EXCLUSIVE: Setting the Stage for Food Integrity
At the recent Newtopia Now trade show, which took place Aug. 25-28 in Denver, Progressive Grocer spoke with Kiira Heymann, industry research and engagement manager of the Bellingham, Wash.-based Non-GMO Project, along with her colleagues, Brittany O’Brien, chief executive of marketing and comms, and Madison Rossi, senior partnerships specialist, about the organization’s latest venture, the Food Integrity Collective, and what it can offer to retailers and CPGs.
Progressive Grocer: What exactly is the Food Integrity Collective, and what is its mission?
Kiira Heymann: The Non-GMO Project has been considering for a long time what our next contribution to the food system is going to look like, and while we are so stoked and proud of what we’ve done with the development of a non-GMO supply chain in conjunction with eaters, we’ve come to a moment of realizing that certifications are kind of a band-aid fix for a broken and murky system. And we love this idea that we’re a shortcut of trust. We want to kind of evolve our contribution and evolve the paradigm for certification in a way that allows eaters to really connect to themselves through food, and then their community and their environment. It’s something we’ve always done for the non-GMO Project mission, but we’re expanding the programming now to reflect that in a new way.
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PG: How did the collective get started? How did you decide to approach this issue?
Brittany O’Brien: That credit goes to our founder, Megan Westgate. And it’s been five years of looking at how we want to expand the mission of the Non-GMO Project. It came through a lot of learning. At one point, we were really interested in zeroing in on soil health and through learning in that realm and learning alongside with regenerative certifications coming online. We just started to see a little bit of a gap between the ecological mission of those other missions and the human health component and the human health crisis that we’re seeing in this moment, and how that is all deeply interconnected.
That also was supported through learning, through [regenerative-business educator] Carol Sanford’s teaching, and we’ve been learning and involved with a studio called ReNourish Studio for the last three years. That is really looking at what they call “living systems thinking” and looking at a regenerative paradigm outside of just regenerative agriculture. What does regenerative mean as a way of life, of how we engage with our communities? That is really where the Food Integrity Collective was born out of.
PG: What role do food producers, and especially food retailers or grocers, play in the collective?
KH: I think that something that we really want to honor [is] the fact that the Non-GMO Project was founded by retailers, and retailers are in a unique position to engage with and connect and educate leaders. So we’re really, really wanting to start early with our stakeholder groups, with retailers, again, with this concept of food integrity.
We currently launched a community of practice with 10 CPGs to imagine and engage in this new type of programming with us over the course of the next year, and we have plans to bring retailers in in the same way so we can have roundtable and workshop discussions about what does food integrity mean. Currently, we have an eight-petal framework that includes eight different issue areas that we know are really important and interconnected to that living systems piece that Brittany was speaking about, and we want to workshop what are the baseline requirements for all of those things, and then how do we collectively move forward with those holistically so that we can move the needle and shift the system.
We are planning some engagements with some retailers this fall to get involved in that work, and we hope to continue to partner with retailers to get that education and mission out.
PG: Oh, that sounds exciting. Have you developed any particular programs yet, or is this all still in the planning stage as you get stakeholders on board and start working with them?
KH: We currently have that founding CPG cohort that meets monthly to think about how we’re working on this new programming. We also have direct eater outreach happening in the marketing side of things, with a new newsletter and totally new socials that are promoting these concepts and our thought leadership. Megan Westgate, our founder and CEO, just published a whitepaper on the topic that we’re hoping can get widely distributed so we can continue to build the field in this way. And then we’re also in development with a web application that’s going to utilize the same product database that we have for Non-GMO Project Verified products.
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But we’re thinking about ways to surface all of these issue areas and that eight-petal framework so that eaters can become engaged and retailers, too. We know there are tons of different procurement policies that retailers have, so how can they find and look for products that are of high integrity through a program like this?
PG: How can companies or organizations get involved?
Madison Rossi: We have the retailer roundtable event in October, so that’s a great way for retailers to step in right now and get involved. They can sign up on the website for that, and then our brand summit as well, so they’re already Non-GMO Project Verified. They’ll hear about it at that event in October, and we’ll have a follow up in November, kind of a Q&A style.
PG: Since this is a brand-new show concept, what are you hoping to get out of your time here at Newtopia Now?
KH: We were excited to see how [the show organizers] were shifting the experience in general. We participated yesterday in some of the off-site experiences. I think something that I’ve taken from the living systems learning is that it’s truly relational, so being here in person and making deep connections and having conversations that can inspire people to take their next step on this journey. That’s the biggest possible thing. Yes, we have this booth; yes, we’re giving out business cards and checking in on our brands.
But the best possible outcome is deeper connections and relationships so that we can move this work forward together.
