Greater Good Blog

Arabella’s Recipe for Good Food

Eric Kessler

The time to fix our food system has come. We hope you will join us as we help to grow Good Food—a new system that produces delicious, nutritious, sustainable food that is accessible for all.

 

I’m thrilled to announce that Arabella Advisors is launching a Good Food practice. It’s the first large-scale food system practice of its kind, dedicated to supporting philanthropists and impact investors who are working to achieve solutions to one of the great challenges of our time: transforming our food system to make delicious, nutritious, sustainably produced food accessible for all.

We believe that a unique opportunity has arrived to change America’s food system for the better. The potential impacts are huge:

  • Better health for the two-thirds of American adults now suffering from obesity, diabetes, and other food-related conditions
  • More and better food on the table for the 49 million Americans who currently go hungry, or who don’t get the food they need to meet basic nutritional needs
  • Smarter, more sustainable use of our resources through a system that produces the food we need without wasting 40 percent of the food we actually grow
  • A more equitable society thanks to the elimination of food deserts and empowerment of farmers, agricultural entrepreneurs, and food workers

We shouldn’t kid ourselves:  Building a system that produces healthy, affordable, accessible, and sustainable food won’t be easy. But many of the solutions to the problems we face are clear, and many people are already hard at work on them—including advocates, entrepreneurs, farmers, investors, philanthropists, culinary professionals, and others. So far, their efforts have delivered a long list of exciting startups and innovative projects but not enough large-scale solutions. With that in mind, we’ve launched our Good Food practice as a concentrated effort to support philanthropists, foundation professionals, and impact investors who are transforming the food our nation grows, sells, and consumes.

Based on the nearly 40 food-related projects we’ve already worked on over the past decade, we believe that the recipe for a Good Food system has three essential ingredients:

  1. A culture that demands good food
  2. An infrastructure that supplies good food to meet that demand
  3. A policy environment that enables a good food system to take root

Our Good Food team will explore each of these “ingredients” in greater depth over the coming weeks and months. We will enjoy the support of more than a dozen Arabella senior leaders and nearly 30 researchers, analysts, and finance professionals, as well as specialized external experts.

Our priority will be to serve the needs of our food practice clients. Already we are researching and analyzing food system issues and philanthropic opportunities, developing outcome-oriented grant-making strategies, evaluating the impact of Good Food work, building and managing donor collaboratives, designing impact investing portfolios that support a good food supply chain, and sourcing deals that fit those portfolios. But we aren’t stopping there.

We are also beginning to prescribe what we think the good food movement needs—and we’ll be proactively taking those ideas to the food philanthropy and impact investment community. Next week, we will announce a set of 12 Good Food policy priorities. Early next year, we will explore opportunities to eliminate gaps in the good food supply chain, to expand demand and equity for good food, and to meet numerous other challenges that our clients are focusing on. We’ll be joined by policy leaders, medical professionals, advocates, top chefs, and industry executives. If you’re interested, we hope you will join us, too. If you’re interested, just send us an email at goodfood@arabellaadvisors.com.

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As founder and a senior managing director of Arabella Advisors, Eric Kessler has built a social venture firm dedicated to making philanthropy more effective. Eric is now focusing his energy on leading Arabella’s Good Food practice. 

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