How to Create a Sustainable Food Industry : A Practical Guide to Perfect Food

This book presents a practical guide to help businesses navigate the complex topics of sustainability in the food industry.

The book takes you on a journey along the food value chain, from farm to fork, exploring key opportunities to increase positive impacts and circularity at each step of the journey. Written by a team of authors with decades of experience in the food industry and academia, it provides guidance on how to analyse sustainability across the value chain and life cycle of a food product and how to design, implement and communicate strategies to customers. Furthermore, the book shows that there are not always straightforward solutions, but rather choices and trade-offs that require an understanding of what is best suited to the product, customers and business in question. It demystifies a variety of topics, such as local sourcing, regenerative agriculture, plant-based protein and the environmental impact of meat production, and draws on a wide range of case studies from across the globe, to provide concrete, real-world examples. While a perfect food system may not exist, informed decisions can go a long way to reshape and transform the food industry as we know it.

This book will be of great interest to professionals working in the food and agriculture industries, as well as students and scholars of sustainable food systems and sustainable business.

Melissa Barrett is Global Managing Director, Practices and Impact at dss+. She has twenty years of experience in consulting on food system and value chain sustainability, and as a board advisor to a number of startups. She holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and has worked and taught in a number of research institutions including at the University of Cambridge, UK, the British Antarctic Survey and the South Australian Research and Development Institute.

Massimo Marino is an environmental engineer, specialist in Life Cycle Assessments (PhD) and Principal at dss+. He is the author and co-author of many publications, including the Life Cycle Analysis Manual (2008).

Francesca Brkic is a Manager at the sustainability consultancy dss+ and the Founder of an early stage start-up in the circular economy of infant food, Little Origins. She has an MSt in Sustainability Leadership from the University of Cambridge, UK, where she focused on frontier approaches to sustainability, such as circular economy and regenerative agriculture, and a BSc in Economics and Politics from the University of Bath, UK.

Carlo Alberto Pratesi is a Professor of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Roma Tre, Italy, where he leads courses on Marketing, Innovation and Sustainability. On the same topics, he consults for businesses, with a particular focus on the food and agriculture industry. He is the Founder and President of EIIS – the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability.