Is the dream of a fair food system dead?
Some thoughts on systems design, regeneration, supermarkets and Supie.
Not long after I sent out last week’s newsletter about food insecurity I received a DM from a subscriber. They forwarded an article that reported up to 600,000 New Zealanders were accessing the services of a food charity called New Zealand Food Network in the month prior to the article’s publication (which was October). That’s a lot. And the number is on the rise.
The main cause is cost of living increases, as I elaborated in last week’s newsletter. Fresh produce is 20-25% more expensive today than it was a year ago. And the fact that there is so little retail choice for the average food shopper isn’t helping the situation.
This week, news broke that online food retailer Supie – a potential disruptor to the New Zealand supermarket duopoly of Woolworths and Foodstuffs – was going into liquidation. Subscriber growth had slowed and the retailer lost a key investor. When Supie launched in 2021, the founder, Sarah Balle, had a vision of creating a fairer food system. What she got was a reality check, as Monopoly Watch spokesman Tex Edwards told NZ media: “It’s damn hard breaking [the supermarkets] up.”
And so the food crisis continues.
The Supie news coincided with me finishing Hoodie Economics, a new book by social change entrepreneur and Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) CEO Jack Manning Bancroft. It’s a book about systems design and Indigenous knowledge mostly, and it’s fascinating – especially in light of the Supie news. It helped me realise that all the passion in the world won’t help you build a thriving business if the system you’re plugging into is broken, which is how I see the duopoly supermarket system (it’s not fair for the consumer or the supplier).
Look, a network of roots!
Bancroft makes a case for a reimagined corporate system that is networked – like a web of plant or tree roots – not strictly vertical (hierarchical, growth driven). I don’t want to elaborate his argument in full here (I recommend reading the book), but in his conclusion for changing corporate systems he referenced the work of systems thinker Fritjof Capra, who has a few salient observations about the characteristics of a functioning, healthy system. And I like this one:
Life is inherently regenerative, from the turning of the seasons to a cell constantly regenerating its molecules. When an organism dies, the molecular structures do not disappear; the piece of dead wood has exactly the same amount of DNA it had as a living tree, but what has stopped is the process of regeneration.
You may wonder what this has to do with food insecurity and Supie. Well, it occurs to me that Supie is the dying organism. Bancroft’s mission – in life and in his book – is to create greater equality by hacking corporate structures, much the same as Supie founder Balle. He designs tools to help this mission along. Practical things like sharing IP, creating networks of five unlikely connections that will power a new style of leadership and decision making, creating endpoints for corporations to avoid institutionalised thinking and perpetual growth targets to ensure survival. All to tackle the big problems facing our collective society, such as the cost of living crisis.
Fresh food is expensive. That we know. The subscriber who forwarded me the article about the food charity fears we’re heading for a health crisis down the line as our collective diets suffer due to the cost of fresh foods. There is still a problem to solve: we still need a fairer, affordable food system.
In an ideal world the death of Supie will mark the beginning of the next phase to tackle this problem. That’s the process of regeneration, as Capra points out. But will the liquidation of Supie be viewed as a failure or just part of this natural cycle of regeneration? Can or will Supie or Sarah Balle share the IP embedded in the company or does it have too much “value” in the eyes of the PwC administrators? Is the dream of a fair food system dead or still very much alive?
On death, Jack Manning Bancroft writes: “Death is challenging. It hurts. It’s sad. It’s also inevitable. So how do we design with knowledge of death? With a focus on death? Just as we centre nature as our scorekeeping, could we make death an anchor point as a design process for life?”
These are big questions, for which I don’t have answers but I hope someone is in Sarah Balle’s ear saying: “don’t stop, this is just the beginning of something new.”
In next week’s newsletter… I speak with a bunch of women far wiser than me about Service Leadership. Do you know what that means, and where it happens? Hint: it’s not the boardroom.
Weaving and breathing (for Paid Subscribers)
Before I read Jack Manning Bancroft I met his sister, Ella.
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