Remodeling Food Supply Chains for Sustainability

What’s the story behind the food on your plate? Whether it’s a fresh salad or a juicy burger, your food might have traveled thousands of miles, crossed a couple of borders, and consumed hundreds of gallons of water before arriving on your table. What looks like a simple, everyday meal often masks a complex global supply chain system—one that consumes unfathomable amounts of energy, generates substantial carbon emissions, and wastes enough food annually to have fed 2 billion people.¹

In food supply chains designed for cost and efficiency, sustainability is often an afterthought. While sustainability leaders and policymakers are pursuing various approaches to shift priorities in the food industry—including regulations, green certifications, sustainable procurement guidelines, and voluntary carbon reporting—adoption and effectiveness have been uneven. Emerging technologies like blockchain traceability stand to amplify the impact of these solutions, but uptake remains slow.²

While several logistical issues and systemic limitations stand in the way of food supply chain sustainability, behavioral barriers also exist. Businesses and buyers tend to stick with default procurement practices, responsibility for sustainability is diffused across a range of supply chain actors, and upstream practices are mostly invisible to those making buying decisions. Alongside the much-needed systemic changes to supply chain systems, addressing these behavioral challenges can help increase uptake of new guidelines, regulations, and technologies, improving sustainability at every step in the journey from farm to fork.