Future of Food

In a new study, the Swiss GDI Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute looked for "opportunities for a sustainable food system" - and found a simple solution. Without any #foodtech, digitalization or AI, namely: Make sustainable products cheaper!
The basis for this is a representative survey for Switzerland: 48 percent of Swiss people often or always make sure to eat sustainably. So there is now a (potential) mass market here. 57 percent of respondents say they would reach for healthy and sustainable foods more often if their prices were cheaper. So the breakthrough in the market is being prevented by the high prices.

Now I am well aware that in many cases it costs more to produce sustainable products. That also applies, for example, to organic tea, which the tea campaign buys in Darjeeling and Assam. But there are also a whole range of foods where the environmentally and climate-friendly alternative costs LESS to produce than the conventional product - and yet sells for KEUR MORE. Examples include plant milk drinks and vegan cheese.

Why are they sold more expensively? Because you can - according to the old #marketing saying: "Take what the market will bear". Producers and retailers know that ecologically conscious consumers are willing to pay more for sustainable products. And that's why they're taking more out of their pockets. Prof. Michael Braungart (one of the creators of the Cradle to Cradle concept) tells a fitting story about this. Not about #food, but symptomatic. He developed an ecologically convincing television set for Philips that could even be produced at a lower cost. The idea was to help a sustainable product with a lower price break through in the market. Philips built the TV, but sold it at a higher price than conventional sets.

This leaves the company stuck in a small, but fine, and expensive, niche market, and accepts that products with larger environmental footprints will continue to dominate the mass market. The alternative, which is to offer sustainable products as cheaply as possible, would significantly improve the #climatefootprint of the grocery trade. And our nutrition and health to boot.

It makes you want to shout it out loud:
Producers and retailers, stop charging eco-conscious shoppers higher prices than necessary. Eco-conscious shoppers, stop getting ripped off just because the other side has realized that they can use your eco-consciousness to get higher prices.

Prof. Michael Braungart in interview

Process engineer, chemist, co-founder of the Cradle to Cradle principle

"An advertising brochure printed in Malaysia contains around 90 toxic carcinogenic substances. It ends up in our waste paper and is recycled. The toxic chemicals then end up in sludge and slag, and in the end as filler in cardboard boxes. So the crap stuff, once in the world, ends up poisoning our pizza boxes and our Advent calendars."

We would perfect the wrong thing and then call it environmental engineering, says Prof. Michael Braungart. He is a process technologist and chemist. Together with his colleague William McDonough, Michael Braungart developed the cradle-to-cradle principle.

Our product world today is primitive, he said. We produce things that are full of pollutants. Michael Braungart wants to make good products. Without pollutants. Products that either end up as unproblematic compost or can be reused as valuable, unmixed raw materials. To ensure that the raw materials are actually returned, goods should better be borrowed instead of bought, with a take-back obligation on the part of the producers. If producers got their material back, it would also be worthwhile for them to use high-quality materials.