Is Sysco an Example for Sustainability?

One of my favorite magazines for recreational reading is Saveur. It is a food magazine that features everyday food around the world. It’s like being invited into a private home on a trip around the world. No pretension, just real people and real food. And there is an incredible variety of real people around the world so it gets pretty interesting.

But I don’t read it for business information. So I was surprised to see a recent column (although I probably shouldn’t have been) on Sysco entitled Greener Giant. It asked the question, “Can an emblem of industrialized food also stand for sustainability?

Most of us think of Sysco as the giant distribution company that delivers mass quantities of food to institutional kitchens. And that’s what they do. But it was very interesting to see how they see sustainability relating to their business.

Writer Indrani Sen explained that a  middle man can still play an important role of consolidation which decreases “food miles,” that is, the carbon footprint of the delivery of food to the consumer. Sen also described a conversation with CEO Richard J. Schnieders

Still, Schnieders sees dark clouds gathering for the food industry. Irrespective of food miles and carbon footprints, he said, nurturing and diverisfying local agriculture systems is a practical necessity in this era of climate change and environmental degradation. He cited the example of California’s Salinas Valley, where most of the nation’s salad greens are grown; groundwater salinity there is threatening productivity, and the valley’s bounty may eventually dwindle…”I think we need to be encouraging folks within local geographies to produce these products again.”

I first wrote about agriculture and changing management models earlier this year in Of Bananas and Industrialization. The challenge of innovation in the food industry is very much about intellectual capital. It’s about creating better processes (structural capital) to leverage networks (relationship capital) and the knowledge of stakeholders (human capital). It indeed appears that Sysco indeed has something to offer in this battle.