Lily Raphael
VFR: Lily, tell us about yourself and how you became involved in food systems work in Vancouver?
Lily Raphael: I have been working with the Solutions Lab at the City of Vancouver as an innovation practitioner around complex challenges at the intersection of climate, equity, and decolonization for the past five years.
Erin Nichols, the Senior Project Manager with Solid Waste Strategic Services at the City of Vancouver, brought to the Lab a complex challenge related to addressing wasted food amongst grocery retailers in Vancouver. The Grocery Retail Solutions Lab ran in 2019-2020, and during that time I supported a few of the sessions to influence and support the long-term adoption of behaviours that eliminate avoidable food waste. That first iteration brought up many learnings about innovating around Vancouver’s food system.
Soon after, Erin, and Lindsay Cole from the Solutions Lab, assembled a funding application to the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance Game Changer Grant and Mitacs to run another iteration called the Circular Food Innovation Lab (CFIL). In collaboration with Vancouver Economic Commission and Emily Carr University, I was asked to guide the Lab’s innovation process, which responds to the root causes of key systemic challenges Vancouver is currently facing.
VFR: The Circular Food Innovation Lab (CFIL) just wrapped up. Please share about this project: the issues it aims to address and why it’s important.
LR: The Circular Food Innovation Lab (CFIL) was a project co-led by the City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Economic Commission’s (VEC) Economic Transformation Lab, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and 18 Vancouver-based businesses and organizations working in the food system.
For 10 months, participants worked alongside design researchers from Emily Carr University to co-design and prototype potential solutions to reduce and prevent wasted food and increase circularity.
When it comes to our global economic system, we’re stuck in a linear pattern of ‘extract-produce-consume-dispose’. According to Second Harvest (via: The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste: Technical Report): in Canada, 11.17 million tonnes of edible food are wasted each year at a value of $49.46 billion.
If we want a more equitable and circular food system, we need to turn our attention to these habitual ways of doing things. We should shift our mindsets and practices throughout the food sector, addressing production, operations, consumption, and how we think about and handle food 'waste'.
VFR: A big part of the CFIL project involves “systems change” and “stuck patterns.” Please tell us more about these ideas; and outline the specific “stuck patterns” that many food businesses are currently locked into.
LR: I’ll try to answer this without getting too nerdy or meta! Preventing or reducing wasted food and increasing circularity is a complex challenge, which is characterized by having many possible solutions, many different perspectives on how to address it, many unknown unknowns, and things changing often. This means that there is no blueprint strategy or solution that we can put all our resources into that will fix everything. If we want to transform the food system, we need to strengthen our muscles to be able to see the system, understand how it’s operating, and navigate its constant changes.
Patterns can either help a system function or keep it stuck, and these patterns exist within individual mindsets, organizational operations, flows of good and services, and so on. A key idea in working with systems is that durable and effective systems change is only possible if deeply embedded patterns can be made visible and then shifted.
Here are some of the stuck patterns identified by CFIL participants:
Across the system, actors place responsibility and fault of wasted food on one another rather than taking responsibility for what they can do
“Shrink” (or loss of inventory) is accepted as part of doing business
Our ways of thinking and language are so entrenched in linear thinking that it is difficult to imagine circularity
Consumers expect perfection and overabundance of choice when it comes to food, and businesses comply
Infrastructure and resources for circular food entrepreneurs are hard to access and afford
Food surplus donation programs are providing partial solutions for food businesses, meanwhile over-ordering of food persists
VFR: Nine prototypes of potential solutions emerged from CFIL. How did these prototypes come about? Please share about a couple of the prototypes that gained traction during the project.
LR: These prototypes came about as attempts to intervene on the challenges and stuck patterns that were surfaced by business collaborators upon joining the Lab. The team of design researchers developed a series of prototypes that seemed like promising interventions on the dominant system. Business collaborators signed up for which prototypes they were interested in being a part of developing and testing and each prototype took its own windy journey.
Here are a couple examples of the prototypes:
Measure What Matters: Changing Actions to Change Values
Measurement around wasted food is typically calculated as a percentage of lost profit, or ‘shrink’, rather than the physical amount of food being lost. Without measuring actual wasted food, we cannot understand the magnitude or origins of the problem. The Measure What Matters prototype aimed to promote a more transparent and sustainable food system in Vancouver by encouraging businesses to measure their unsold food and collectively set targets to reduce wasted food.
Through a 2-week challenge exercise with one of our business collaborators, high impact shifts occurred in a short amount of time:
Streamlined donation pick-up area to make it easier for charity partners
Retrained produce + deli departments to work better together
Staff started voluntarily creating value-added products like repurposing unsold fruit in the deli (selling fruit cups)
Creation of a new role in the grocery store: Sustainability Manager
Circular Entrepreneurship: Innovating Around Spent Grain
Circularity has already been happening in small niches in Vancouver. There is a lack of support, reward, or incentives to run or scale up circular businesses, or operationalize circular practices, in existing businesses. Those leading circular initiatives are largely running on passion, and may have minimal resources. A risk of burnout means slow growth for the circular economy. The Circular Entrepreneurship prototype emerged from the recognition of the need to support connections between Vancouver businesses practicing circularity, for knowledge-sharing and generating new opportunities, so that those who are doing it, continue doing it, and those who aren’t, join in. Based on the business who chose to participate in this prototype, as a group we focused on spent grain, a by-product of beer making, from breweries.
This prototype led to testing unique collaborations and new industry opportunities. The prototype team connected a brewery with a design student developing a new bio-material made out of mycelium. Together, we developed a proof of concept demonstrating how we can repurpose spent grain to grow mushrooms. Recognizing that this issue needed sector-wide collaboration, this prototype also brought together breweries from across Vancouver to imagine sustainable and innovative solutions for upcycling spent grain, and also test out new roles for collaboration between the City and the brewery community.
You can read the full document on the CIFL’s 9 prototypes here!
VFR: As CFIL is wrapping up, what are some of the key outcomes from the lab overall? Can you also touch upon how city governments and institutions can help enable transformation and incentivize circularity in the food sector?
Some key outcomes:
New skills and tools for navigating complex challenges: The Lab created a learning container in which participants shared and practiced new tools and approaches together. These included design and innovation tools, such as action research, systems mapping, brainstorming, and rapid prototyping as well as tools related to Value Chain Management and Persuasive Storytelling.
Connecting the dots in the system: Bringing businesses and government together provided a systems perspective, which not only revealed patterns in what actors had experienced as isolated challenges, but also shifted patterns and assumptions.
Creating deeper trust and collaboration: With many unknown unknowns throughout the process, CFIL participants chose to trust the process despite ambiguity and discomfort, and developed strong relationships with one another, which laid important groundwork for amplifying circularity in Vancouver.
As far as how cities and institutions can enable transformation, there are many things that can be done. We cannot continue to work in the same way if we want transformative outcomes. This includes transforming habitual procedures, approaches, and ways of thinking for decision-making institutions. There are opportunities to incentivize circularity through procurement, policy creation, and investing resources to create space for collaborative discussions, innovation, and learning to happen.
VFR: What are the “next steps” for CFIL and its participants? How can we keep this momentum going?
While the Lab itself has wrapped up, the community and momentum that it generated continues. The City of Vancouver Solid Waste Strategic Services and the Vancouver Economic Commission are currently supporting the next phase for scaling principles and practices related to a circular economy of food. If you’d like to get involved, you can reach out to solving-food-waste@vancouver.ca.
From my perspective, maintaining momentum looks like continuing to build relationships, continuing to prototype and try out new ways of working, and taking risks that challenge the status quo system. It looks like making choices that are rooted in courage, abundance, and accountability to those whom our work impacts. Tracking and sharing what we learn along the way can help transformation to come about more quickly. There’s a paradox at play of needing to slow down to connect more deeply into what’s happening in our system while also needing to effectively respond to the urgent needs of our communities and planet. Being able to dance with that paradox will take us far.
VFR: Finally, summer is coming up! Lily, please share a few of your favourite local places to grab a bite to eat.
LR: So many places to choose from! For going out, I love Machete, Rise Up and La Fabrique. I’m also super excited for some easy healthy meals at home thanks to ReRoot Kitchen, a new social enterprise that makes ready-made meals using surplus food. The revenue supports Chef TJ and Ono Vancouver to continue to make meals for community organizations in the Downtown Eastside. Check them out!
To learn more about the Circular Food Innovation Lab, visit https://vancouver.ca/green-vancouver/circular-food-innovation-lab.
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