The purpose of the Sustainable Food Lab is to create living examples of mainstream sustainable food supply chains. We co-initiated the Sustainable Food Lab, an independent, multi-stakeholder effort, with the Sustainability Institute and provided leadership, process design, and facilitation from its conception in 2002, to its launch in 2004, through the end of its first phase in 2007. We continue to work as part of the Secretariat providing event design and management and process support to this large-scale Change Lab involving food system actors “from farm to fork,” including business, government, and civil society leaders from Europe, North America, and Latin America. The Food Lab focuses on:

· Building a cross-sectoral community of leaders by bringing them together at summits and on learning journeys to reflect on what is happening and needs to happen in food systems.

· Piloting value chain innovations by developing new business models for sustainable trading relationships, finding ways that agriculture can mitigate climate change impacts, and discovering how to re-regionalise food supply sources.

· Supporting and strengthening organisational sustainability strategies by providing in-house training and coaching.

· Sharing learning, by creating resources such as the “Changing Vocabulary of Food” report and the “Healthy Value Chain” case book and Toolkit.

“[The Sustainable Food Lab is] the largest and most promising systemic change initiative I know of.” --Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline and founder of the Society for Organizational Learning

“The Food Lab is a safe space in which we can admit that we don’t have all the answers—which is a prerequisite to allowing new solutions to emerge.” --Member of Lab Team from a large food producer

“The people who stuck with the Lab are who’s-who of what’s going on. They are people who are way ahead of the curve, and that keeps attracting more such people along the way. I didn’t ‘get’ [sustainability] at all at the beginning, but I am starting to get it now. People saw potential in me and helped me, so now I feel like a convert and have made this my life’s mission.” --Member of Lab Team from a large food retailer