Dole Develops Systemic Answers to Combat Global Hunger and Malnutrition

As part of the Adweek Sustainability Playbook, Global CMO of Dole Rupen Desai discusses the ways in which the 170-year-old brand is raising awareness and combating worldwide hunger and malnutrition. THE CHALLENGE We live in a world where almost the same amount of people are dealing with hunger or obesity. Our world is characterized by the coexistence of agricultural bounty, widespread hunger, and malnutrition that virtually co-exist and need desperate change. Hunger vs. Malnutrition There is a huge difference between hunger and malnutrition. Malnutrition is a much larger enemy than hunger because it is an all-inclusive term that represents all manifestations of poor nutrition. Obesity is a result of malnutrition, as much as undernutrition is as much as overweight is. If this is the world we live in, where one quarter of the world's population experiences food insecurity, it is important for all of us to be able to make a change. Good Nutrition is a Human Right A couple of years back, we reached a point in the business where we said good nutrition should be like sunshine. Sunshine doesn't choose who it shines on. Sunshine doesn't select who it is available for. Therefore, good nutrition should be like sunshine available to all not just for a few. Good nutrition has to be a human right. Purpose Must be a Part of the Business Model Whilst a lot of companies are talking about purpose, the biggest takeaway for us as we started to put this into the front and center of business DNA is we had to avoid the trap that this does not become an advertising brief. Unless purpose is baked in the business model and part of what you scale to grow, there won't be a dramatic change we'll be able to make to these sustainable development goals. Food is Being Wasted You see a lot of us waste fruit because of the way it looks. What we don't realize is the interconnection of that action between people, planet and prosperity. When less food is wasted, we can actually avoid the methane that is caused in landfills by transforming fruit that is wasted just because it looks ugly, just because we don't like the shape, size, look or the feel of it. We can convert more fruits into up-cycled products, which can help contribute to better nutrition for the one-fourth of the world's population that is currently dealing with malnutrition. The moment more fruit is sold, there is obviously stakeholder return, but it also helps the farmer who takes between 9-18 months to grow the fruit that we tend to throw away. The big realization for us was there is an inextricable interdependent link between people, planet and prosperity. The reason sustainable development goals were created is because business has broken the link. If you break it down, most businesses are either becoming prosperous at the cost of people or at the cost of planet. Therefore, the three are not thriving together. The challenge for us: how do you create an interdependent business model that puts people, planet, and prosperity thriving together rather than the cost of each other? THE APPROACH For a company like ours that has been selling fruit for 170 years, it's much easier because we were started by missionaries and they brought a sense of corporate social responsibility, a sense of social fences to the business. Purpose has always been a part of our history, but over the last couple of years, we've put it front and center. In the middle of the pandemic, we made six public commitments to the world based on the interdependency between people, planet and prosperity. One of the six promises is around prosperity. We are a for-profit organization and profit actually gives us scale to do what we need to do for planet as well as people at a much larger scale. One of the objectives of businesses is to bring prosperity, not just for the shareholder a small myopic view, which probably caused the largest amount of damage to people in the planet, but a much more expanded view where we can create shared value for all stakeholders. We also put five promises which were around people and planet covering a large amount of the sustainable development goals. But what we're using it for at Dole is we're now creating a business model. We're using these promises to change how we're structured, how we innovate, how we package fruit and bring it to people, how we drive our supply chains, how we measured success, and how we incentivize leaders who are working day by day, across the entire Dole company to work on the interconnectivity, the interdependence between people and in prosperity and as an organization. If the business model is not aligned to your purpose, it becomes extremely difficult to have impacted any significance or it will not be sustainable. THE IMPACT The kind of challenges we're dealing with when it comes to zero hunger are very systemic. Unhealthy food is far more attractive, easily available, and more affordable. Just as much as there are systemic challenges, they will need systemic solutions. We started a pilot with the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson is one of the most unequal places between food and feed and we've been working with the mayor with NGOs on education, with partners on pricing, on innovation and distribution, so that we are not creating a donation mechanism to try and solve hunger, but we're creating a systemic answer to a challenge that has been systemically created. This also changes the way we work with our farmers. We are working with strategic partners like Solidaridad and working on how we can improve small farmer, financial returns or partnering with organizations like Upcycled so that we can bring some of the ugly fruit back as nutrition for our people. While we have these wonderful partners who have joined us along the journey, even with these superpowers, we won't be able to achieve this on our own. It is for this reason that we set up a fund realizing that we don't have all the answers ourselves. It's not a venture fund. It's not an acquisition fund. It is a fund-to-fund ideas, whether you're a one-person team or two people team, a large organization, somebody with a dream and NGO, we would love to be able to combine these superpowers ours with yours so that we can try and make a larger dent to zero hunger. KEY TAKEAWAYS The challenges we're dealing with when it comes to zero hunger are very systemic. We're creating a systemic answer to a challenge that has been systemically created.If the business model is not aligned to your purpose, it becomes extremely difficult to have impacted any significance.We are working on how we can improve small farmers' financial returns and partnering with organizations so that we can bring some of the ugly fruit back as nutrition for our people and decrease food waste.We can’t achieve this on our own. It is a good time for all of us to take our Don Quixote hats and work together or the impact we will be having will be a small drop. How Eli Lilly and Company Cracked an Inclusive Approach in Health Communications