In February, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation announced the completion of the Big Food Redesign Challenge, an initiative to encourage retailers and consumer goods firms to redesign or develop products according to circular economy principles.
Launched in May 2023, in collaboration with the Sustainable Food Trust, the initiative welcomed participants from across the globe, with some 141 products – hailing from 57 organisations in 12 different countries – completing the process. This includes products from Nestlé, Waitrose and Wildfarmed, with a showcase held at London’s Fortnum & Mason last month highlighting the breadth of innovations on offer.
SustainabilityOnline caught up with Reniera O’Donnell, food initiative lead at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, to discuss some of the key takeaways from the process.
Regenerating nature
As she explains, the thinking behind the Big Food Redesign Challenge came from a “growing realisation that, while the circular economy as a term and framework was becoming far more well-known and embedded in government policy, it was still very much focused on the use and reuse of technical materials. A lot of people would describe it as ‘recycling on steroids’.
“We realised that people had forgotten that a key principle of the circular economy is the ‘regenerate nature’ piece.”
The Foundation sought to double down on this thinking within the food sector – noting that while the sector was responsible for around 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, it could also represent 30% of the potential solution.
“Also, there was – and still is – momentum around regenerative agriculture,” says O’Donnell. “The challenge with regenerative agriculture is that, if you’re just going to keep farming the same things as we do today, you’re really just pushing the problem further down the line. Because, ultimately, nature needs diversity, we need to look for different sources of food.”
The challenge aimed to highlight how adopting a circular approach to food design could enhance nature, promoting biodiversity and innovation – “We wanted to prove that if you change design decisions and put nature at the heart of those, nature does get better,” as O’Donnell puts it.
Ultimately, of course, the products that came through the process needed to be marketable, with feedback from the industry indicating that true change could only be achievable if such ‘regenerative’ products had commercial value.
“So, we knew we had to prove that it worked, but we also had to find a route to get these products to market, so we could really start to get insights on how consumers engage with products that are designed differently,” O’Donnell adds.
Assessment criteria
Three main criteria were established for those interested in participating in the Big Food Redesign Challenge. Firstly, the majority of ingredients had to come from production systems that reflect regenerative outcomes. Second, products had to incorporate at least one design opportunity from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular food design framework. Lastly, packaging had to meet the Foundation’s standards, and be either technically recyclable or compostable at scale.
The Foundation partnered with Howgood, a US-based platform, to assess the sustainability of the products, based on eight metrics, including soil health, biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions – both on-farm and in processing – water usage, land usage, labour risk and animal welfare. Participating firms were given free access to data, allowing them to evaluate the environmental impacts of their sourcing decisions, with products using a combination of quantitative metrics and qualitative storytelling to showcase their sustainability and impact.
“This means that for every product, we know what it looks like compared to the industry standard, but we also know the story behind the majority of the ingredients that have gone into it,” says O’Donnell.
Inspiring innovations
While there were initial fears that the challenge would yield a limited range of products, such as biscuits or cereals, which are easier to produce with regenerative grains, the diversity of innovations surprised O’Donnell and her team.
“We ended up with over 25 different food and drink categories,” says O’Donnell. “For example, there’s a company in the US called Wildway that makes banana chips. They found a way to slice through the peel without removing it, then cure the peel as part of the process. This means there’s literally no waste from that banana, whereas previously, the entire peel would go to waste. It’s innovations like this in food technology that make it exciting.”
Having completed the process, the Foundation believes it has developed a proof point through which it can demonstrate how food manufacturers that adopt these practices can encourage a circular economy.
As the Foundation extracts more data from the process over the coming months, O’Donnell believes there’ll be an opportunity to develop a framework, potentially alongside groups like EIT Foods in Europe, for manufacturers to embed circular food design into their processes, including offering courses for buying and R&D teams.
“What has been interesting is how many of the participants have said that they’re not thinking in terms of the one or two products that they entered into the challenge,” she says. “As one retailer told us, they loved the methodology, and they’ve committed to ensuring over the next five years that every product has to meet a minimum standard, or it gets redesigned.
“It has really catalysed people to think differently about what drives their ingredient sourcing and selection decisions.”
Keeping it simple
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation believes that consumers shouldn’t have to navigate sustainability labels like ‘organic’ or ‘plant-based’ when making food choices – instead, their food choices should be dictated by traditional factors such as taste, price, and personal preference, with the assurance that their purchases are positively impacting nature, improving biodiversity, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
This was a core aim of the Big Food Redesign Challenge – to develop products with no compromise attached, while also ensuring the price is competitive.
“We’ve got some products in the challenge which are at the same price point as their regular, non-regenerative counterparts,” says O’Donnell. “Retailers will only buy what they know their consumers like – it’s a catch-22.”
Nature in mind
Several successful products have already gone on sale in retailers such as Waitrose, Abel & Cole, and Fortnum & Mason – Waitrose, for example, is stocking 25 products in selected stores.
But to ensure the benefits of the process are communicated in a broader context, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation developed the Nature In Mind platform (www.nature-in-mind.com), where visitors can, as the official blurb puts it, ‘discover delicious products that are designed with nature in mind’.
“Through all of this, the biggest thing for us was: how do you talk to consumers in a way that is more accessible than terms like ‘organic’ or ‘regenerative’? It was very clear from the start that we needed to find a way of bringing all of the successful products together under something easier to understand,” says O’Donnell.
“So, Nature in Mind was developed—not as a label or brand, you can’t stamp it on your product—but as a way of engaging consumers with the idea that nature is actually part of your food, because there’s a real disconnect there. It shows that food design decisions have an impact on nature, without using words like ‘regenerative’, and so forth.”
Nature In Mind also serves as a platform for showcasing all the products that completed the Big Food Redesign Challenge – including those not yet available on supermarket shelves – helping retailers learn more about these sustainable alternatives.
Influencing the conversation
As to what happens next, while there are currently no plans to extend the Challenge into areas such as personal care or fashion, the Foundation also doesn’t want this to be a one-shot deal, whereby a cohort of regenerative food products is championed, only to fade from prominence.
“At the moment, we are actively looking at what the next couple of years hold for us in this space,” says O’Donnell. “One of the things we are going to be doing over the next couple of months is drawing on the insights and looking at where we can have an influence.
“This includes things like food standards – we’re really interested about how we could influence advertising standards, because it’s a challenge. Companies don’t want to talk about some of the positive things they are doing, because they’re worried about greenwashing. But at the same time, they want to be able to say something.
“So, it’s really about thinking about where the right space for this kind of conversation is, because it’s not just the farming and agriculture level. We need to find the spaces further upstream.”
Find out more about the Big Food Redesign Challenge here, and Nature in Mind here.
