Positioning deliciousness up front

L: I’ve been part of the Healthy Menus Collaborative since it started at the Culinary Institute of America, and they started talking a lot about the link between food and climate. Through my work and connections there, I eventually was invited to sit on a panel at Google Food Lab, a biannual meeting of invited experts in the food and beverage space, all working toward the common goal of improving the future of food. The panel after mine featured Eve Turow-Paul. She talked about how Gen Z and Millenials are experiencing increased anxiety and mental illness due to climate change and its effects and how, maybe through food, there was a way to help solve some of that anxiety. And it just really impacted me. I had this moment where I was like, “Why have we not ever thought about connecting these things?” After the panel, I made a beeline to get some coffee and almost slammed into Eve – I almost took her out! We started talking about how we need to get better at talking about the connections between food and climate, how we can better use narrative as a way to draw people in and become part of the solution. Other people started to join in and we all agreed to keep having conversations about this issue. All of a sudden, we had started a nonprofit! Food for Climate League was born. And the organization is thriving. We went from 2 employees to now upwards of 20. 

After its launch, I was determined to get Sodexo to start aligning with the goals of Food for Climate League. And the thing that I think is my greatest skill – and also the thing that bothers my colleagues the most – is that I’m incredibly persistent. Like, annoyingly persistent. I will contact people over and over again. And if approach A doesn’t work, then I go to approach B. I kept hounding people to talk with Eve, and how the work of Food for Climate League would really help us start to make connections for operators, our customers, our clients. Eventually, our global VP of Culinary met with Eve and we formed the Sodexo Future Food Collective. We started to integrate a climate lens into our work, using the Sodexo language and approach.

That’s a very long-winded explanation of how one tiny moment – bumping into Eve at Google Food Lab – really changed my career!

A: I love it! Can you talk about an example of tangible change you’ve helped bring about related to this initiative? 

L: We worked with the Humane Society of the United States’s Forward Food program. At the time, they were campaigning for more vegetarian and vegan food at the campuses we service, and I was getting pummeled with requests for plant-based recipes that I didn't know existed or where they were coming from. But I finally got in touch with the campaign lead and brought them in, partnering with them in a way that was aligned with Sodexo as a business. We showed them how our campus menus are created and where plant-based dishes fit, and how to connect dishes to Sodexo’s existing supply chain, and ensured frontline staff were comfortable with making those dishes.

What we're ultimately trying to do is push or nudge people. If we want to make the default option something interesting and plant-based, we need to position deliciousness up front. Instead of going at it from a shaming perspective, we went at it from a culinary perspective. Our goal is for our campus menu entrees to be 50% plant-based by 2025, and we’re already at 48%. At the end of the day, it was the collaboration between Sodexo and the Humane Society that really pushed the needle.

A: Can you tell me more about how this corporate-level goal is being met from the bottom up? How is that showing up operationally?

L: I can easily write a menu for any of our business segments that’s 50% plant-based. But by the time that menu gets to an operator, that number goes down to 25% because they aren’t thinking about the sustainability of a dish; they’re thinking about whether or not they’re familiar with the dish or feel confident enough to cook it, or if their consumer will even want it. And when we look at consumer adoption, it goes down even further to 7–12%. So now what we’re doing is figuring out how to take people part of the way there and then, over time, shift those percentages. For example, our core chili recipe is probably 80% beef and 20% beans. But what if we flip that? Would a consumer even notice? We’re thinking about how to get to 70% beef – reducing gradually over time – then 60%, then to 40%, and so on. I think our C-suite would say we need to go from “0 to 100” on sustainability, but it's really “100 to 0.”

And we continue to gauge how the consumer responds. Different environments and demographics will have different responses. And our approach has been working: Our goal is for beef to make up less than 10% across all our menus, and right now we’re at 8.5%. And corporate is very responsive to numbers. If we can quantify our process and make recommendations, they’re definitely open to dialogue. 

A: That’s a great example of why engaging employees on climate is so critical. You and your colleagues are seeing things on the ground – like understanding how operators and consumers behave and how that affects plant-based food adoption rates – that someone in the C-suite will never see or experience. It’s so important to connect corporate-level sustainability goals to employee roles and expertise. How do you see this work evolving?

L: We’re actually working on a frontline worker toolkit. People at the ground level are way more important at moving the needle than somebody in the C-suite or even someone like me at the level I’m at because we’re not interacting with customers on a daily basis. I think that every corporation that’s trying to move the needle on plant-based eating, there’s a push from the top down but not as much from the bottom up. Our frontline workers are from all over the globe – there are so many different cultural backgrounds represented where plant-based eating shows up organically. We need to really understand our employees, their stories, and share that with customers. Like, what if we could adapt someone’s grandma’s recipe for a dish? What if we shared how that dish makes the employee feel? There’s no way a customer is going to want to eat anything else! It’s all about narrative and making people feel good. 

A: Yes! I think a big part of this work is simply relationship-building and taking the time to get to know people. My last question for you is: What advice would you give to company leaders who want to engage their employees on climate and to employees who are trying to get more engaged on climate?

L: For leaders, from the top down: You don’t need to get into technical reasons or carbon calculations. You just need to talk to your employees as people and show them there’s a bigger thing out there that they could be a part of. I also think companies have a tendency to make these big sweeping declarations – “We're going to be X by Y” – as opposed to making their employees feel like it's the small, everyday things they do and the changes they make. And for employees, I would say it’s okay for things to be a mess because if you don’t even start, nothing happens. It just takes one person to have that spark and really be persistent about it.