THE BRITISH food industry must boost innovation in order to improve productivity, but sustainably. This was one of the key points made by Lord Carter of Coles in his talk Innovation in Agriculture and Food. He was speaking at the first ever Thought Leaders and Innovators Conference and Partnering Event, organised by Footprint Forum in [...]
Septembers Foodservice Footprint will reveal the findings of a new government report showing that businesses are slow in adapting to climate change especially the opportunities it provides. Here, Jessica Frank, climate change project manager at Twin, explains why adaptation is the key to survival. [...]
Vicky Murray, Forum for the Future principal sustainability advisor, explains why we all need to be innovating to shift the foodservice sector for the better, and how we can make it happen. IT IS 1991. The coffee price has plummeted. A bunch of investors [...]
BUSINESSES HAVE to start producing more disruptive innovation in order to meet the sustainability challenges and goals of the future. The combination of rising energy and commodity prices, concerns over security of supply and consumers who are demanding increased levels of corporate responsibility will force [...]
Last week I spoke at Footprint Forums Thought Leaders & Innovators Partnering event. I was on the Sustainable Procurement panel talking about Cafédirects innovative businesses model, which 20 years ago went against the coffee industry. Instead of procuring coffee through anonymous auctions, we went direct to the smallholder farmers, hence getting them a better price. [...]
Cafédirect has a relatively short history in the scheme of things but as a mover and shaker of sustainability its contribution has been emphatic. Footprint finds out how Cafédirect goes about its marketing and finds, surprisingly for such a well known brand, it has quite a softly, softly approach. It seems light years ago [...]
Whitney Kakos, Impact & Sustainability Manager at Cafédirect tells Foodservice Footprint about a range of strategies devised to help smallholder farmers of coffee, tea and cocoa cope with changing rainfall patterns. Smallholder coffee, tea and cocoa farmers represent one of the populations most vulnerable to climate change, and one key change is rainfall patterns. [...]
Andrew Kobia Ethuru, a Cafédirect grower director at the Michimikuru tea factory in Kenya, talks to Footprint about the realities of climate change in that country and its impact on tea planters. Whilst we in the UK might not feel the effects of climate shifts, growers in far-flung corners of the world such as Kenya [...]
Farms of the future
By footprint on November 20, 2012
Published in: Comment, Features, Features, Foodservice News, Green Scene and tagged Al Gore, Bayer CropScience, Cafedirect, Coventry University, Dr Julia Whright, Dr Patricia Thornley, Elizabeth Bowles, European Food and Farming Partnership, Food Ethics Council, Food for Life Catering, Forum for the Future, Future of Food And Farming, Geoff Tansey, Jonathan Porritt, Julian Little, Mark Driscoll, Michael Bond, NFU, Peter Kendall, Professor Charles Godfray, Professor Sir John Beddington, Rachel Carson, Robert Frost, Robyn Kimber, Silent Spring, Soil Association, The Dailt Telegraph, University of Manchester, University of Oxford, WWF.
FIFTY YEARS ago this month the book Silent Spring kick-started the environmental movement and changed the way we grow our food. As climate change and population growth exert growing pressure, what will the next generation of farms look like? This month marks the 50th anniversary of [...]