PALM DESERT, CALIF. — Tamara Muruetagoiena, vice president of sustainability for the International Fresh Produce Association, asked Sustainable Produce Summit attendees, “Do you know what the opposite of greenwashing is?”
The answer? The produce industry, she said.
Muruetagoiena’s point — as part of a panel about marketing sustainability in the fresh produce industry — was that the fresh produce industry is behind other industries in telling its story. The panel was moderated by Brock Nemecek, marketing manager of fresh produce for Farm Journal, and also included Melinda Goodman, principal at Full Tilt Marketing,
Goodman agreed with Muruetagoiena’s statement, noting it’s not a level playing field with consumer packaged goods.
“We don’t have the same tools and resources. It’s not that we don’t have the same messages or the same values, but it’s harder to accomplish it with smaller budgets,” she said.
Muruetagoiena said this lack of a level playing field is playing out for the produce industry in terms of the push to reduce plastics and change packaging both from retailers and from regulators.
“We’re suffering tremendously right now from very unfair regulations on packaging around the world,” she said. “One of the reasons why they’re so unfair to us and not to other industries is that regulators just don’t know why we might need packaging to bring our products to work.”
She said retailers also tend to group all fresh produce into one category instead of working with the industry to help realistically meet sustainability goals. She used a scenario of major soda-producing companies to illustrate her point.
“Let’s say retailers are asking them to sell their products on a fountain that sometimes is shared with one another,” Muruetagoiena said. “Or, even worse, you go with your own container and get your soda. That seems unfathomable. That is what they’re asking of the produce industry. We have the same or far worse, more complex food safety requirements and quality requirements, but because we’re not that well known it seems like ‘Oh, we can ask the person to do anything.’”
Muruetagoiena said part of the double standard is the very nature of the industry — highly perishable products with fast turnaround and food safety concerns.
Goodman said the industry often tries to “science our way out of a problem.”
“We want to inundate people with facts and information and hope that they understand sometimes a very complex issue,” she said.
Muruetagoiena adds that often growers wear many hats on their farms, from human resources to organic production to food safety and often just put out the most important fire and move on to the next pressing issue.
Goodman, too, said growers need to market to two different audiences: retailers and consumers and the produce industry overall faces a branding crisis. Why do consumer packaged goods have such a hold on consumers? Branding.
“We have very few brands in the fresh produce industry,” she said “In the fresh produce industry we are often asked over and over and over to put our products in a private label or own-brand situation. … Private label has done very well in many parts of the store and category including fresh products, but it also strips away the reality of how you communicate your message.”
Goodman said private-label or even reduced packaging also eliminates a grower’s ability to share how they grow their produce and their sustainability efforts.
“The buyer says, ‘Tell your story, tell your sustainability initiatives and efforts to the consumer so they know what you’re doing,’” she said. “How do they find this? They don’t even know how to look for us, let alone find this. How do they find an apple grower or an asparagus grower or a potato grower and say ‘I love that guy. I want to buy his stuff, but I can’t find it because I don’t understand where it is.’”
Goodman said there are multiple pillars of sustainability — from biodiversity to carbon reduction, to reducing food waste, packaging and recycling, regenerative agriculture, soil quality and social sustainability.
Nemecek also mentioned that three out of the four SPS Marketing Award winners all focused on people, and Muruetagoiena said the focus is on more environmental factors, such as reducing plastic packaging and other quantifiable efforts, is a big change from the early 2010s when the produce industry focused more on farmworkers.
“We at the association level get not that much interest in talking about social responsibility,” she said. “One of the reasons why is that people feel very uncomfortable talking about it, and because it’s much easier to talk about Scope 1, 2 and 3 [emissions], even though it’s hard to even understand what they are.”
Goodman said an example is how the foodservice industry reduced plastic straw use because consumers believed plastic straws killed turtles.
“It goes back to finding the message that’s going to resonate and move and industry,” she said. “We don’t want to look for ways that the industry is making mistakes and then have to be reacted. We want to take a positive approach. Tell our stories and make sure we’re not the ones left behind reacting. If we’re telling our stories and staying in front of things, that’s not a position that we have to take.”
Goodman quoted Maisie Ganzler, chief strategy and brand officer at Bon Appétit Management Co., who said companies shouldn’t celebrate the progress made in sustainability if it harms people in the process of doing so.
Muruetagoiena said the fresh produce industry has such a great opportunity for storytelling. As plant-based diets gain in popularity, the fresh produce industry needs to tout its benefits.
“We know clearly that by increasing your consumption of fruits and vegetables, you will improve your health and the health of the planet,” she said. “And if we add to that the heavy focus that we’re putting on sustainable agriculture, regenerative agriculture [and] climate-smart agriculture, we’re on a really, really good path.”
She encouraged all attendees to start sharing the benefits of the fresh produce industry “Because we have a great story to tell.”
Goodman, too, says sustainability is a critical component of that story. She encouraged those in the audience to set a goal for how the brand would communicate its sustainability story and identify someone within the company to take on that role to craft a social media message a month or share the things done in the field each month related to sustainability.
“You have to start somewhere and make someone team accountable to that,” she said.
Muruetagoiena also encouraged attendees to have a strategy and a goal in this storytelling journey.
“Each company is different, and that’s the beauty of it,” she said. “And that journey, ideally, needs to be documented.”
She said transparency is a critical part of sustainability.
“I think that’s what the world wants to hear — those stories,” she said. “But at the core, the company has to have a clear strategy toward where they want to go, and they have to start embarking on their own journey. And then they need to tell the story, but first, have goals and a strategy before we even start documenting anything.”
