Sustainability in the fresh produce industry can mean a lot of different things to different stakeholders. It could mean regenerative agriculture, integrated pest management, packaging, biological products — or a combination of any or all of those approaches.
“Sustainability is such a wide swath of things,” said Brianna Shales, marketing director for Wenatchee, Wash.-based Stemilt Growers. “Companies have realized how sustainability plays into their overall goals. In our business, we also have to realize what those goals of our large customers are and how we can help fit into them.”
Kieran Ficken McNeice, director of sustainability programs with Measure to Improve, said sustainability is more of a holistic approach as opposed to a category-based approach.
“As much as we want to put things in these nice little buckets and say, ‘Packaging is a question, regenerative agriculture is a question, IPM is a question, there's a lot of crossover among these kinds of topics,” she said. “One of the cool things about sustainability is it asks us to think about things on a bigger level. How do these things interact? How do they interact with our other business priorities? How do consumers feel about this? How does this work for our retailers and our shipping partners? How does this actually work for our growers?”
Packaging
The role of plastics in the fresh produce industry is continuing to evolve. Jeana Cadby, director of environment and climate for Western Growers, said she sees the industry continuing to go toward more efficient use of plastics. She said the produce industry has already made huge strides in its use of plastics, incorporating lightweight materials, using more PCRs and increasing the recyclability of plastics.Cadby said a major stride is how the strawberry industry has adopted BOPP — or biaxially oriented polypropylene — labels on clamshells, which has helped increase its recyclability. However, other commodities such as fresh-cut salads and baby carrots rely on plastics as a food safety component.
“A significant challenge for the industry is that we need more ‘plug-and-play' opportunities when it comes to plastic alternatives,” she said. “The versatility and accessibility (infrastructure, cost, supply chain, etc.) of plastic materials means that it is incredibly difficult to replace with an alternative material and achieve equivalent functionality.”
Ficken McNeice said produce packaging not only protects the product in shipping, but it is also a branding and marketing opportunity.
“If you can say, ‘We're going to do away with packaging.' Does it actually make sense in practice? Can you do that from a business standpoint? Does it get to the consumer? Are they happy with it?” she said. “Maybe you think about, ‘Could we transition to a cardboard option?' Did that work? Does it cost twice as much? Does only half the produce make it? Are consumers annoyed that they can't see into the packaging?”
Food waste
“Food is still the No. 1 material in U.S. landfills, with perishable food (things like produce) making up the bulk of it,” said Liz Miller, senior manager of community relations for Spoonfuls, New England's largest food recovery organization. “What we know is that there's an opportunity to intercept excess or unsold perishable food while it's still edible and ensure it reaches people who could use it.”Spoonfuls says it has recovered and distributed more than 35 million pounds of food — 5 million pounds this year. The organization partners with food retailers and brands to pick up excess or unsold food — including produce — and deliver it to community-based organizations across Massachusetts. Spoonfuls recovered 41,000 pounds of food in a single day this year and more than 148,000 pounds of food that week, which Miller said was mainly unsold holiday produce such as squash, corn and beans.
Miller said food recovery is a great sustainability option for retailers, especially for produce that can still be consumed.
“In broader conversations about sustainability practices, it sometimes takes a back seat to waste diversion methods like composting — while a great option for food that can't be consumed by people, often involves food that's still good to eat, too,” she said. “There's an opportunity here to reframe how we think about sustainability … to consider not just the environmental, but also the human impacts of our business decisions."
Regenerative ag
Ficken McNiece said the produce industry faces the challenge of identifying what practices constitute regenerative agriculture.“That's a new term for a lot of folks, and they're trying to figure out what that means and how different companies are using it in different industries,” she said.
Another challenge for the industry is helping consumers and retailers understand how regenerative ag fits into a larger sustainability picture in the fresh produce industry.
“What do we collectively mean when we say that something is regenerative? What do we collectively mean when we say that it's sustainable? They're really interesting questions, because there's often this balance or maybe just tension between some of these different elements of sustainability,” she said.
Carbon credits
Shales said carbon capture, carbon credits and becoming more carbon neutral in Stemilt's supply chain continues to be a topic of conversation with clients.Ficken McNiece said those in the produce industry can continue to expect to hear more about greenhouse gas emission tracking.
“We saw more reporting pressure this year. We will see more reporting pressure next year,” she said. “It's really important that, when folks are answering those questions, they're thinking about what the best practices are for answering them. As people are asking for greenhouse gas emissions-related information, this is not the place to guess.”
Other measures
Cadby said she sees input use efficiency becoming a greater focus for produce growers' overall carbon footprint and sustainability efforts.“Where [growers'] electricity, fertilizer, pest control tools and water come from will have an impact on the total footprint of production,” she said.
She also sees the industry looking closer at climate resilience and developing tools, practices and inputs that can help the fresh produce industry be more resilient.
Stemilt Growers says it became the first U.S. farming company to secure the Integrated Pest Management Addendum of Conformity from Safe Quality Foods. Shales said IPM is nothing new in the fresh produce industry, as growers have been integrating composting, scouting and pest trap management, beneficial insect and natural predators, all to establish the orchards as a natural ecosystem.
“Composting is kind of the original regenerative ag,” Shales said, adding that the company has been composting for almost 25 years.
Tech and data
Ficken McNiece said she expects the fresh produce industry to continue to seek technology solutions to support sustainability objectives. But she cautions growers who seek to use technology as the one-size-fits-all remedy for sustainability metric tracking.”Technology supports the decisions that farmers make, that businesses make, and often those decisions are only as good as the data that gets fed in,” she said. “There are lots of very cool things out there — everything from cool probes you can use in the field to new modeling tools.”
She said something as low-tech as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a piece of paper could be a good place to start, noting the critical component of sustainability tracking is the data being tracked.
Shales said she has seen a significant shift to more data reporting in sustainability in the last decade. A significant challenge to this shift is the different data points from on-farm and packing operations.
“In produce that can be challenging, because the data sources can come from such a diverse amount of places, especially on the farming side,” she said. “How do we get better data to help convey those unique things that are helping our business succeed? We have a lot of environmental programs in place, but we've been doing a lot of work also on the social responsibility side, through [the Equitable Food Initiative], continuous improvement.”
And as there continue to be developments in farming technology and incorporating more technology — from autonomous sprayers to harvesting equipment — Shales said she sees a future where electric farm equipment can help reduce on-farm emissions even more.
Cadby said Western Growers has published case studies with Carbon Robotics' laser weeder for growers interested in understanding the costs and savings of incorporating automation into their operation.
Consumers' and retailers' role in sustainability
Consumers play a significant role in the future of sustainability in the fresh produce industry, which is often challenged with how to best convey the work of the industry in a way that the consumer will understand.“It's a really common problem to say, ‘There's all this cool language around sustainability. What does this mean? Does this mean anything?'” Ficken McNiece said. “Some of those terms are very regulated, and some of them are just really new.”
Shales said packaging continues to be a major concern for consumers who want to reduce their impact.
“I don't see the trend of consumers expecting more around sustainability in packaging going away,” she said. “We have to make sure that, as an industry, we really understand — but going away from one thing, is that truly sustainable? How do we prevent greenwashing and help consumers understand what is truly better for the environment?”
In terms of the industry conveying the message of sustainability to consumers, there's a tug and pull between being detailed enough so the consumer understands a little about the sustainability practices and not being too granular to be too complicated. Ficken McNiece said a successful tactic might be to humanize the effort by highlighting a person within the operation who helped implement the change and tie it to something that helps quantify the effort.
Shales said it's important for the produce industry to convey the message to consumers as clearly as possible.
"A lot of it, too, is making sure that we know the story we're telling when it comes to sustainability, and that we're doing that as with as much transparency as we can,” Shales said.
Retailers also play a pivotal role in terms of sustainability reporting, Ficken McNiece said.
“Retailers sit in this really interesting part of the supply chain where they're the one between consumers and suppliers,” she said. “They are where a lot of the reporting pressure currently sits because they are asking for information from their suppliers, and suppliers are trying to figure out how to provide that. Produce has some pretty complicated supply chains that make that a little challenging.”
Challenges to the future of sustainability
Those in the industry say reporting is a major challenge to sustainability efforts. Unlike food safety and other programs, there's a lack of clear-cut requirements or established guidance to help produce industry businesses determine its environmental impact.Shales said another challenge the fresh produce industry faces is the variety of different crops grown, which can make it hard to standardize, let alone measure, the environmental impacts or greenhouse gas emissions.
“Companies would have to look at, ‘What can we have the biggest impact on when it comes to greenhouse gasses?” she said. "We have to be able to have the data that would help us track and improve those things.”
Ficken McNiece said another challenge to meeting sustainability goals is that the efforts implemented will take resources and time. Produce industry businesses will have to decide what sustainability metrics or efforts to take on first and do them well.
“We have to balance our ambition with our willingness to really help drive change and make that kind of progress,” she said. “We've got all these ideas. Where do we want to focus first, so that we can make some good progress, get some success under our belt, collect some good data and help our team really learn how to do this so that they are able to see the benefit of the work that they're doing, and they don't feel like they've been pulled in 14 directions and they didn't make any real progress?”
Another challenge is the sheer cost of implementing some of these changes, whether it's new packaging or the changes that stem from that.
“Just because it might be more sustainable, that can have a cost too,” she said.
Ficken McNiece said sustainability can be a bit of a moving target, noting that “when you know better, you do better.”
Shales said she's also seen different sustainability metrics take precedence over time.
“Our industry, sometimes it can be highly focused on water or inputs, and [then] sometimes it's really focused on transportation and outputs and things like that,” she said.
Ficken McNiece said she expects to see a bigger focus on data and sustainability metrics in the future, often using best practices developed outside the fresh produce industry for areas like greenhouse gas emissions.
“More and more we're seeing alignment with some of those sort of bigger sustainability reporting and transparency objectives from outside the produce industry,” she said. “We're seeing retailers asking more questions about things that didn't quite make sense to them or fell out outside an expected range that's grown over time.”
Shales said she's optimistic about the role the fresh produce industry is playing in terms of advocating for sustainable packaging in a way that makes sense for the whole industry as well as the environment. She highlighted the work the Canadian Produce Marketing Association did to help advocate for the industry when a plastics ban was proposed.
“I think we need to have a seat at the table of those regulations,” Shales said. “It's great that we have people in the industry working on those types of things. If CPMA and other groups were not advocating for our part of that story, it could have been really detrimental if it would have gone through.”