This post is part of a blogging series by economics students at the Presidio Graduate School’s MBA program. You can follow along here. By: Chad Reese San Diego County has a temperate climate, a population of over three million people and, according to the last US Census, is home to 6,687 farms. The county leads [...]

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This post is part of a blogging series by economics students at the Presidio Graduate School’s MBA program. You can follow along here. By Inna Volynskaya Being a responsible beer geek, you opt for a Berkeley-brewed Bison or one of those super green Oregon breweries to quench your thirst. Or maybe you unknowingly bought something [...]

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This week, May 2-8, is Hemp History Week. A more accurate title would be “Legalize Industrial Hemp” Week, as that is the purpose of these next several days, during which 550 events related to the promotion of hemp will occur across all 50 U.S. states.

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This post is part of a blogging series by marketing students at the Presidio Graduate School’s MBA program. You can follow along here. by Karen Schlesinger Businesses of all stripes are starting to use Facebook and other social media outlets to promote themselves and connect with consumers. According to an article by Mariann Hardey in [...]

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One decade ago Clif Bar & Company made a commitment to be sustainable and today has proven to continuously raise the bar for fellow entrepreneurs on what it means to be a sustainable business. From the outside, it appears as though Gary Erickson and Kit Crawford, Clif Bar’s co-CEOs, and their innovative staff have thought [...]

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This post is part of a blogging series by marketing students at the Presidio Graduate School’s MBA program. You can follow along here. by Delise Weir I think Monsanto is doing itself a disservice by helping the organic food industry. Retail sales of organic foods rose to $21.1 billion in 2008 from $3.6 billion in [...]

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How are sustainability practitioners transforming companies?  In this interview, Brie Johnson, the sustainability manager of Straus Family Creamery, shares her best practices.  The Straus family has long been known for their commitment to sustainable production of excellent milk products, but every company can make improvements.  The first step is to measure.  Johnson uses Food Trade [...]

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At the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim the exotic is now mainstream. Guatemalan hats, hippie skirts, and copper bracelets of yesteryear were replaced by business suits, briefcases, and blue tooth ear pieces. The Expo’s main hall were full of men and women yakking into smart phones while pulling sleek rollaway bags, and who would look more comfortable on Wall Street instead of Nature’s Path.

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According to the EPA’s Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment children receive 50% of their lifetime cancer risks in the first two years of life. In past testing conducted by the Food and Drug Administration eight industry-leading baby foods were found to have measurable amounts of 16 pesticides, including three of which were consider to be [...]

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While statistics on street children are difficult to verify, according to this UNICEF report, there are an estimated 230,000 in Indonesia alone.  This is mostly the result of lack of free public education for children, so families living below the poverty line cannot afford to send their kids to school and have little choice but [...]

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Are you looking for a business strategy to spark your revenue growth? Or maybe you are looking for a job within a growth industry that would also enable you to contribute toward making the world a little better place to live in? One market segment to consider is organic foods. The organic food industry has [...]

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In talking with businesses and entrepreneurs I am almost always asked these two questions: Is there a green industry or market segment experiencing attractive levels of revenue growth? If I were looking to be a green entrepreneur what are key paths for success? The food industry is one that has embarked upon revolutionary changes in [...]

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Advertising Age named sustainability one of the “jargoniest jargon” words of 2010 that they “wish you would stop saying,” right up there with monetize, choiceful, and the new normal, among others.  They explain their decision by describing sustainability as “a good concept gone bad by mis- and overuse. It’s come to be a squishy, feel-good [...]

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Abe’s Market is a natural goods store using smart strategies to overcome green retail’s pricing problem through social media.

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Farmers markets offer an opportunity to buy local produce, know your farmers, and to buy fruits and vegetables that have not hibernated in a warehouse for months.  Name a city or town in North America, and chances are that the community has a farmers’ market.  California scores with stone fruit; the Midwest has some of [...]

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By: Frank van der Linde Worldwide, there are hundreds of certification schemes and other initiatives promoting the sustainability of food. That is good news for increased sustainability within the food industry. There is a potential pitfall, though. More than one billion people worldwide suffer from extreme hunger. Fortunately, more and more people are aware of [...]

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An insistence that food must be fresh and natural is modern-day wishful thinking. As Professor Laudan explains in her blog and in the Utne Reader, wistful nonstalgia masks the reality of what fresh and natural used to mean.

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Just as in our personal lives, companies go through growing pains. Organic beverage company, Honest Tea, now faces their own growing pains. From brewing batches of tea in his kitchen in 1998, Seth Goldman and his colleagues have now created one of the best selling organic teas in the country. The business model was so successful that in early 2008, Coke purchased a minority stake in the company for a whopping $43 million.

The dilemma rests in the fact that Honest Tea is trying to maintain its status as a truly organic, ecologically aware and low-calorie beverage company. Coca-Cola sees cost cutting measures and expansion of product portfolio as primary drivers. To add to this drama, Coke has the option to buy the whole company come 2011.

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Whole Foods is now informing its personal care product suppliers that they have less a year to verify their “organic” claims. Everything from eye cream to ear care on Whole Food aisles has got to meet the US Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program, or “NOP” standards.

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I find it ironic that some of the most unhealthy food can be found in a place where people are receiving medical treatment for chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes and cancer. After all, isn’t healthy food an integral part of the healing process? Given the bad reputation that ‘hospital food’ has, there are  substantial [...]

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My conscious weighs on me as I stare at the selection of colorful shampoos in aisle five of Whole Foods.  Should I pay the extra $1.49 for the one made from organic lavender or save some cash and opt for the one containing the ever-so healthy sodium lauryl sulfite?  According to a recent Wall Street [...]

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The following is a guest post by our friends at Saybrook University’s Organizational Systems Program (a 3p sponsor) – designed for students who want to understand the nature of organizations, collaborative practices, and transformative change. by Erica Kohl-Arenas Oprah Winfrey has dedicated three shows to the sustainable food movement in as many years:  there’s no [...]

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In high school, we were warned against using marijuana, not necessarily because marijuana itself was that bad for you, it was the fact that the use of marijuana would lead to other, more unhealthy drugs.  It was referred to as a “gateway drug.” The concept is equally applicable to many other aspects of life.  Running [...]

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The famous advertisement says, “Nobody does it like Sara Lee.” Considering the controversy surrounding the advertising of Sara Lee’s EarthGrains bread, I think the jingle fits. The mega food company launched Eco-Grain wheat in its EarthGrains bread in February with a major public relations campaign that “blanketed the Web, Facebook, Twitter, and National Public Radio,” [...]

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Sometimes I think it would be fun to run a restaurant review site. Since I don’t, it’s nice to occasionally opine about the rare restaurant that not only serves phenomenal food, but as a business, takes sustainability seriously enough to get my attention. Such was my Saturday inspiration today at Gather. It comes as no [...]

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The recent announcement about USDA’s final regulation on access to pasture for organic livestock is a clear victory for the organic movement. The present language of the National Organic Program (NOP)  merely stipulates that grazing livestock must have access to pasture. As the organic market share has grown, the differing interpretations of this language have created fissures [...]

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I have to be honest. I don’t know much about the Tea Party movement. But as someone who sees our two party system as offering little more than the illusion of a real and effective democracy, I applaud any group that stands up and forces the status quo to take notice. In fact, after doing [...]

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“Does green really sell,” is the question I am most consistently asked. Amanda’s is one of my favorite answers to this question. It is a restaurant that its founder, Amanda West, defines as “Whole Foods meets In–N-Out Burger.” It is also likely that Amanda’s represents the future of the fast food industry. America is a [...]

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When an organic food retailer markets a product that looks and tastes similar to its competitors, but offers a lower price, one has to wonder, how do they do that?  In the organic yogurt field, where pioneers such as Stonyfield and small, local producers like Straus Family Creamery offer products side by side with lower [...]

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An Australian expression I love and use constantly is “No worries!” That phrase captures the essence of an entrepreneur’s faith. And it captures my faith that it will be our entrepreneurs, rather than government, that lead the way in figuring out solutions to our current environmental and economic mess. My attendance at the Cleantech Open [...]

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