Creating A Sustainability Facts Label
We have a Nutrition Facts label for our health, but what about a label for the health of the planet? Here's my vision for what a Sustainability Facts label could look like.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” - John Muir
Food Labels Matter.
In a world where 55% of people live in cities and only 1.3% of the American population is employed in farming, as compared to 48% in 1870, food labels are one of the key ways that eaters encounter the story behind their food. If we want to make sure all eaters can participate in shaping the future of food, we need to get food labels tracking the right things in the right way.
It’s impractical for us to be physically present to observe the growth, harvesting, and processing of crops into food, so the label on the package gives us a sense of where our food has been and what it’s made of. A food label is an eater’s proxy for “being there” when your food gets made. But the overall disconnection between urbanites and farming communities creates a knowledge void where silly labeling moves can take advantage of eater ignorance about food system.
A 2017 study published in the Journal of Food suggested that 8% of consumers would pay a premium for food products that had the word “natural” on the package. Another study in 2016 by Consumer Reports showed that 73% of people seek out foods labeled with the word, “natural,” while only 58% sought out organic foods. And in 2019, a study by Mintel found that 39% of eaters think “all-natural” is the most important claim when purchasing red meat. All of this is despite the fact that the word “natural” is essentially meaningless and is weakly regulated, if at all.
In 2016 as McDonald’s was transitioning to using cage-free eggs, they found that on the farms they worked with, something called “enriched colony cage” environments were more successful at reducing chicken mortality than cage-free setups. Yet, they went with “cage-free” over “enriched cages” because their consumer research found that no one recognized what enriched meant.
And Hint Water is a flavored water that calls out on the back of the label that it’s gluten free. Not to be outdone, there’s even a brand of plain bottled water that loudly touts itself as “Gluten Free Diet Water.” How did we get here as a society? Food labels were meant to enlighten us but they’ve also pointed out society’s collective ignorance about food.
A New Sustainability Facts Label
Despite all the confusion labels can cause, it was a big step in the right direction to have mandated nutrition and ingredient labels on food. Prior to the late 1960s, there wasn’t a lot of information readily available about food products. We’ve come a long way since then in setting standards for what brands must reveal about ingredients, processing, and nutrition through things like the Nutrition Labelling Act of 1990.
While those labels are a useful tool for eaters trying to monitor their personal health, what about eaters trying to watch the health of the planet?
We need a food label that captures the environmental impact of what we eat. Labels and certifications are a necessary shorthand for consumers to quickly understand and make decisions on which food products to buy, but they don’t always tell the full story. Organic, Non-GMO, and Gluten-Free labels are useful when measuring things that can be certified in black and white terms, but things involving natural ecosystems are not always black and white.
You could buy a food that’s certified Non-GMO, but do you know if they’re doing all they can to enrich soil health? Are they using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides? What’s their carbon footprint? This is not to say that you should be categorically suspicious of Non-GMO foods, but there’s usually more to the story and sustainable farming is more than just using a Non-GMO seed and calling it a day.
How might we tell a more complete story about a food’s impact on the planet in a way that’s user friendly to eaters? Almost no one has the time during their grocery trips for a full analysis of all the all things a farmer did to grow a certain crop, but we shouldn’t let perfection stand in the way of progress.
I began to think about how people summarize complex information in other domains and sports immediately came to mind. In sports, all manner of statistics are exhaustively tracked every season for all players. And while legends like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant are both in the top 5 of all-time scoring leaders, the number of points they scored doesn’t fully capture how impactful they were on the court.
In Basketball, it’s customary to measure a player’s performance on three key stats, not one: points, rebounds, and assists. Doing this builds a more complete picture of how that player is able to score, play defense, and enable their teammates to score too. And even beyond those three key metrics, there are many more qualitative characteristics that tell a fuller story about a player’s impact on the game. At the very least, measuring these three key stats is going to have a stronger correlation to greatness than if you just tracked one.
We can think about sustainable agriculture in the same way. One crop might excel at few things but be deficient in others. Do those deficiencies cancel out the strengths? There is no such thing as a purely good or bad food and plants and animals, like us, contain multitudes.
Putting Sustainability On Everyone’s Radar
To track and succinctly represent a wider range of sustainability metrics, we can use a radar chart to represent those metrics while making it easy for an eater to quickly and visually get a sense of a food’s holistic impact.
The chart above is laid out in a way that a food with a larger radar chart area is going to be more sustainable than a smaller one. Once you remember what sustainability traits are on each axis, it’s easy to quickly spot where a food succeeds or falls short on that trait. Grocery shoppers in a rush can simply look for items that have the fullest radar charts once they understand how the graphic works. It gets people away from black and white, all or nothing thinking and tries to represent ecosystems impact more holistically.
The radar chart also gives people easier ways to zero in on the sustainability issues that matter most to them. It’s no different to how someone on a Keto diet will zoom in on the net carbs on a nutrition label, except for environmental impact.
Measuring food’s environmental impact on a multivariate basis may also help the Regenerative Agriculture (RA) movement. Unlike a certification like Organic where there is a very clearly stated list of rules and processes a grower must follow, there isn’t a hard and fast guideline on how to become a regenerative farmer. There are general principles that describe what RA farmers should do, but RA is more focused on outcomes versus process. This recognizes that no two farms are alike and what might be considered “regenerative behavior” on one farm in the Midwest could be not regenerative in the Deep South. RA gives growers more latitude to decide what practices they will use in order to achieve outcomes related to soil health, biodiversity, and others.
It’s been difficult for the industry to turn Regenerative Agriculture into a household name, despite it being more seriously talked about in food circles for about a decade and it being practiced by indigenous peoples for millennia. Complex farming practices and outcomes are difficult to efficiently communicate to the average eater without oversimplifying the content.
However, certification seals on food labels provide clarity for eaters, despite their imperfections. They act as shorthand signals for busy eaters who just want to understand if they’re eating something “good” or not. And seeing that Organic seal on the front of the package certainly gives food a positive halo for many eaters.
But because RA doesn’t have a unified checklist of things a farmer must do to be regenerative, it’s hard to communicate to eaters why a regeneratively grown food is good for the planet. RA is context based and in order to tell the story of how something is regenerative, one needs to say a little more about what food is being grown, where it’s grown, and how it’s grown. This is a story that unfortunately very few eaters have time for as they walk down the aisles of a grocery store. I think the ideal way to communicate to an eater that a food is regenerative is not to just emblazon a “regenerative” seal on the front of the package, but to succinctly showcase how well the food succeeds at the handful of outcomes that matter most to regenerative farmers.
Outcomes based reporting is a departure from most of the food certifications we have on the market today, which certify processes and ingredients, but it’s one that is needed for the industry to move beyond merely sustainable agriculture and into regenerative agriculture.
You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure
Labels can act as amplifiers for food systems activities. Having worked at Chobani during the Greek Yogurt boom, I saw firsthand how food brands participated in an arms race to see who could get the most protein into their product. There are many things that go into a nutritionally balanced diet, yet the industry spent an incredible amount of time and money on figuring out how to optimize for one nutritional metric. Both consumers and the industry did all they could to create and glorify foods that had high protein.
The same can’t be said today for something environmentally valuable, like soil health. How might we get consumers to obsess over soil health as much as they do with protein grams? Mandating a sustainability facts label on every food would be a first, but not the only step to creating a more virtuous arms race where consumers demand more from sustainability metrics.
Or better yet, something like the sustainability radar chart I’ve proposed could get eaters and industry alike to stop isolating and obsessing about individual metrics that are only a fraction of a nutrition or sustainability story. I totally get why food marketers tout single stats, like protein, to eaters. It’s easier to reduce something as complex as one’s nutritional situation into one thing, rather than talk about food more holistically. But in the long run, it takes us out of the mindset that the health of our bodies and our planet run as systems, not single metrics in isolation.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Can you imagine if there was no scoreboard in Basketball? You’d never know how to act on the court because you don’t know where anyone stands. Yet, this is essentially what we’ve been doing on food without a sustainability facts label—taking a bunch of shots and not knowing if they’re doing anything for us.
Putting a sustainability facts label on food is a first crucial step to ensuring the food industry looks out for the planet as much as it looks out for your health or their bottom line. I just hope we can get one on our food before it’s too late.
Footnotes
3 Recent posts from my Substack
3 Highlights from my current reading list
How will we feed Earth’s rising population? Ask the Dutch by Kenny Torrella - Vox.
Planning for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and beyond by Sam Altman - OpenAI.
Phosphorus Saved Our Way of Life—and Now Threatens to End It by Elizabeth Kolbert - The New Yorker.
As always, my email is mike@thefuturemarket.com for questions, comments, consulting, or speaking inquiries.