In late 2021, the Food Trails project invited experts, investors and financial actors to participate in the project’s Investors Living Lab, together with municipalities. The Investors Lab held monthly meetings of stakeholders, practitioners, and innovators, to exchange insights and experiences. The meetings focused on a core set of 8 themes, which represent segments of the urban food system impact investing value chain:
- Impact – commonalities and differences in defining impact between investors and the wider community in the case;
- Ambition – development of goals and timelines for improved outcomes;
- Data – review of needs for agreed metrics, integrated data systems, and new modes of information sharing;
- Policy – policies and regulations, and the roles and experiences of policy makers;
- Products – development of—and interactions between—products, tools and services, for both readiness and resource mobilization;
- Scaling – innovation, marketing, incentives, and financing, to drive delivery beyond the local scale;
- Capacity – across the value chain, across cities but also support for community-level actors (webinar);
- Community – functionally improve food systems at citizen level.
As the Roadmap document notes:
This value chain is a landscape of interacting entities, communities, individuals, and services, and is comprised of the areas of consensus-building, incentives, innovation, and direct investment, that make it possible for investment decisions to turn into real-world food systems transformation. One of the insights which emerged in the Lab repeatedly, is the need for sequencing actions strategically over time, to catalyse the delivery of investment for impact. Local circumstances may have significant influence on what sequence of actions would most rapidly and significantly enable the delivery of investment for impact.
The segments of the value chain are, then, not reflective of a one-size-fits-all step by step sequence for scaling impact investment; they are, rather, a map of the landscape of needs, actions, actors, and capacity-enhancements that can drive change and make policy-driven transformation more investable.
Three key insights stood out, in the work of the Lab:
- Food systems transformation touches the experience of everyone, and so requires both high-level policy direction and inclusive implementation;
- Impact investment activity is not limited to the narrow group that self-identify as impact investors, but involves mainstream institutions and communities;
- Innovations that improve health outcomes and sustainability of food systems reduce hidden costs and generate cascading co-benefits.
For the announcement of the Roadmap’s official release, I contributed the following thoughts on the value of investing in urban food systems:
“What makes urban food systems transformation a smart investment? Pricing pressures from climate change and shock disruptions like the COVID pandemic or war in Ukraine, strain local and national economies, and make all investments more expensive and risky. Diet-related health costs deplete public resources for investment in innovation. Urban food policies can send a clear signal, align with national sustainable development strategies, and reduce market risks for everyone. By leveraging impact investment to drive urban food systems transformation, cities can support new business models that scale and achieve economy-wide reach, expanding overall value-creation—for investors, for stakeholders, and for whole societies.”
Additional Resources
- Roadmap for scaling impact investment in urban food systems (PDF)
- Announcement of the release of the Roadmap
- Interactive online version of the Roadmap
- Impact Investors Living Lab Overview
- Food Trails Initiative website
Acknowledgements
The work of the Lab was led by team members from the EAT Foundation and Wageningen University & Research.
Substantive contributions were also made to the Lab’s discussions and outputs by Birmingham City Council, Blockchain Lab Drenthe, Bordeaux Metropole Municipality, C40 Cities, the Climate Bonds Initiative, the European Business Angels Investors Network (EBAN), the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), FAIRR, Fondazione Politecnico Milano Cariplo Factory, FoodSHIFT 2030 Accelerator Lab Berlin, Key Fund Investments, Meridian, Municipality of Bergamo, Municipality of Copenhagen, Municipality of Funchal, Municipality of Groningen, Municipality of Milan, Municipality of Thessaloniki, Municipality of Warsaw, Pymwymic Investment Management B.V., and ResponsAbility.
Key individual thought leaders and representatives of financial institutions also contributed substance to the Lab’s discussions and outputs, in meetings and in background work.
