A two-day business resilience extravaganza at Footprint Festival

One banana, one big problem: my time at Footprint Festival

Some events leave you with a list of contacts. The best ones leave you with a better question. Footprint Festival in Hampshire did both. Thank you to Amy Fetzer for inviting me to be part of it.

Who actually decides what's on the menu?

Andrea Zick, Chris Terry and I hosted a workshop on sustainable menu transformation. We asked the room to map the key influencers and key priorities across the public and private sectors.

It sounds simple, but most of us have never done it properly. When people talk about changing what we eat, they often point at "the industry" or "the government". Once you start drawing the map, those labels fall apart.

We got people thinking about:

🍽️ Who the stakeholders really are

🍽️ What kind of influence each one has

🍽️ Which levers can be pulled to drive change

A procurement lead and a chef do not have the same priorities. Neither do a school caterer and a restaurant group. Knowing who holds which lever is the first step to moving anything.

The trouble with the Cavendish

Next up, Peter Stedman and I had a fireside chat about the Cavendish banana. It might be the most useful example of food system risk I've come across.

The Cavendish dominates the banana trade, and it is essentially a single clone. That means one disease can threaten an entire industry. Tropical Race 4 (TR4), a fungal disease, is one of the most serious threats.

Peter shared insights on Yelloway, an innovation partnership led by Chiquita with KeyGene. Chiquita says its aim is to develop disease-resistant varieties that keep the look, feel and shelf life of the Cavendish. I'd encourage you to read up on it.

The wider point stuck with me. When a food supply chain depends on one ingredient, one variety or one supplier, it is fragile. Resilience means diversity, and that applies to menus, procurement and business models, as much as to bananas.

The people

The best part of any festival is who you meet. I made some wonderful new connections and I also loved catching up with old friends.

What I'm taking away

Change in food doesn't come from one hero. It comes from understanding who has influence, what they need, and where the pressure points are. And it comes from asking uncomfortable questions about what we depend on.

I'm already looking forward to next year.

Tause