Welcome to Learning out Loud! This is where CFIL collaborators reflect on what we’ve been learning and trying in this experimental space. Thanks for joining us on our journey, and if you have any thoughts on what you’re reading we’d be happy to hear from you!
“How might we re-purpose food at the end of day in stores so that we create a market that…?”
After a “stagnating” feedback loop (fig.1) presented itself in the early stages of work with the businesses, Last Call surfaced as a concept centred around ways to encourage creative solutions for surplus food and the holding of responsibility at every stage in its lifecycle.
A difficult but important factor that needed to be addressed was the one of food donation. It is easy to be blinded by the immediate and apparent goodness of something, enough to miss the long-term impacts. Food donation is undoubtedly an amazing part of the food system that helps countless people in need and gives food another chance to be enjoyed and shared. Our goal is not to discredit that or all the positive impacts its widespread adoption has brought. But systemically, it is perpetuating the linear system, allowing consciences to be cleared and preventing businesses from being faced with their surplus food.
Launching into phase one the ideas came like fury. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to flip this thing on its head two main ideas bubbled to the surface. “Value Add Products” and “Community Engagement Cooking Class”.
Value Add Products: using processes such as dehydrating, pickling, cooking or otherwise modifying food items frequently seen at the end-of-day surplus.
Community Engagement Cooking Class: bringing together customers to attend and local chefs to teach a small-scale cooking class using the end-of-day surplus. (this could also be a way to teach food preservation methods like pickling).
Both these concepts got traction with the businesses and the following weeks became a game of navigating a messy, entangled, systemic space with a wide range of business participants and their own boundaries towards implementation. This became especially apparent when pushing forward the community engagement prototype. What maybe naively seemed like a highly plausible idea, became a tidal wave of logistics and delicate navigation.
When attempting to implement a new program that offers seemingly no additional profit from outside an organization, resources are scarce. While looking for a facility that could host something like this, we began working with local food rescuers. This revealed to us something that we see recurring in many other CFIL concepts. Those who are working in the food system at the very end of the food journey (where there is little or no money to be made) have no time or capacity for these interventions. Dealing with overwhelmingly high demand and supply, vulnerable patrons, and no significant source of income/funds, setting aside time and space for a cooking class for 6 or 7 grocery store customers does not take priority.
Each week the community engagement prototype grew into something that needed more time, attention and nurturing than we could provide on our limited schedule. In an act of laying to rest this prototype and acknowledging that the value add products had been seeing positive reactions from participants with fewer barriers, we did something that would become quite familiar to Last Call. We followed the yeses.
“Following the yeses” was born from a desire to latch onto traction gained with participants. Seasonal demand from customers, supply chain issues, strict regulations/policy, employee turnover, and more, contributed to a situation in which it was hard to engage in ongoing prototyping. By following the yeses, the design team could use the momentum of prototypes we saw garnering a positive response to go forward with active experimentation. Although this occasionally meant letting some activities go dormant in favour of others (sometimes more than once), getting tangible testing done that is adjacent to the original goal is better than pushing headstrong in the original direction and being met with little or no excitement to test and intervene on the system.
With heavy hearts from letting community engagement go but excitement for the future of value add, we continued to meet with a mix of different food actors. Local and international produce distributors, a retailer, and sometimes a food rescuer. They all steered directions and conversations of the prototype, challenging the designers to promptly find ways to connect participants with the experience of Last Call.
Each experiment, such as the apple chip making above (fig.3 and fig.4), bumped into more constraints of the real world — industry customs, operation and infrastructure limits, and resource allocations. Sometimes we were motivated, but lots of times feeling lost, pondering what would be the smallest, simplest action we could take despite the constraints. Co-creating direct actions within the scope of each business and learning to understand the limits and size of the issue Last Call can tackle from within the lab, we focused on small, simple steps to prioritize their excitement and willingness to move one step further each week. Observing the struggles of a local produce distributor dealing with surplus food when summer days lasted until October last year, another door of Last Call opened up. We began turning our heads toward the communication around seasons of produce between growers, distributors, retailers, and customers. The seasonality of our food was getting lost along the system. The longer the journey of food stretches between food actors, the shorter windows of time were left handling perishable items. We allowed ourselves to pivot again and latched onto the opportunity of seasonality communication.
Learning about the precious timings of local produce, we laid our focus on the shoulder seasons and the waste that happens due to the lack of timely communications and actions. Exploring ways to communicate harvest information and the volume of produce that fluctuates depending on the weather each year, we are now exploring ways to engage conversations of seasonality in grocery store environments. How would our food system change if different food actors plan their business operations around the changes in food each season, where they travel from, and the timing of natural surroundings that nourish them? Imagining a world where different food actors could accommodate produce according to its seasonal fluctuation, and perhaps create value-added products voluntarily for their customers, we become excited about the opportunities and relationships that the last chapter of Last Call could foster.
Oscillating between systemic challenges that are too big to tackle, the footsteps of Last Call captured here reveal stories of navigating immediate actions, and tangible outcomes through attentive negotiations with the participants. The ride of the Last Call prototype is bumpy but precious. And its conversation doesn’t end here.
Disclaimer: the opinions and perspectives expressed within each of these posts are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and perspectives of all CFIL participants.
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