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The Sustainable Food Entrepreneurship panel at U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business. Pictured from left to right are Will Rosenzweig, Alice Waters and Claus Meyer. Photo by Bruce Cook
“There’s quite a wonderful energy going on here and we’ve never had to employ bouncers before,” Robert Strand announced on Thursday (Oct. 29) in front of an overflowing Wells Fargo Room at the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business. “But there are student bouncers outside these doors right now,” he continued to laughter.
Strand, the executive director of the Center for Responsible Business at Haas, was introducing the Sustainable Food Entrepreneurship panel to the 50 or so “fortunate few” that found a seat or standing room. Students, faculty, and community members munched on the type of food that you’re not exactly sure what it is, but it tastes good. And more importantly, it makes you feel good, too. They listened to Haas instructor and Food Business School dean Will Rosenzweig moderate a panel of author, restaurant owner, and food activist Alice Waters and entrepreneur, professional chef, and food activist Claus Meyer.
If there was ever a Berkeley-type event, this was assuredly the Berkeley-est. Waters, who owns acclaimed Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse and runs the Edible Schoolyard at nearby Martin Luther King Middle School spoke about her “call” to food that came shortly after the Free Speech Movement. Meyer, a Denmark native and co-founder of multiple-time Best Restaurant in the World, Noma, talked about his French enlightenment and his mission to “change the food culture” of his Scandinavian roots.
TRENDING: BUSINESS STUDENTS’ INTEREST IN FOOD
The story could easily be about the personalities discussing everything from Waters’ involvement in a failed political campaign in the ’60s to Meyer’s humorous accounts of being “raised on a diet of margarine and frozen vegetables pre-boiled in Eastern Europe.”
But as Strand asked all the students in the room to raise their hands, and about 85% of the room raised their hands, two things became apparent. First, this reporter was suddenly self-conscious of the Clif bar in his backpack that was probably processed so many times it could withstand a Mars mission. Second, there’s a budding interest in food entrepreneurship among some of the top business students in the world.
But it’s certainly not a Berkeley-only trend. Last June, food startup Maestro won Chicago Booth’s startup competition—netting $70,000. FOCUS Foods, a sustainable rooftop-garden venture founded by a 2015 Wharton MBA grad has been setting startup competitions on fire, earning $130,000 along the way. Babson College has an “action tank for food entrepreneurs,” called Food Sol. And multiple schools including Stanford’s Graduate School of Business to Harvard Business School have food and agriculture clubs.
A INDUSTRY ON THE VERGE OF A ‘TECTONIC SHIFT?’
Still, Haas might be one of the few to dedicate a dean’s series panel to the topic and bring in two of the most influential food activists in the world. “It’s a testament to Berkeley that an event like this would take place,” Rosenzweig, who has taught at Berkeley for the past 15 years and was a senior vice president at Odwalla juice company and co-founded The Republic of Tea, said as he opened the panel discussion.
The panel comes at a time when business students are seeing opportunities in the way we source, package, and consume food. It’s an industry on the potential verge of disruption. Earlier this month, Whole Foods announced the firing of 1,500 employees, prompting co-CEO Walter Robb to pronounce a “tectonic shift” coming to the grocery industry. In an effort to stay in front of the shift, General Mills announced just last week they’ve created a VC for food startups.
The “tectonic shift” seems to be stemming from two trends, both of which were discussed during the panel. First, a growing obsession with where food comes from and how it’s consumed. Second, massive amounts of VC dough being pumped into food startups—particularly in food-delivery ventures. To be sure, both are complex business problems.
‘WE HAVE BECOME WHAT WE EAT’
“We started to connect the food with the farms,” Waters said when Rosenzweig asked to explain her restaurant’s success. “Because people wanted to know where we could get that apricot, or where we could get that pluot, or where we get those green beans.” Meyer agreed by saying the reason for starting his restaurant in 2003 was to create “systemic change” in the Nordic food culture by sourcing locally.
After an “industrialization of food” that saw a country keen on McDonald’s and Kraft, the panelists believe the culinary pendulum is about to switch back.
“I think one of the biggest problems we have is we live in a fast food culture,” Waters said. “So we have become what we eat. And when we eat fast food, we digest the ideas of fast, cheap, and easy: that food should be available 24-7, that it’s OK to eat in your car, that who cares who’s cooking it or where it comes from. It should be the same in Bogota as it is in Berlin … we have to come back to our senses.”
‘YOU CANNOT CHANGE A FOOD SYSTEM WITH TWO CHEFS, A DISHWASHER, AND AN ENTREPRENEUR’
Indeed, many recent successful upstarts point to a culture on the cusp of coming “back to our senses.” Revolution Foods was created by executive MBAs and moms Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey in Rosenzweig’s social entrepreneurship class at Haas. To date, Revolution Foods has served more than 150 million healthy meals at schools around the country—many of which are in low-income school districts and communities.
Meanwhile, Blue Apron, founded by Harvard MBA Matt Salzberg, just swept up a $135 million Series D seed round in June. Both companies represent two very different food delivery startups that are shaping the “tectonic shift” Robb spoke of earlier this month.
Meyer mentioned the importance of growth when speaking of his mission to change the food structure in Denmark. “You cannot change a food system with two chefs, a dishwasher, and an entrepreneur,” he said about the beginnings of Noma. “It won’t happen.”
RE-THINKING CERTAIN BUSINESS STRATEGIES
But Waters isn’t convinced scaling is the right direction. “I think we get too wrapped up in this idea of scaling up,” Waters claimed. “I think less is more.”
In response, Rosenzweig, who founded his own VC firm, Physic Ventures, in 2007, suggested a different mindset prevails in business schools. “The vision you’re sharing is in contrast to a lot of what’s being taught right now in business school,” Rosenzweig said. “A lot of the aspirations we know is about scale. People equate scale and impact. I think you’re challenging us to re-think that.”
With the future of food delivery seemingly on a set path, Rosenzweig says not so fast.
“It feels like the other pressure is our constant interaction with cloud-based data and there’s a real push now in food, certainly delivery,” he said. “There’s been an enormous amount of venture capital going in to create logistical efficiencies. There’s a vision that a company could serve a hundred thousand great meals to people’s doors. You’re basically saying we have to re-think that.”
A SYSTEMIC FOOD SHIFT?
In reality, the issues go well beyond VCs and startups and business students. That’s a portion of it, but as the panelists discussed, systematic food shifts happen when nearly everyone’s on board.
“This is too complex for any one person to solve,” Meyer said. Meyer spoke multiple times of creating “food constitutions” and “food manifestos” and getting others involved, which he says could be easier with certain environmental pressures. “The closer we get to a systemic collapse, the more people will work to prevent that,” Meyer said. “And America is a good example of that with everything that’s going on, particularly in California.”
Waters agreed.
“I think a lot of these issues have to be answered by small communities of people getting together and having that conversation,” she said. “I do think, though, there is a set of values that needs to be articulated in terms of cities and countries. And we have to be detailed about it. You know, about the production of food. And I see the best way to change the food system is by having a criteria for the buying of that food and it includes wages to farmers, it includes packaging, every imaginable way we can care for the land and care for the people who are eating.
“These are ideas that have been around since the beginning of civilization,” Waters continued. “Eating locally. Eating with family and friends. Eating in season. Saving the food for the winter. Using every part of it. Treasuring the farmer. Food is precious. I mean, we’ve only lost this really since the industrialization of food.”
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