Giving Compass' Take:

• Izzy Baird at Food Tank interviews Ben Friedman, CEO of Homegrown, a slow-food, casual salad and sandwich restaurant. They discuss how Friedman and Homegrown are part of a larger movement toward more sustainable food production. 

• What are the challenges in recruiting more support for sustainable food initiatives? What are the barriers for donors to be apart of this? 

• Read about pasture-raised pork as the future of sustainable meat production. 

. Ben Friedman is an entrepreneur working to promote sustainably sourced foods. Ben is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Homegrown Sustainable Sandwiches, a slow-food, fast-casual restaurant brand with stores in Seattle and the Bay Area. As a 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30honoree, Ben’s  professional passions include the slow food movement, social enterprise, fast casual restaurants, retail real estate development, and consumer products and brand development.

Food Tank spoke with Ben about his work to promote sustainable foods using a business approach:

Food Tank (FT): What originally inspired you to get involved in your work?

Ben Friedman (BF): I wanted to make an effort to use a business model to solve important environmental problems.

FT: How are you helping to build a better food system?

BF: All of our stores use sustainably sourced ingredients. Each store we build increases a neighborhood’s access to sustainable food. Furthermore, by buying sustainably grown food, we support those farms, overall, increasing the supply of sustainably grown food.

FT: How can we make food policy more relevant to eaters so that the politicians representing them feel a mandate to act?

BF: We need to make food system issues part of the climate change conversation and reduce the fragmentation in the national conversation on the environment. Climate change and food policy are tightly connected, but we must work to demonstrate this connection to eaters.

Read the full article about promoting sustainable foods by Izzy Baird at Food Tank.