[SOUND].
>> Stanford University.
>> Morning everyone.
Exciting to be here.
Christopher, thank you and congratulations on Summit 5, very very impressive.
I was just chatting with Shirley Everett before we started.
I've been with the CIA for 20 years.
I was there when we were how many of you have been up to the Napa Valley to see
the CIA raised home?
So had to do a lot of work to open that place 20 years ago.
And, and Shirley came up, did a hard hat tour.
And she said, I know you guys are opening here, we need to work together.
So CI and
Stanford have been collaborating for about 20 years now, on various projects, and
we have a new project we're going to mention a little bit further into the day.
I want to give a little sense of one of
the projects that we're heavily engaged in now called Menus of Change.
And this will give a little window into how we're looking at
food system transformation.
So that would be Culinary Institute up in the, the Napa Valley where we call home.
That's our main campus in, in Hyde Park, New York.
Just a little sense of that.
So just as all of you are sitting here,
this is a group of CIA students in our main theater in Hyde Park, New York,
looking listening to Ferran Adrià, one of the great chefs in the world.
We have virtual crossroads of world talent coming through our, our campuses.
Just the briefest snapshot on,
on who we are a non-for-profit college started in 1946.
3,000 students in our degree programs 46,000 alumni.
And four campuses now, in addition to New York and
California, we have a campus in Texas and a campus in Singapore.
So I want to talk a little bit about the role of chefs, and
how chefs play into all of this.
You know, if you go into a restaurant 30 years ago
you probably didn't know the name of the chef.
You were lucky to know the name of the restaurant.
Maybe you met somebody, maybe you were lucky to know the name of the owner.
the, the chef was buried in the kitchen, never came out.
There was no sense of that.
Of course, that's all changed.
Chefs are everywhere.
On food television, publishing books, owning restaurants, building empires.
So when you look at the potential for
food system transformation, you look at the food service sector.
There's a lot there to look at in terms of the size of the sector and
the potential for change.
$680 billion in sales, 47% of the share of the U.S. food dollar goes to food service.
That goes up and down a little bit.
And there is some additional percent beyond that
that is chef driven in the manufacturing and retail sector.
All in all, chefs in restaurants exert an enormous influence on national
food trends, consumer preferences, values, and then that in turn, affects everything
from agriculture, transportation, everything about our, our food systems.
When we think about leadership, I'm Vice President of Industry Leadership for
the college, and
so all of our outreach efforts develop around one of these four platforms.
Very focused on health and wellness, sustainability and
food ethics, but also very involved with world cuisines and
cultures, and of course, our core mission of professional excellence in innovation.
And I, I want to show you how all of these really weave around our Menus of
Change concept that we've developed.
One key takeaway in all this, is what I've, I've framed as the unapologetic
elevation of deliciousness as a global health and sustainability imperative.
If I, if I can leave you with anything today it's the,
it's the potential role of culinary in all of these discussions.
And I think we're just at this Google medium, we talked about yesterday,
how this conversation with a number of people.
The public health community, not to pick on anybody in the public health
community here, I think is uncomfortable talking about pleasure,
is uncomfortable talking about food being delicious.
It's okay to talk about food needing to taste good.
I don't think that's good enough.
Food has to be craveable.
If you look at what it's up against,
double bacon cheeseburger, fries, Coke and everything else like that and
we're going to put up something that's merely good against that?
We're going to lose every time, right?
So we ought to be very comfortable talking about fee,
food needing to be craveable, needing to be delicious.
And I'd like to see that in, in you know, in public policy statements,
in federal statements, and so otherwise, we're going to, we're going to miss out.
Unapologetic elevation of culinary strategies.
One thing tell people to eat more fruits and vegetables is quite another thing to
figure out how to do that so that they go, wow, I want more of that.
Food experience design, I would put in that same camp.
So, Menus of Change program is a collaboration between the CIA and
the Harvard School of Public Health.
We have a robust collaboration, a whole portfolio of leadership programs with
with the school of public health at Harvard.
And really our strategy on this is, within the food and service industry,
there's been this steady drip drip of issues that need to be addressed.
Sodium.
Everybody runs after sodium, then everybody runs after trans fat,
then everybody runs after calories, and then there's this sense of,
my god, the world is really shifting.
Our customers really do want healthier food.
We need to look more comprehensively.
And so what we've tried to do is to provide a framework.
Roland Washerman is the head of our sustainability business leadership
council with us here today.
And he will be speaking a little bit later.
Very instrumental in this initiative bring, bringing
sustainability imperatives, health imperatives, business imperatives together
to create a coherent framework vision for the future that looks at issues of risk.
That looks at issues of opportunity.
So people have a road map for the future.
and, and can look beyond the current quarter in terms of what they're doing.
Looking at, in each case, what is optimal.
This is the other thing that is a little bit of an issue with the food
service industry.
We tend to do things very incrementally. Right?
So it's like oh,
you want something healthier?
Okay, I'll take one of the pieces of bacon out of the double bacon cheeseburger.
Is that, is, you know, and then just moving.
So it's a chance to say what does the endpoint look like in nutrition?
What does the endpoint look like when we start to hit
the wall on water issues worldwide?
And what is that going to do to commodity prices for animal protein?
And, and then you know, if you're running a company with 1,500 units, or
you're running a Sodexo, Aramark, or Compass or food service for the military
or what have you, you can't turn on a dime like a neighborhood restaurant.
You've got to have a sense of what, where all these issues are trending.
So this all wraps up into guidance for the future of food.
We have two advisory councils a scientific and technical advisory council.
Christopher is on that council.
And our sustainable business leadership council,
Eric Montel is, is here on that council as well.
We publish an annual report now.
I'm not going to go into this, but this is a, I think, a really useful model for
change, for describing how we're engaged in the food service
industry in a process for change and the kinds of things that make sense to them,
as opposed to what we may want to impose on the food service industry.
looking, starting with evidence based in nutrition and public health,
the environment, integrating those, bringing in the consumer piece because you
may have consumer values and concerns that aren't necessarily evidenced based.
But you still have to deal with those because those are your cus,
your customers.
And one of the the most interesting pieces of this is that, you know,
for the longest time, the, the, the mantra of the food service industry,
manufacturers and everything is we're just trying to respond to our customers.
And now I think we have a clear sense that we can also lead our customers.
So it's a little bit of both, and so this kind of captures that.
This is a, a picture of the cover of our current annual report, menusofchange.org.
I encourage you to, to check it out, download that.
And as part of that, we have a dashboard that gives us
an annual checkup on where the industry is going on a number of key indicators,
24 principles of healthy sustainable menu development.
And I wanted to just single out one of these,
which is focused on largely plant-based cooking.
I'll just read part of this.
The most effective way to help diners to make healthy, sustainable food choices is
to shift our collective diets to mostly plant-based foods.
In fact, no other single decision in the professional kitchen or
the boardrooms of food service companies can compare in terms of
the benefits of advancing global environmental sustainable.
Now, here comes the strategy piece.
From the well-researched Mediterranean diet to the cuisines of Asia and
Latin America, traditional food cultures offer a myriad of flavor strategies to
support innovation around healthy, delicious, even craveable cooking that
rebalances ratios between food from animal and plant sources.
Now, this may be intuitive to everybody in the room,
but good luck finding this embedded in policy statements in the United States or
major public health organization in terms of strategy, right?
This is where we're getting at.
This raises two key questions.
One is [COUGH] how do we increase the interest in the foods we should be
eating more of?
And how do we take the foods we should be eating less of, in this case,
animal protein, meat, and leverage smaller amounts of those items, and
Chef Adam Busby will be doing a great demo on that a little bit later on.
So there's a whole variety of culinary strategies that you can start to
bring into this equation, starting from, you know, how do we grow our food,
farming for flavor, going out through culinary techniques,
the use of aromatics, various of other kinds of, of opportunities.
A little picture of a spice market in Istanbul here.
So just to take an example, one example, out of all this.
The use of herbs and aromatics.
You know, in, in, in the U.S. when you think about reducing meat portions,
often times, it's that large piece of meat on the plate.
And so, the message seems to be to people, oh, you want to cut that in half,
you want to make that smaller.
Actually what happens in a lot of traditional cultures is they'll take that
and add a whole lot of spices and herbs to it.
and, and then mix it with a lot of vegetable matter, and
you have this really craveable meal.
So it, it's, it's an entirely different approach.
But you can take the same approach to, forget about the,
the animal protein, forget about the meat for a minute, just to to produce.
To, to fruits and vegetables.
So this is, this is something you see all over the world.
Roasted vegetables plus the world spice kitchen.
You can look in India, roasted cauliflower roasted with Indian spices.
You can look at roasted carrots with North African spices.
You can go to Turkey and see wood-roasted eggplant.
The roasting of tomatoes with Oaxacan spices go into mole.
Spanish peppers roasted with aromatics, you can look all over the world, and it,
there is this combination of vegetables plus culinary technique,
plus spices, herbs, aromatics, and you get craveable produce.
You know,
much more effective than just telling people to eat more fruits and vegetables.
I think we all get that.
We have to move to the next thing in terms of strategy.
now, this is another critical piece of the puzzle.
And this, this is, we're especially guilty of this in the food service industry.
Which is we tend to lump everybody into a regular customer, or
a special need customer.
Regular customer, I'm going to do my regular menu.
Indulgence, over the top, celebratory, even if you're trying to
have an everyday meal, we're still going to load it on for you.
It's like oh, you have a special need?
You're a vegetarian?
Or you have some other gluten free something or other.
That's, we're [COUGH] we're happy to manage that,
but we're going to put that in a special category.
And you see how this plays out.
Let me just give you an example.
LYFE Kitchen here, not to pick on LYFE Kitchen, I love those guys.
They're doing great, great job.
But if you've happened to been, and I haven't been in the last few months,
but when I went maybe eight months ago to the LYFE Kitchen here in Palo Alto,
they had two burgers.
One was an angus burger, 100% beef.
The other one was a Portobello mushroom burger.
That's what we do in our industry.
It's like, you go into camp A, or you go into camp B.
And we'll do the same thing for appetizers.
You want a salad?
Great.
You want a big plate of fried calamari?
Great.
Can you get anything in the middle?
Hard, hard to do that.
So there's a, there's a, there's an opportunity to rethink that.
And here's a, here's a a just an example of this with a steak with mushrooms on
top, everybody gets that,
everybody gets the portobello mushroom burger, which is the one on the right.
What happens if you take a different approach inspired by,
let's say in this case, the cuisines of Asia, which will take a very small amount
of meat ad do a stir fry with a huge amount of green beans or
a huge amount of whatever vegetable you could be thinking of.
And then on the right a a meatball that is 25% mushrooms or
30% or 40% mushrooms and you've, you already taken a huge
whack out of the the meat in that and giving people a fabulous experience.
So we went then to where, a little bit later on we're going to be talking about
research, we went to UC Davis and said this is a hunch that we have.
We've cooked it up.
We really like it.
Can we do some sensory work?
So we actually did a formal sensory research study with UC Davis and
published this, the results of this recently.
So all over the world,
necessity was the mother of invention in traditional kitchens.
This guy kind of needs to sell all of these by the end of the day, or
he is going to be in trouble.
You know, and you see this from Asia to Latin America.
Plant protein, you know, you can go through a salad bar and
see a tub of tofu that is just cut up and sitting there.
Or you can look to a place lie Vietnam that does fabulous things with tofu,
lemongrass with basil, chiles, crusted peanuts.
Same thing with legumes, same thing with nuts.
So the bottom line, or one of the, one of the bottom lines that I
would like to leave you with and this tees up a little bit of our conversation for
later this morning about research is that, you know, if you look at these things
lining up in terms of the the impact of diet and health on chronic disease.
And you look at the absolute unsustainability of
our reliance on animal protein in trying to feed the future of
the planet with two to three additional billion people.
And yet, we know we keep running into this stumbling block of taste trumps nutrition,
taste trumps environmental imperatives every time.
Maybe not every time, but almost every time.
So what I'm suggesting that we need is a new global research focus around the inner
section of deliciousness, menu insight, healthy,
sustainable plant-based food choices.
There's a big disconnect between chefs, culinary insight, and
the academic research community on the other hand barely talk to each other.
And what often happens is the public health community will say oh you know,
you ought to be eating more fruits and vegetables, less of this, more and so.
So let's just hand this all over to the chefs.
You guys are the creative ones.
You'll figure this out.
Knock yourself out, right?
And the chefs are going you know, so
there's just this lack of collaboration, and that's what we are trying to address.
We need a broad based partnership to I think move some of these things forward.
Just a couple of things to end with,
we're very excited we have a long-running partnership now with, with Google.
And we're in the process of developing a Culinary Innovation &
World Flavors Lab at the Google Mountain View campus, and
this will be a place where we can test all of these things.
So basically, testing the imperatives that come out of Menus of Change and
saying what happens when you try something on a Google engineer.
Is he going to like it or not and get feedback that way.
And that will also be a lab that we can plug in other researchers from
around the country to test things or to try to replicate things.
So we're excited about that.
And again, we'll talk a little bit about this later on this morning.
But we're then launching a, a new partnership with Stanford that we're
calling our Menus of Change University Research Collaborative with a, a group
of premier universities that are really interested in food system transformation
and want to make that connection between academics and food service on campus.
So more on that a little bit later in the morning.
So that's it.
Excited to be here.
Thank you very much.
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