#1 Newspeak House / Food Waste

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In the face of crisis what can we do? For 15 brave souls the answer was, “attend the Climate Venture Collective and try and solve some food waste problems!”.
The event had sold out multiple times on eventbrite but the covid-19 outbreak had clearly kept many people away. Regardless, the 15 who did attend couldn’t have been a more enthusiastic group.

We started off with a talk from Ed Saperia, the Dean of Newspeak House, who himself works on a large number of digitally enabled climate change projects. He spoke about how many projects set out with good intentions but don’t actually achieve their desired impact, a thought very much shared by the Climate Venture Collective (CVC).

His project focused on the murky and opaque world of government permits. Sounds boring right? Well it almost certainly is. It’s one of the unsexiest parts of politics, but it also happens to be the mechanism through which environmental destruction and pollution is legitimised.

His platform simply draws data from a variety of open sources onto one map which helps us identify when and where permits are being granted. From the very small to the very large. The idea being that each of these can be used as campaign points to target and stop very specific instances of natural destruction.

Take a peek here (once Ed supplies the link).

After this talk we got cracking with CVC. The 4 tenets of the workshops were established:

1. Working together, but alone
   Talking is a very inefficient means of communication as everyone has to listen to one person. Discussing ideas is also a great way to pollute each others ideas and make them less diverse.
2. Anonymous ideas
   By keeping ideas with no names and to yourself, we bring many different perspectives to the table and have no biases for who’s idea you might want to vote for.
3. Time boxing
   Activities usually stretch to the amount of time that has been allocated for them, therefore we keep a tight schedule so we can get through a lot.
4. Getting started is more important than being right
   No one gets things right the first time, so rather than spending time trying to get the first thing right, it’s better to write and iterate.

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Apart from a few misunderstandings of instructions and some slight overruns the activities flowed very well and we moved forward very quickly.

We sorted through the problems of food waste and arrived at our core problem for the evening; Government subsidies in relation to food and this being a perverse incentive which in fact contributes to the problem of food waste.*

*In hindsight this problem was very impactful, but had a very high threshold of effort which didn’t quite match the aims of the session. In future all decisions will be made on the basis of something being high impact, low effort.

With calming music in the background we went into research mode to find inspiring ideas to present to the group. Working in 3 groups of 5, ideas were shared and then everyone walked around the room taking notes.

There were still small instances of confusion, but that was understandable considering it was an untried workshop and most of the group were new to product development workshops in general.

Sketching and crazy 8s followed where each person started to choose an idea and refine it and then the final idea creation took place.

The big reveal:

Namely
Medium Impact / Medium Effort

This solution took more of an advisory position, describing the challenges that would be faced by any attempt to alter the current subsidy structure. A point that was highlighted through voting was the need to design things with the collective interest in mind.

Smart Subsidies
High Impact / High Effort

This solution got the most votes in total and was a crowd favourite (however this was only on measure of impact not in terms of effort to deploy!! Oops noted for next time). The solution was very clearly sketched out and sought to pull, anonymise and aggregate demand data for food from supermarkets into a national demand database. This data is then used to inform dynamic subsidies based on actual demand so that it meets the needs of people, farmers and supermarkets as well as incentivising lower waste.

Accountancy
Medium Impact / Medium-to-High Effort

This solution had 3 stages, Link, Expand and Develop. Link sees tax payers directly informed of how their taxes are being spent on subsidies through infographics. Expand sees a specific accreditation made to show products are part of a low, or no food waste supply chain so that people can have an easy way of taking a low impact option. The final stage, development, was popular and had 3 stickers on it. This part of the solution saw all of this linked to a database or app, which would enable consumers to see the footprint of commodities in terms of wasted food.

Insert catchy title here
High Impact / High Effort

This solution was a big flow diagram that listed 3 types of campaigns that were to be run in conjunction. They centred around decreasing subsidies for animal agriculture and increasing subsidies for plant based agriculture. The first step was to crowdsource the content of the campaigns and get enough signatures on petitions to get it debated in parliament. Given the popularity of the plant-based movement, perhaps this wouldn’t be so hard to pull off?

R&D for Ecological, Organic & Sustainable Farming Practices
High Impact / High Effort

This was similar to namely in that it was a list of suggestions at the high level. With a variety of focuses. The part that was highlighted by some sticker votes was the introduction of people’s assemblies within government (such as the ones that occur in Ireland) which have the ability to actually influence policy.

Signed by Defra
High Impact / Medium Effort

The simplest solution presented; create a campaign, get it signed by enough people, get it trending in the media and question our outdated subsidy system. With the end aim of getting Defra to create and sign a new modern subsidy program. It suggested getting political support across the aisle and to use the tactics of lobbyists if possible.

Never Food Waste
High Impact / High Effort

This project set out to create a circular economy for food which marries the needs of consumers to distribution and all the way up the chain to farmers. It had a focus on helping us transition away from animal agriculture (whoop!) as well as making sure food that is currently being wasted gets to those who need it. Any further waste should be getting back to farmers to be used as natural fertiliser in the form of mulch (people liked the mulching part).

Destruction to Harmony
High Impact / Low Effort

Anonymous creator of this one took their paper and I forgot to take a picture so summarising from memory. A marketing campaign using pro-bono work from the best marketers to encourage a reduction in food waste at the consumer level.

Farmers Venture Collective
High Impact / Low Effort

An inspired title if I do say so myself ;) This solution suggested getting farmers and food waste experts in rooms up and down the country and running workshops using the CVC format to focus on creating subsidies which encourage positive behaviour within the food system and minimising waste. A key point was to have graphic designers and note takers in the room at the same time to create beautifully presented meetings notes. These are then turned into well presented proposals and can be used to gain support from farmers up and down the country and presented to government.

You’re so transparent
High Impact / Low Effort

This project wanted to highlight not just the demand side data of the food production system but where corporate, lobbyist and political interests lie as well. This solution simply suggested getting an online resource which maps out the journey of our food and highlights the parts that are inefficient. Once this information is up, then a focus on lobbying to get more open information at each stage so that we can actually understand our food system in full.

Food Transparency Project
High Impact / High Effort

Another solution which focused on getting data to help inform how subsidies impact the chain. Very clearly stated (which many people voted on as a good point) as the need to inform subsidy decisions based on demand. This tool was an app which gets consumers to upload their food purchase information at point of sale to create a consumer facing national database to inform better subsidies.

Together for a better world
Medium Impact / Medium Effort

This solution sets out very clear aims, Gather the farmers, regulate the waste at supermarket and farm level and create an ambitious policy which is ‘world leading’. The policy was to penalise supermarkets for every KG of food wasted, reward farmers for eco-friendly production, UK law changed so that all food has to be used in some way (no landfilling). Setting up new subsidies for zero carbon farming or urban farming and trying to create accountability from farm to fork.

Peep Waste Challenge
High Effort / Low Impact (in relation to the gov subsidy challenge)

This solution captures information from shoppers receipts and gets users to confirm when they have eaten/used these products. This then shows how you are doing in a food waste table with all the other users, the gamification of waste was very highly voted by the others in the room! The app also lets you have a geographic base where you can see how you compare against local average and will let you access more local food products, as well as informing you of when local campaigns are occurring about gov’t subsidies. (This person did leave a note saying it was a bit of a jump to get it to meet the subsidy topic).

Although many of these solutions shared similarities (possibly due to too much talking) and were too grand in scale (completely due to my lack of instruction on choosing impactful/low effort problems and solutions) we still created detailed sketches and the flow made sense for everyone, none of whom were experts in food waste or product workshops.

We also had a big group of us go to the Blue Casa pub over the road and have great chats afterwards (I forgot to take a picture so you’ll just have to believe me), so the evening was a roaring success!

Key lessons I, as the facilitator learned:

1. Better intro to the topic at the start (I rushed it as we were late starting)
2. Be very very very clear at the start of each task, make sure everyone is listening!
3. Make sure all decisions are based on something being high impact and low effort
4. Be distinct about a solution and an overview of what needs to be done (most of the sketches outlined really high level grand things that weren’t actionable enough)
5. As pointed out in the pub after — leverage points are the areas where we want to focus. These exist for campaigns to change consumers and government and are points of opportunity for business ideas.

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We will be arranging a digital call to discuss the projects: Farmers Venture Collective, Destruction to Harmony and You’re so transparent as these projects were placed in the sweet spot. Once you sign up you’ll be sent a link to join the slack channel so you can join us in getting stuck in.