Alberta Institute of Agrologists 13th Annual Conference on Agriculture, Food and the Environment
Markets and Social License Session
March 16, 2017
Social License in Food: Beyond the Foolish Noise (Brian Sterling, SCS Consulting)
Brian Sterling, founder and President of SCS Consulting, an international management consulting company specializing in food industry issues including traceability and social license. He addresses address the evolving debate about social license within agriculture and food, and examine how we may unintentionally be excluding key stakeholders, namely consumers.
A new word has entered the lexicon of agriculture and food businesses and that is ‘social license’. Social license is described as the privilege of operating with minimal restrictions (legislation, regulation, or market requirements) based on building and maintaining public trust. It can sound a little fuzzy and yet is has already brought more attention to such under emphasized issues as food systems in northern communities, mitigation of climate change, sustainability in aquaculture, and food innovation in general. What is unclear is who gets to “grant” social license, how it can be earned, and what values are essential when it comes to social license in food.
As we are now learning, consumers have acted fiercely on questions of transparency and on their co-ownership rights by expressing concerns related to issues, which were at one time perceived as obscure. Farming and food production are just the latest industries to have come under the watchful eye of the new consumer.
In the past year, we have seen several cases affecting food companies, such as the price of cauliflower rising to $8 last winter, the foodborne illness outbreak with Chipotle, Leamington based French’s ketchup de-listing at Loblaw, and U.S. beef at Earl’s Restaurants. All of these were perceived breaches of social license.
More cases will surely occur in the future. Consumers are the new CEO of food systems, making their decisions based on imperfect information, while everyone else struggles to follow. What makes achieving social license so challenging for the agriculture and food industries is how difficult it is to identify and embrace shared values so companies can build trust. Each stakeholder group has their own agenda and priorities. To identify common values across a country as diverse as Canada is close to impossible.
