Sustainability is a global issue, and The Packer’s Sept. 13-17 Sustainable Produce Summit will bring in high-profile speakers from within and outside of the industry to address key developments.
Now in its second year, the Sustainable Produce Summit will focus on four themes:
- Trends & Thought Leadership;
- Packaging; Operations;
- Certifications & More; and
- Marketing & Merchandising.
In addition to a robust education agenda and networking sessions, the event will reveal the latest research from The Packer’s annual sustainability survey,
A voice for regenerative agriculture
Margaret Henry, director of sustainable agriculture at PepsiCo, will be a Sept. 15 keynote speaker.
Henry was born on a dairy farm in Kentucky and has spent her life and career working to improve social, economic and environmental outcomes for rural communities around the world.
Henry has a BA and BS from Brown University, training from Massachusetts Institute for Technology in system dynamics, and a master’s degree from Princeton University focused on science, technology and environmental policy.
Henry’s career focused on improving sustainable food systems in government, NGOs and the private sector in places as varied as Mozambique, Brazil, the U.S. and India.
At PepsiCo, she works on the company’s strategy to expand climate resilient and regenerative farming practices around the world.
“We started doing this sustainable farming program back in about 2015.” Henry said. “And that was working with farmers from 60 different countries where we’re sourcing from, and really engaging them around the holistic picture of sustainability, around core practices that they might be doing — environmental practices, human rights practices, economic practices — trying to try to help all of our growers come up to that core level of sustainability.”
With big cultural and infrastructure differences between growers in Nebraska and India, for example, not all growers are in the same place.
About four or five years ago, Henry said PepsiCo started to look beyond the “core” issues for sustainability for North American growers.
“The core (practice) of sustainability wasn’t hugely different from what a lot of our North American growers were doing,” she said. “U.S. farmers are doing a great job around so much of the stewardship that they’ve been doing, but the real challenges that we were seeing are around climate resilience, are around reducing greenhouse gases, are around soil health, or around water quality legislation that might be coming at them.”
Henry said PepsiCo wants to help growers look to the next steps of what is needed to “to keep farmers farming, quite practically — to keep farming viable and strong in this country.”
That means turning to regenerative agriculture, which she described as commonsense practices that are driving improvements in soil health, reductions in greenhouse gases, improvements in the watershed, improvements in biodiversity and improvements in farmer livelihood across the board.
Hear more of Henry’s story about how PepsiCo is investing in resilience with growers to make sure it has continued access to potatoes, oranges, corn and other crops at The Packer’s Sustainable Produce Summit.
