I'm gonna start with a hard hitting problem statement: When you can substitute a salad ingredient for a baseball, something is wrong.
Industrial food poses bigger problems than hard tomatoes. Food deserts, hypoxic zones, obesity. But the current food system wasn't designed to be sustainable, or healthy, or fair to local farmers.
It was designed for three other goals: durable food products, year-round supply, and low-cost. And it's done a stunning job at accomplishing those three things.
But this system can't go on. The intolerable costs of fossil fuels and healthcare, and all the negative side effects from the industrial food system are forcing a change.
And that presents an opportunity for us in the Good Food Movement.
This is our moment to shape a new food system by creating supply chains based on values.
Fair trade, healthy soils and ecological farming, transparency and resilient regional economies. But we have a blind spot called logistics.
The very thing we need to learn in order to reach millions of people with our values.
By logistics, I mean every aspect of handling the product. From packing and grading, warehousing, to transportation and food safety.
For many in the Good Food Movement, logistics comes as an afterthought. It's invisible.
But unless we learn food logistics, we're gonna be a marginal movement on the outside looking in. So I'm gonna make the invisible a little more visible.
First, with a little history. By the 1950s, the American consumer was hungry for new products. One insight drove big changes.
A vegetable's durability depended on its temperature when it was packed.
So get all that solar energy out of the plant, get the temperature down to the ideal storage temperature, and then hold it there. That's the supply chain.
I mean, that's the cold chain. In 1950, California growers were shoveling tons of ice on top of rail cars filled with iceberg lettuce.
Maybe it'll arrive in the east, salable, or maybe it'll be slime. Then, vacuum cooling was invented.
With vacuum cooling, lettuce could be cut and packed, and brought down to 34 degrees in under an hour, compared with 72 hours before.
The invention of the standardized metal shipping container further revolutionized shipping.
Loading boxes by hand one by one was incredibly tedious. The solution was brilliant. Why not take 1000 of these boxes, put them in a protective shipping container, and then just move the containers around?
Today, massive cranes can lift a 20 ton container every two minutes onto a ship.
There were so many innervations and computers and technology were really part of every one. And so we arrive at 2014.
You go into a supermarket today, you find four kinds of kale, 12 kinds of tomatoes in the produce section that has 350 in a store that has 40,000 different items.
Today, we're importing 90 times more produce than we did in 1950. In the last decade, people discovered something that global food wasn't giving them.
Real flavor and freshness from local sources. So why can't our huge distribution system just add more local products to the thousands of items it already carries?
Well there are two reasons: First, cause people really weren't asking local food to be just another faceless commodity from anywhere.
They wanted to know the farm name, how was it grown, and even whether it was fairly traded.
And the second reason is because small loads from our local regional farmers just didn't fit neatly into the food distribution system.
Imagine you're a produce buyer for a distributor. The supermarkets that are your customers are screaming for local because their customers are.
You persuade your boss to run an experiment. You locate three reputable tomato growers in states, three states, where you are distributing food to.
You keep the hothouse tomato that you've been buying for a long time, because it's reliable. So now, you're offering four different kinds of salad tomatoes.
Each one requiring its own palate space, its own dock inspection, its own delivery, its own item code, its own line on the price list.
Your warehouse workers are frustrated because now there's four items that kinda look the same.
What you saw as innovation and good customer service, your boss sees as extra time, extra space, out of stocks, lost sales, more waste, general confusion, and less profits.
Virtually all produce distributors have tried to offer more local products. They had to. But many of them couldn't get past the risk and the extra cost up front.
So the mainstreaming of local has come rather slow. That has created a space for hundreds of new businesses.
Some are called food hubs, like Red Tomato, functioning as small distributors with specialized and locally grown.
Others are food tech startups, with a disruptive strategy to replace grocery stores with internet based retailing.
I hope these food tech startups will be very disruptive. But I predict, they aren't gonna put any grocery stores out of business all too soon.
The logistics of globalization and mega scale will adapt and change and keep right on delivering the three things it does best: durable products, year-round supply, and low-cost food.
So those three goals aren't going away. But we have to master them. It's the foundation.
We also need them to sound a little more compatible with our values. So I have revised them.
Goal one: Take freshness and flavor to a new level. Two: Make local a significant part of year-round supply. And three: Offer good value.
Now we're ready for a new logistic. Logistics that makes it possible for the farmers in this region to fit inside this region's food distribution system.
Wholesaling is how we're gonna reach a whole lot of people. But it's not for all farmers. We need farmers who are really committed to the discipline of packing and growing for wholesale.
One or two wholesale farms in the same state doesn't really make a strong supply chain. That's where regional comes in.
In 1999, Red Tomato entered the Heirloom Tomato market. We had a four to six week New England season.
Today, we start in Southern Pennsylvania, we move up to New York, then New England, back down to Pennsylvania, and we have a 14 to 18 week season.
Red Tomato has no warehouse and no trucks. We got rid of them in 2002. We rely on growers for warehousing and trucking as much as possible, and then we hire the rest.
We coordinate this decentralized supply chain using the one asset that we did retain. Our computers.
In all cases, the new logistics is asking for creative collaboration. We have to be as inventive with ways of collaborating as they were in the 1950s with refrigeration.
So this means food hubs working with distributors. Small companies working with each other. Growers in formal cooperatives. Growers cooperating informally.
Collaboration adds capacity and it also builds trust. Trust isn't only about feeling good. Trust can also be a way to eliminate steps and save some money.
Here's one example of how new logistics works in action. Freshness is the number one thing consumers want in produce. That led us to develop a program in Northern Jersey with a supermarket chain, and the program's called, Local Fresh 24/7.
10 to 40 products arrive at every store in the morning, guaranteed to have been harvested within the last 24 hours.
The display shows not only the harvest time, but it also shows the farm where each item comes from.
The produce managers in those stores are ordering 2 days ahead of time instead of one. So now, they're ordering out of a field instead of out of inventory in a warehouse.
The farm harvests in the early morning, it's brought to a nearby cooperative, it's vacuum cooled, it's put on a truck, it heads to the supermarket central warehouse, but instead of going into inventory in that warehouse, it stays on the loading dock.
And it's moved quickly into a place where it's heading for an outbound truck to a store in a process known as cross docking.
Trust replaces that formal dock inspection. If there's something wrong with a product anywhere, we just take their word for it.
So how do we get from a global community, from a global commodity system, to one that's infused with new values?
By intentional design. Values and logistics together. Think of the values you hold dear as your active ingredient. And think of logistics as your carrier.
Make logistics a full partner in your venture, sitting shoulder to shoulder with marketing, finance, and technology.
Then, we can move beyond durable products, year round supply, and low cost supply to a world with fair trade, healthy soils, and ecological farming,
transparency, resilient regional economies, and tomatoes that when hit with a baseball bat splatter into a zillion pieces of fabulous flavor. Thank you.