As the world nears its tipping points for climate change, biodiversity loss and natural resources depletion, sustainability takes on double the significance for food companies.

The agri-food sector relies on increasingly scarce land, water and temperate climates, meaning the margins for becoming sustainable are narrowing, and this threatens the very bottom line of industry.

But the sustainability of food producers, distributors and retailers also determines their social license to operate. Food companies may exist firstly for profit, but they are also responsible for nourishing an ever-growing population, more than half of which is overweight or obese.

A recent analysis of sustainability strategies, Fixing the Business of Food, disclosed by the world’s 100 largest food companies, lifts the lid on the existential threats that agri-food businesses are proactively countering, as well as those which industry has not yet internalized as sustainability risks and opportunities.

With governments set to announce national strategies to radically change food systems at this month’s UN Food Systems Summit, food companies must recognize and assume their role and responsibility as a key driver of this transformation.

To ensure company sustainability strategies have maximum impact for both people and profit, food businesses should be asking four critical questions.

  1. Do our product portfolios and strategies contribute to healthy and sustainable diets?
  2. Are our production processes environmentally sustainable, or are they implicated in environmental harms such as greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater depletion and deforestation?
  3. Do our upstream and downstream chains reflect our values by rejecting child and slave labor, and protecting the rights of workers, their families and communities?
  4. Do we fulfill our "social license to produce" by being honest, eschewing fraudulent practices, respecting all stakeholders and obeying the law?

Read the full article about sustainability questions for food supply chains by Marta Antonelli & Angelo Riccaboni at GreenBiz.