seventh Generation, have done a great job of integrating these ideas into day-to-day operations of traditional corporate structures, today’s new ventures, including those formed by Pro Food foodpreneurs, have new options for incorporate their mission and values into the actual structure of the company’s charter by forming a low-profit limited liability corporation (L3C) or B Corp. In my 20 years of experience in Silicon Valley and beyond, there has never been a better time to be a socially responsible company than today.

ADVANTAGE, Pro Food

Stone #3 – Sustainable Food

As outlined in Pro Food Is, our efforts center on “fresh, healthy, and sustainable food,” which starts with farmers and ends with consumers cooking and eating meals incorporating those foods. Seems straightforward enough, but not to those defending cheap calories as a substitute for real food.

As a consumer-driven economy, they know that what matters most at the end of the day is how consumers spend their food dollars. Sustainable foods face the daunting challenge of competing against their heavily subsidized highly processed foods, cheaply made and cheaply sold. This cost advantage is unlikely to change anytime soon.

For the foodpreneur, this represents opportunities to create new, more effective ways for consumers to engage with the food they eat, which can happen anywhere in the food chain, including at the farm, processor, distributor or retail level. Innovations in retail experiences, from how foods are packaged to how retail space is configured, offer fertile ground for change. As the number of ventures increases, consumers will gain more access to sustainable foods, while the established industrial food system will simultaneously find itself being challenged on multiple fronts. In the end, sustainable food will triumph over cheap calories.

ADVANTAGE, Pro Food

Stone #4 – Transparency

Beyond increasing access to sustainable food, what consumers will most quickly recognize is how the sustainable food they are finding offers transparency all the way the back to its source. This is a significant departure from today’s cheap calories, chock full of highly processed ingredients, many of which come from genetically modified (GM) crops, especially soybean and corn, which respectively account for 85 percent and 45 percent of all crops planted in the United State. Moving downstream, it has been estimated that 70-75 percent of processed foods contain one or more GM ingredients.

The problem is that consumers have no way of telling if the food they are buying or eating contain things like GM ingredients. Does it seem like too much to ask to know what is in our food? Apparently it is for companies like Monsanto and name-brand industrial food (calorie) manufacturers. Why? Because they know that given the choice, many consumers would opt for foods without GM ingredients, which would devastate profits.

With transparency, on a voluntary basis, comes trust. Industrial food doesn’t do voluntary, although it points to those who do as an example of food people can buy without, say, GM ingredients.

Pro Food entrepreneurs value transparency as core to their missions. Consumers deserve the right to know where food comes from, how it was grown/raised/processed and what is in it. By practicing transparency from the get go, Pro Food ventures will quickly intersect with growing consumer demands, and thus accelerate a shift in market share away from the hidden ingredients at the core of cheap calories.

ADVANTAGE, Pro Food

Stone #5 – Accessibility

What may be Pro Food’s greatest competitive advantage is its ability to build new ventures, leveraging triple bottom-line structures and sustainable food as its primary product, to address food security issues that plague low-income and disadvantaged segments of the U.S. population.

What industrial food tells the public, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising expenditures, is that it can feed the world. While I work hard to maintain my objectivity, this particular marketing message crosses the line. There are one billion people around the global that go hungry every day, while a billion more are characterized as obese. How can a food system make claims of feeding the world when it is clearly leaving both ends of the global population wanting?

It can’t. Pro Food can and will, as one of its most important core principles is ensuring communities are enriched, including every citizen, despite socio-economic status.

ADVANTAGE, Pro Food

Clearly, new food ventures utilizing The Five Stones of Pro Food have the opportunity to disrupt the industrial food system at various points. There are already examples of this happening throughout the food chain, from Will Allen’s Growing Power to an alliance between Good Natured Family Farms and Ball Food Stores, to name a few.

Early Pro Food pioneers, with dirt on their hands, lessons learned and progress made, played a critical role in defining the right set of stones. Some of those companies have grown dramatically, e.g., Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (NASDAQ: GMCR; market cap of ~$2.5 billion). Others have been acquired by larger companies, e.g., Stonyfield Yogurt (acquired by Groupe Danone), Ben & Jerry’s (Unilever), Burt’s Bees (The Clorox Company). Still others have remained independent.

The next wave of start ups, which I characterize as Pro Food 1.0, will have the advantage of leveraging the many lessons learned by these pioneers, which will allow them more time to focus on how best to utilize their Pro Food Stones, e.g., as a set of stones to take down a Goliath, to build a strong arch with the all important keystone for locking other stones in place, or to create a long and formidable path through dangerous terrain (more on this in future posts).

The potential of The Five Stones of Pro Food is clear. With concerted entrepreneurial effort, and corresponding consumer support, these five stones have the potential to take down the industrial food Goliaths.

It is no longer a matter of if, but when.

Pro Food – The Business of Sustainable Food™

Harnessing Your Brain Power - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Harnessing Your Brain Power - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Harnessing Your Brain Power

11:12 AM Thursday February 11, 2010
by Barbara Strauch  | Comments (1)

In my last post, I described the unique talents of a middle-aged brain. To take full advantage of these skills, which include an increased ability to see patterns and make connections, you need a brain that is healthy and functioning.

And here recent science is helping, too. Old ideas that we lose 40 percent of our neurons as we age have been discounted. Now we know we keep most of our brain cells. The task, then, is to help those brain cells stay in shape.

And for that, some solutions are surprisingly simple. One of the best things we can do for our brains is to continue to work. Most modern jobs — even most modern hobbies — are multi-layered and involve socialization as well as problem-solving.

But we also have to, as brain scientists say, "get out of our comfort zones.'' Research shows that it helps to search out people — and ideas — that are different, to rattle established brain patterns, and shake up the cognitive egg to spur growth. (And another good reason to listen to younger colleagues.)

In particular, we need to push our brains in new ways to force them to use their most sophisticated section, the frontal lobes, the part right behind our foreheads that helps us focus, plan, and think strategically. Scientists are investigating whether certain video games can be developed to keep the pathways to our frontal lobes smooth and open. But in the meantime anything that makes our brain work really hard — and wrestle with the new — will help keep your frontal lobes in tune.

There are tricks, too, of course. It helps, when trying to cement a new fact or face to use different parts — or more parts — of our brains. If you want to remember a name, it can help to attach a facial feature to it — Bob, big forehead, for instance. In a similar way, the simple act of visualizing yourself doing something you need to remember to do — writing a memo to Bob — creates a bigger "neural footprint'' and gives you more ways to retrieve the information you need.

And, while you're busy visualizing, you also might consider getting up and moving around. The current star in brain science research is exercise. The brain, like the heart, needs oxygen and blood flow. Old ideas that nutrients and growth factors produced in the muscles don't cross the blood brain barrier are no longer valid.

Indeed, using your body may be the best thing you can do for your body's most crucial part — your brain.

Barbara Strauch is a deputy science editor and health and medical science editor at The New York Times and author The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind (Viking), coming out in April.

Neighborhood Pride: Ten Ideas To Boost Block Spirit - Walking Distance - GOOD

Neighborhood Pride: Ten Ideas To Boost Block Spirit 

Neighborhood Pride: Ten Ideas To Boost Block Spirit

Walking Distance > Kyla Fullenwider on February 5, 2010 at 8:00 am PST

Creating community is easier than you think.

Is it just me or, is the modern urban neighborhood getting remarkably old-fashioned? In the Los Feliz (locals pronounce this los-FEE-liz) community of Los Angeles where I live, it feels like everything that was old is new (and smart) again. Things my grandparents in Kentucky have always done—checking in on neighbors, sharing a new crop of tomatoes—seem not so much folksy as generally just a good way to live, even if you are in the big city.

So, as my way to welcome you to this new space on GOOD, here’s a list of ways (organized from most ambitious to least) you might improve your little corner of town. Welcome toWalking Distance.

1.Turn your front yard into a farm.

Grass is an expensive, water-intensive waste of space. Rip out the sod and start a small front yard farm to produce food for your household and some of your favorite neighbors. Sounds daunting (or don’t have a yard)? Organize some other like-minded urban agrarians and transform a vacant lot into a community garden. You may even get a tax credit.

2. Start a neighborhood time bank.

Time banks are a fantastic way to leverage skills the larger economy doesn’t always value. “In a time bank, everyone’s time is valued in the same way” says Autumn Rooney, organizer of the Echo Park Time Bank in Los Angeles. Exchange a French lesson for a ride to the airport or watch someone’s cat for a tennis lesson. The key is to have a system in place to facilitate the exchange. Oh, and make sure you know how to throw a party. “You should be a people person,” says Rooney. The group hosts biweekly parties to recruit new neighbors and refine the process. Learn how to start your own here.

3. Make every Sunday a block party.

Sundays are lazy time, and the worldwide movement Ciclovia has taken advantage of our weekend sloth. “There’s less traffic on Sunday,” says Tim Joe Linton, one of the organizers of cicLAvia an initiative to bring the car free days to the car capital of the world. Aside from the obvious benefits of music and picnics in the street, letting the bikes take over can be a boon to the local economy. “Many local shops see their business double,” Linton says.

4. Start a bowling league*. 

Robert Putnam wrote a treatise on the decline of civic participation in America rooted in unlikely data: Americans aren’t bowling together anymore. What does bowling have to do with civic engagement you say? Read Bowling Alone (keeping in mind it was written before the Obama campaign) and in the meantime, choose a team color, a regular night to meet, and see how bowling together makes you feel not so alone.

*If you and your neighbors aren’t the bowling types, find another team sport that requires matching uniforms and a regular meeting time. Kickball? Capture the Flag? 

5. Leverage social media for you library and other neighborhood resources. 

Start a blog (or Facebook fan page) for your library branch, a city wiki, or Google map for your neighborhood. This will help you (and your grateful neighbors) make the best use of your local resources. The more input the better, so enlist your neighbors to help and you’ll be amazed at what you discover about your local haunts. Davis, California’s, Wiki is about as good as it gets.

6. Throw a potluck with your neighbors. 

All of them. This may mean inviting people you may not know, like, or otherwise find interesting, but that’s what makes this fun: everyone is invited. If you want to add some entertainment, include a slideshow. Learn from the experts at Slideluck Potshow.

7. Bring back hide and go seek.

Nothing makes a block come alive like kids (or adults) playing games outside. Other games to teach the youngsters: freeze tag, dodge ball, and how to catch lightning bugs (and free them, of course).



8. Build a community treehouse.

Do I really need a reason? Get some treehouse inspiration here.

9. Install a bench in front of your house (and create other types of informal public spaces).

Temporary dog parks, hop scotch zones, and dumpster pools work too.

10. Say hi to your neighbors. 

Now that one’s not so hard, is it?

Here's to dynamic neighborhoods, smarter communities, and the treehouse making a comeback. How are you breathing life back into your neighborhood?

Kyla Fullenwider is the Pepsi Refresh Project Ambassador for Neighborhoods. Learn more about the Pepsi Refresh Project here, and submit your own idea for how to move the world forward here.

Wendell Berry's 17 Rules for a Sustainable Economy

Wendell Berry's 17 Rules for a Sustainable Economy: "

Robins coming through on their way back North

1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth.

2. Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, the native creatures – within the membership of the community.

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.

4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products – first to nearby cities, then to others).

5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness
of the industrial doctrine of ‘labor saving’ if that implies poor work,
unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

6. Develop properly scaled value-adding
industries for local products to ensure that the community does not
become merely a colony of national or global economy.

7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.

8. Strive to supply as much of the community’s own energy as possible.

9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.

10. Make sure that money paid into the
local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures
outside the community.

11. Make the community able to invest
in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without
dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its
children.

12. See that the old and young take
care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not
necessarily, and not always in school. There must be no
institutionalised childcare and no homes for the aged. The community
knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

13. Account for costs now
conventionally hidden or externalised. Whenever possible, these must be
debited against monetary income.

14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.

15. Always be aware of the economic
value of neighborly acts. In our time, the costs of living are greatly
increased by the loss of neighborhood, which leaves people to face
their calamities alone.

16. A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

17. A sustainable rural economy will
depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are
talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than
competitive.

Robins fly by Wachovia Bank

"

Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog: What Your Group Needs to Become Extraordinary

Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog: What Your Group Needs to Become Extraordinary: "What Your Group Needs to Become Extraordinary"

Why do most groups fall short of their potential and only a few groups become extraordinary? To find out Geoffrey Bellman and Kathleen Ryan say we need to dig deeper into the wants, needs and motives that cause people to work together. They define an extraordinary group as one that “achieves outstanding results while members experience a profound shift in how they see their world.” They exhibit:

• A compelling purpose that inspires and stretches members to make the group and its work a top priority
• Shared leadership that encourages members to take mutual responsibility for helping the group be successful
• Just-enough-structure to create confidence to move forward, but not so much as to become bureaucratic or burdensome
• Full engagement that results in all members jumping in with enthusiasm, sometimes passionately and chaotically, regardless of role
• Embracing differences so that group members see, value, and use their diversity as a strength
• Unexpected learning that translates into personal and group growth
• Strengthened relationships among members characterized by trust, collegiality, and friendship
• Great results, tangible and intangible

Management by Imagination

Management by Imagination: "

The perception that good management is closely linked to good measurement runs deep. How often do you hear these old saws repeated: 'If you can't measure it, it doesn't count'; 'If you can't measure it, you can't manage it'; 'If you can't measure it, it won't happen'? We like these sayings because they're comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it.

But however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What's more, we won't see what we're missing because we don't know what it is that we don't know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world in which we are prisoners of a 'reality' that is in fact an edifice we've unknowingly constructed around ourselves.

The late 19th and early 20th century American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was the first to point out that no new idea in the world was ever produced by inductive or deductive logic. Analyzing the past, crunching the existing numbers to produce the future can do nothing more than extrapolate the future from the past. So if you stick to measuring what you can already measure, you cannot create a future that is different than the past.

For that to work out at all well for any institution making its decisions on that extrapolation, the future needs to be remarkably similar to the past — or bad things start to happen. If an institution is all geared up for a future that is like the past and the future changes radically, then the institution becomes an anachronism, like a Motorola or GM.

Managers in this situation tend to blame forces beyond their control: "How could we have ever predicted such a change?" In some sense, they are absolutely right. They had no way at all of predicting change. Their core conception — "If you can't measure it, it doesn't count" — precludes them from demonstrating to themselves that the future will be anything but an extrapolation of the past. Note however, that it is a prison that they have built for themselves. They build it, lock themselves in a cell, throw away the key; and then complain about being unfairly locked in a prison cell.

We need to get away from all those old sayings about measurement and management, and in that spirit I'd like to propose a new wisdom: 'If you can't imagine it, you will never create it.' The future is about imagination, not measurement. To imagine a future, one has to look beyond the measurable variables, beyond what can be proven with past data. While Motorola was projecting future sales volumes of 'feature phones,' Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion, was imagining what executive life would be like if you could receive your emails on a handheld device. How compelling would an ordinary phone be if you could have a BlackBerry attached to your belt? He couldn't 'prove' that this would be a good idea. There was no data on the demand patterns for smartphones, because smartphones existed only in his imagination. But a mere 11 years after the launch of the product of his imagination, RIM leads Motorola by an ever-accelerating margin in sales, market share and profitability.

Long ago, Peirce coined a term for the thinking that Lazaridis used to create the BlackBerry: abductive logic. He referred to it as 'inference to the best explanation' and 'a logical leap of the mind.' Lazaridis couldn't prove that executives would become so addicted to his invention that it would acquire the nickname CrackBerry. But as he watched executives behave in their day-to-day work, he inferred that there was a good chance that they would highly value immediate access to their email regardless of whether they were at their desk or on the road. There was nothing to measure. What counted were inferences; inferences made on lots of qualitative insights and 'a logical leap of the mind.'

The difference in the world of a Mike Lazaridis vs. the 'if you can't measure it...' executives is like day and night. For the abduction logician, the world is expansive and the possibilities are endless. For the measurement types, the world is a brutal place, full of nasty surprises that are impossible to predict. That is why any expression that starts with 'if you can't measure it' is dangerous for your managerial health.

Roger Martin is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada and the author of The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009). His website is: www.rogerlmartin.com

"

Will you be happier on Saturday?

Will you be happier on Saturday?: "

Richard Ryan, one of the behavioral scientists whose research figures prominently in Drive, thinks you might be, according to a recently released paper.

But the reason for this “weekend effect” isn’t leisure, he says. It’s autonomy most of all — as well as the satisfaction that comes from emotional relationships. On Saturdays and Sundays, he tells USA Today, ”there’s more connection with other people and more self-direction.”

What’s interesting about these findings is that they span across age, education, and profession. Ryan says it seems to be true even among people who generally enjoy their jobs. On weekends, he says, people have greater freedom to do what they want than they do during the work week. And many also feel greater competence.

It’s interesting stuff that makes me think slightly differently about the value of building this sort of time into our lives. What’s more, it raises a question: Why can’t work itself be like weekends — autonomous, self-directed pursuits that lead toward mastery and are animated by connection and purpose?

Do that — and maybe people can be more satisfied and productive the other five days of the week. Here’s hoping at least. TGIF. And have a great weekend.

"

Two simple questions that can improve your life in 2010

Two simple questions that can improve your life in 2010: "

(A “video excerpt” of Drive, created by the fantabulous Lindsey Testolin.)

"

The Rule of High School

The Rule of High School: "

Any sufficiently overheated industry will eventually resemble high school. High school is filled with insecurity, social climbing, backbiting, false friends, faux achievements, high drama and not much content. Much of this insecurity comes from a market that doesn't make good judgments, that doesn't understand how to reliably choose between alternatives. So it turns into a popularity contest.

As Tom Hanks reportedly said, 'Hollywood is like high school, but with money.'

Or the fashion magazine industry, which is high school but with more makeup.

Add to that the Internet, which is like high school but with a modem.

Or Twitter, which is high school but only 140 characters at a time.

As in high school, the winners are the ones who don't take it too seriously and understand what they're trying to accomplish. Get stuck in the never ending drama (worrying about what irrelevant people think) and you'll never get anything done. The only thing worse than coming in second place in the race for student council president is... winning.

"

Can You Motivate Everyone?

Can You Motivate Everyone?: "

At the basis of motivation is the why of human behavior. The fact that there are so many methods used to encourage people to put forth their best effort, speaks to the complexity of the issue. But can everyone be motivated? The simple answer is no. You can’t successfully motivate everyone. And some might say you can’t motivate anyone. Motivation is an internal process. Much is dependent on an individual’s concept of themselves and their interpretation of the environment or situation they find themselves in.


In Motivate Like a CEO, author Suzanne Bates reminds us that “you can inspire people to discover their own motivation. If you communicate effectively and connect people with purpose, they will feel the spark that motivates them.”


Additionally, she writes, “By consistently communicating purpose with passion, you attract the right people with the right talent, skills, and motivation. The right people come into your orbit; those who aren’t right will move on.”


At the same time, Bates does offer a caution. Throwing your hands up and acting on the assumption that you cannot motivate everyone can actually damage motivation further. This assumption was “true in boom times, when organizations were bloated and some people you hired were marginal. Those days are over. Now that companies have downsized and are arguably leaner and meaner with the best talent, this is a damaging assumption. It is a leader’s responsibility to motivate employees. It’s time to stop blaming employees, and start looking to leaders to ignite the spark.”"