Upcoming Sustainability Summit To Address Social Impact Of Food

This year’s European edition of the Sustainable Foods Summit will focus on food ingredients, social and customer impacts, and best practices for marketing.

The conference, held for the ninth year in Amsterdam and put on by Ecovia Intelligence, is part of an international series of summits held in the Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America. This event is expected to draw food and drink manufacturers, retailers, distributors, packing companies, and other food-industry organizations.

The European summit is scheduled June 1 and 2 and will feature speakers from smoothie company Innocent, social enterprise True Price, Fair Trade Original, the Organic Trade Association, and the Fund for Agricultural Development.

Four sessions are scheduled for the climate-neutral summit. The “Sustainability Update” seeks to look past reductions in environmental footprints to explore how positive impacts can be made through sustainability metrics, such as the economic merits of a company incorporating vertical farms for organic produce.

The second session, “Food Ingredients for Sustainability,” will explore options companies have for replacing unsustainable raw materials, new ingredients that benefit regions and biodiversity, and plant-based proteins.

Session three is “Marketing Best-Practices,” looking at the challenges of marketing sustainable products to consumers, ethical private labels and climate-friendly foods. And the fourth session, “Social & Customer Impacts,” looks at the social risks of ingredient supply chains, the social benefits of fair trade for growers, and case studies on customer behavior.

The summit’s carbon footprint is being offset by investments in soil composting projects.