Sustainable Food Laboratory

From his vantage point at the desk of VP of Quality assurance and Sustainable Agriculture at SYSCO, Craig Watson is sitting on a golden egg. SYSCO has developed a Sustainable/Integrated Pest Management Program that not only achieves pesticide reduction—reducing 300,000 pounds active ingredients of pesticides in its first year, 2005—but also soil and water conservation and the reduction of other inputs.

SYSCO developed this program with all of its suppliers of canned and frozen fruits and vegetables. The program was modeled after one in New York State developed for Wegman’s grocery stores, but had to be much further developed because SYSCO is a $30 billion national company sourcing internationally.

According to Shane Sampels at SYSCO, there are many IPM models that are crop and region specific, but before this program, a national standard that could be applied to many different crops did not exist. Because SYSCO buys from processors rather than farmers, they had to work closely with those suppliers. They needed technical advice and third-party validation, for which they chose the nonprofit IPM Institute in Wisconsin.

Watson stresses that this program has not achieved perfect environmental stewardship but will continually improve over time.

Because of the unique features of the program, in addition to the reduction in pesticides they also reported reusing or recycling 155,000,000 tons of organic waste material, 6,400,000 lbs of cardboard and paper, 2,900,000 lbs of metal products and 1,600,000 lbs of plastic.

Tom Green, President of the IPM Institute, describes the initiative as “the largest effort ever undertaken by a North American food distributor to improve sustainable agriculture and IPM practices for the food products it distributes.” This initiative involves 70 suppliers, 160 food factories and approximately 375,000 acres of crop land the first year of implementation. SYSCO has offered to share all the details of the program with any other food company, including competitors.

The question now before the Sustainable Food Lab is, “What will it take for this program to continuously improve and be adapted and adopted by the entire food industry?” At the London Sustainable Food Lab meeting in February 2007 we will discuss scaling up and replication of this initiative and other key business models that move us toward our vision of a sustainable food supply.