35 Leading Businesses Bring FReSH Momentum to Address Food Systems Challenges

GENEVA & STOCKHOLM, June 14, 2017 /3BL Media/ – Today at the EAT Stockholm Food Forum , the ‘Food Reform for Sustainability and Health’ (FReSH) program announced that it is welcoming 10 new members, for a total of 35 leading global companies: AXA, Bureau Veritas, Cargill, Deloitte, Edelman, KDD, Olam, Sealed Air, Sonae and Symrise.

Launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year under the combined leadership of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the EAT Foundation (EAT), FReSH is designed to accelerate transformational change in global food systems. Through jointly created business solutions, it aims to create new pathways to reach healthy, enjoyable diets for all, produced responsibly within planetary boundaries.

The 35 FReSH members come from a variety of sectors that all have an interest in health, nutrition, food supply, production, retail and consumption. They span across regions from North America to South East Asia. This adds strength to the program’s holistic outlook on food systems – and will seek to target those systemic interventions that can shift the food system from fork to farm.

Peter Bakker, President & CEO of WBCSD said “Our food systems require radical transformation, and FReSH is unique in the way it brings together leading global companies to build a portfolio of science- based, scalable business solutions for healthy food, healthy people and a healthy planet.”

“I am thrilled to see more companies taking on the massive food system challenges, turning them into exciting business opportunities” said Gunhild A. Stordalen, Founder and President of the EAT Foundation. “We need disruptive innovation – also in the ways we collaborate. The FReSH programme is a great example of how business work together to translate science-based targets into win-win solutions, for people, planet and profit.“

“FReSH is gaining traction across companies and sectors, and we’d like to welcome AXA, Bureau Veritas, Cargill, Deloitte, Edelman, KDD, Olam, Sealed Air, Sonae and Symrise to the program”, said Alison Cairns, Managing Director of FReSH. “As FReSH continues to evolve, we look forward to our members actively shaping business solutions that can contribute to more sustainable global food systems.”

For more information, please contact:
Felicity Glennie-Holmes
WBCSD Communications
glennie-holmes@wbcsd.org   
+41 (0)22 839 31 00
+41 (0)79 933 3665

Dag Hvaring
COO, EAT Foundation
dag@eatforum.org
+47 901 53 848

About WBCSD
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) is a global, CEO-led organization of over 200 leading businesses working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world. With the contribution of non-business partners, WBCSD helps make its member companies more successful and sustainable by focusing on the maximum positive impact for shareholders, the environment and societies.

WBCSD has extensive experience in leading collaborative initiatives, bringing together various stakeholders from business, NGO, the scientific community and governments. In the run-up to Paris, WBCSD and its members successfully set up Low Carbon Technology Partnership initiative (LCTPi), to define and implement large-scale or scalable, impactful business solutions, to reduce emissions and deliver against the agreed 2C target. This success of mobilizing business to drive the improvements will be repeated for sustainable food systems. www.wbcsd.org    

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About the EAT Foundation (EAT)
EAT is an international foundation linking food, health and sustainable development across science, business and policy. Originally launched three years ago, EAT is now an independent foundation with three core partners: The Stordalen Foundation, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Wellcome Trust. The overall objective of EAT is to expand scientific knowledge on the interconnections between food, health and environmental sustainability, spur innovation along the food value chain, and facilitate the development of evidence-based policies to radically transform the global food system to be able to deliver healthy, affordable diets to a growing world population within the planetary boundaries.

Multi-stakeholder, multidisciplinary and multi-scale collaboration between business, science, politics and civil society lies at the heart of EAT’s work. EAT believes that a transformation of the food system is only possible if these diverse actors collectively address the intertwined issues of food, health and sustainability, and develop integrated strategies on food production and consumption to leverage multiple benefits for human and planetary health.

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