Contents

The cookbook in two minutes

We can and must work with the strategic innovation of food systems to solve some of our greatest societal challenges. This is the fundamental proposal of our book, Cookbook for systems change – Nordic innovation strategies for sustainable food systems. In essence, this cookbook of strategies is about the role that a strong public innovation system can play alongside the pathways towards sustainable food systems. We demonstrate this by laying out a method for deliberate food system transformation – a mission-based approach – that can support people, planet and society. While missions have received increasing attention in policy circles at national and EU levels, they are still rather loosely defined and there are very few examples of the implementation of mission-based approaches. Moving from intent to action has been slow as there is no existing playbook (or cookbook) to go by. This in turn means that mission-thinking is still often overlooked in new policy proposals.

This strategy cookbook will provide the ingredients – templates for developing interventions, guides for how to get started and examples of cross-cutting projects – that you can use to create your own recipes for change. To accomplish this, we offer a new, emergent way to work with complex and dynamic systems. The cookbook is intended primarily for national and regional innovation agencies, as the government has both a mandate and more authority than any other entity to lead the change needed to achieve sustainable food systems. However, because innovation ecosystems include a variety of different actors, this strategy cookbook also provides valuable insights into the roles that entrepreneurs and civil society and research organisations can play to cultivate change from the bottom-up. Drawing inspiration from a Nordic innovation alliance, this cookbook suggests that the Nordic countries’ most important global contribution to achieving the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals may not be a specific technology, business model or policy innovation. Rather, this contribution can come in the form of demonstrating how a strong public innovation ecosystem is the missing link to overcome the complex societal challenges defining our times.

Tasting Menu: A bite-sized overview of your journey through the cookbook

ACT I – Food: an essential ingredient for sustainable development 

This chapter gives you the chance to explore some of the grand challenges that societies around the world, including the Nordics, are now facing. We will introduce you to entry points, the places where we can intervene to make strategic changes that can address grand challenges.
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ACT II – We are on a mission

In this chapter we show how to move from grand challenges to more concrete actions and interventions. With a long list of potential entry points and limited resources – how can you choose which entry points to pursue? We dig deeper into the “mission-based approach” to societal innovation, understanding how missions can help us zoom in on a challenge and set goals for food system transformation in particular contexts. This will provide you with a foundation to start designing your own mission.
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ACT III – Demonstrating transformation

This chapter gives you a taste of how missions are implemented on the ground. It describes how to orchestrate demonstrator experiments and the steps involved in designing and implementing them. The power of demonstrators stems from their ability to identify interdependencies and unlock synergies in the system. We walk you through the concept of a demonstrator using meals in schools in Oslo as an example, bringing you closer to what implementing a mission might look like in practice.
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ACT IV – Bringing the cookbook to life  

This chapter describes how Acts I, II and III fit together, helping you pave the road to the future. After reading through this cookbook you are now ready to define grand challenges and entry points, develop a bold mission, plan demonstrators and start strategically orchestrating actions across networks of people and organisations. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!
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Entering a radical change mindset

​It is seven in the morning on 18 May 2030 in a Nordic capital city. Line Mwangi is lying awake in bed, excited about the day ahead. The aroma of her fresh mushroom coffee lingers in the air as her husband helps get their son Erik ready for school. They take some groceries that are about to go off and put them in his backpack so he can take them to school. 

Line showers, dries her hair and slips on her blue seaweed-fibre dress and her favourite fish-leather shoes. On Erik’s bike ride to school, he stops off at the garden plot so he can water the plants and check on their cricket farm. When he reaches the school entrance, he checks the hologram display to see what they will be making in food education class – locally raised snails with garlic, and red beet salad with Nordic hazelnuts, his favourite! He takes the groceries from his backpack and drops them off in the school kitchen.

Line walks to her office at the Ministry of Food Systems. Today, a delegation from the USA is visiting via photorealistic conference call to learn about how her government has brought an end to childhood obesity. Just as she and her colleagues have sat down in the conference room, a video message pops up on their screens. It’s the prime minister, congratulating everyone once again for meeting all of the targets for the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

At lunchtime, Line scans her fingerprint in the canteen and finds her personalised meal ready for pick-up. Mushroom and barley risotto, North Atlantic seaweed salad and a side of sautéed arctic lupin – cooked just the ways she likes it! The canteen message board lights up and announces that her meal scores high in animal welfare, biodiversity protection and nutritional quality and low in greenhouse gas emissions and natural resource use. As she walks towards the lunchroom tables, she runs into her colleagues from the Choice Architecture taskforce. They have just finished reviewing the insights they have acquired from a decade of action on sustainable food delivery.
 
On her way home from work, Line receives two notifications. Her neighbourhood maritime co-operative has just finished harvesting mussels so she can collect her order, and at school her son has turned their surplus groceries into a side dish of roasted cauliflower that will go well with the mussels and horseradish cream. What a perfect treat for celebrating Nordic Sustainable Gastronomy Day!

Over dinner, Line’s family makes plans for a weekend outing. They decide to take the high-speed electric train and visit the Nordic Flora and Fauna Agrobiodiversity Park.

As Line reads her youngest son a book before bed, he tells her that he wants to be a regenerative agriculture technologist when he grows up. She smiles, smooths his hair and kisses him goodnight.

Does this really have to be fiction? 2030 is just around the corner. Many of these solutions are already here. By integrating them and adopting them on a wide scale, we can achieve numerous global, regional and national targets to improve human and environmental health.

The thing is, we really do need an all-hands-on-deck approach if we want to thrive in the future. The history of human innovation shows us that we can turn things around dramatically when we put our minds to it. That doesn’t mean it will be easy.

It’s tempting to think of innovation as something radical and futuristic that has never been seen before. You can always find innovations that fit this description – like lab-grown meat and driverless delivery vehicles. But innovation doesn’t have to be flashy and “out there”. The term “innovation” means doing something differently and deliberately in order to achieve certain objectives.^{[1]Koch, P. and Hauknes, J., 2005. On innovation in the public sector – today and beyond. Publin Report No. D20, Second revised edition.}  When we combine the knowledge, capabilities and resources we already have in a new way to achieve something specific – that’s innovation!^{[2]Edler, J. and Fagerberg, J., 2017. Innovation policy: what, why, and how. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 33(1), pp. 2-23.}  And because innovation is contextual, what’s already established in one place can be an innovation when it’s introduced somewhere else. Implementing innovation and an innovative mindset can lead to anything from a single technical fix to a widespread change in behaviour.

To have a more desirable future, we have to actively choose to do some things differently. This is where the research and innovation agencies come in. In the Nordics, we’re lucky to have multiple national agencies and two regional agencies that support research and innovation. While these agencies differ slightly in scope, they do have one mission in common – improving society by making it easier to do things differently. This increasingly means starting with a desirable societal outcome, and then working our way backwards in order to support the solutions with the greatest chance of achieving that outcome. Sometimes the most powerful innovations come from recombining already existing solutions into a new system that is more efficient and has a greater impact than the sum of its parts.

Throughout the pages of this cookbook of strategies, we will make the case for why one of the most important societal missions of our time is the transition to more sustainable food systems – and why a strong public innovation ecosystem is key to the timely occurrence of that transition.

Who is this cookbook for and what can it do for you?

This cookbook is intended primarily for national and regional innovation agencies, as the government has both a mandate and more authority than any other entity to lead the change needed to achieve sustainable food systems. However, because innovation ecosystems include a variety of different actors, this cookbook also provides valuable insights into the roles that entrepreneurs and civil society and research organisations can play to cultivate change from the bottom-up.

Throughout the pages of this cookbook, we will be setting out a method for deliberate food system transformation that can support people, planet and society. But we aren’t just going to talk you through the reasons why food systems are such a powerful lever of change. The cookbook will provide you with ingredients – templates for developing interventions, guides for how to get started and examples of cross-cutting projects – that you can use to create your own recipe for change. And although we would love you to read this cookbook of strategies for change from cover to cover, time is not always on our side. With your precious time in mind, we’ve designed the cookbook so that you can choose the sections that best suit your needs.

This cookbook is also a call to action. While the method that we propose in this strategy cookbook has been used in a variety of smaller, more localised contexts in the Nordics, this is the first time it has been proposed at the pan-Nordic level. There is nothing stopping us from trying. And we will really need to try, because the challenges that we face – like the impact of climate change, inequality and poor health – affect us all. There is no way around it: we will need to work together.

We also need to add a few more garnishes before you dig in...…

When talking about the Nordic region we’re referring to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, as well as the three autonomous territories connected to these states: the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland.

Because there are a few terms that we use a lot in this cookbook, we want to make sure that we are on the same page.

First, this cookbook is all about food systems. Perhaps you are not quite sure what a food system is, but we assure you that you know more than you think. A food system is an all-encompassing term for the people, policies, activities and inputs involved in growing food on the land and in our oceans; processing, marketing and distributing food to local and global markets; and preparing, eating and even wasting the food that is on our plates.^{[3]HLPE, 2017. Nutrition and food systems. A report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security. Rome: High Level Panel of Experts}  In other words, a food system represents the complex relationship between humans and nature that revolves around all things food. It’s also worth noting that there are many overlapping food systems – a Helsinki food system is nested within a Finnish food system, which in turn is connected to global food systems! In this strategy cookbook, we focus mainly on Nordic food systems – the food systems of each Nordic country and the shared food system across the region.

Second, we will be focusing a lot on sustainability. We want to emphasise that sustainability goes way beyond a healthy planet. In fact, environmental sustainability is only one dimension of sustainability. There is also social sustainability, which includes human health, thriving communities and cities, and wellbeing; and economic sustainability, which extends from a strong economy at the level of the individual all the way to the economies that run our countries. When we talk about “sustainable food”, for example, we mean food that nourishes healthy people, a stable and healthy planet, and prosperous societies.

Third, you will read about the need to transform our food systems. But what does that really mean? Transformation involves fundamental changes to the way a system – such as a society, an ecosystem, or a food system – functions. When it comes to food, we are concerned with sustainable transformations, or putting food systems on a new trajectory towards sustainability. This means rewiring food systems so that they provide food security and nutrition for all populations, present and future, while supporting economic, social and environmental bases.^{[4]FAO, 2018. Sustainable food systems: concept and framework. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.}  Then, to maintain that sustainable state, food systems also need to be resilient^{[5]Tendall, D.M., et al., 2015. Food system resilience: defining the concept. Global Food Security, 6, pp. 17-23. DOI: 10.1016/j.gfs.2015.08.001}  – or able to withstand various shocks and disturbances, such as a pandemic or natural disaster, and still continue to develop in a sustainable way. Working with transformation also means that we will need to test new approaches, adapt to unexpected changes and act in a more emergent way.

It’s easy to get carried away when thinking about transformation and imagine that every part of a food system needs to change. While it’s true that a system emerging from a transformation is fundamentally different from what it started out as, this doesn’t mean we have to throw out everything. There are good things that we want to keep about our current food systems – the social aspect of sharing a meal, for example, and a safe food supply. The point is that change will need to be widespread if we are to support our sustainability goals.

Now you’re ready! Bon appetit!

Glossary

Get to know your ABCs:

Demonstrator: A method for planning and co-ordinating (“orchestrating”) a portfolio of experiments, described at length in Act 3

Entry point: Indicates where to intervene in a food system, identifying places where strategic changes can help tackle grand challenges

Experiment: A low-cost, low-risk way of learning how a mission can be solved

Grand challenge: A complex, societal problem that is currently impeding sustainable development

Insight: A clear, deep, and sometimes sudden understanding of a complicated problem or situation.^{[1]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/insight} Insights allow you to understand the system in a different way to what you may initially have thought

Innovation: Doing something differently and deliberately in order to achieve certain objectives

Mission approach: A way to direct multi-stakeholder innovation towards a common understanding of how best to solve our urgent grand challenges

Mission: Missions identify opportunities to address grand challenges, propose innovations that can help overcome these challenges, and outline an approach to testing and co-ordinating these innovations

Portfolio approach: Selecting individual experiments according to both individual merit and their complementarity with other experiments (synergies and knowledge gaps)

ACT I – Food: an essential ingredient for sustainable development

The world is facing some pretty big challenges. Open a newspaper and you’ll see stories about melting arctic ice, global pandemics and the extinction of plants and animals. We have a lot of work to do if we are going to leave our societies and our world in a state that is fit for future generations. We may not have easy answers or silver-bullet solutions for tackling these challenges, but we’re hardly unaware of what to do. How is that? Because it is increasingly clear that we have an essential ingredient right before our eyes: food systems. 

Food systems have been driving societal progress for millennia. The creation of agriculture led to a whole new way of life – a way of life that no longer relied on migration to secure food. This opened the door to permanent settlements – even cities! More recently, the 20th century’s dominant priorities of increasing yields and food safety have allowed our food systems to perform incredible feats. Advances in farming have allowed producers to increase agricultural crop yields at jaw-dropping rates – to grow enough to feed billions of people. The explosion of the retail sector has made food more readily available and convenient for many here in the Nordics and around the world. And global supply chains that run like well-oiled machines allow exotic fruits, coffee and a wide range of foods to fill supermarket shelves all year round.  

Some societal progress has come at a high cost. While 20th-century changes to food systems have brought gains in nutrition and new opportunities in agriculture, they have also posed new challenges to realising sustainable food futures. Supermarket shelves are increasingly occupied by highly processed, nutrient-poor foods that are intensively marketed as the cheap, convenient option – often at a cost to our health. The move from integrated crop and livestock farming systems to specialised, high-input meat and monocrop production in certain regions creates a disconnect in the nutrient cycle. A focus on just a few plant and animal species leads to the loss of significant regional agrobiodiversity. Not to mention the impact on diets – over 40% of the calories consumed each day come from only three crops: rice, wheat and maize.^{[1]FAO. Once neglected, these traditional crops are our new rising stars.  http://www.fao.org/fao-stories/article/en/c/1154584/} It’s clear that food systems are not fully aligned with 21st-century priorities of environmental sustainability, human health and wellbeing, and equity. 

• Stay in Act I if you want to explore some of the great challenges that societies around the world, including the Nordics, are now facing and learn how food systems can provide entry points for tackling these grand challenges. 

• Skip to Act II if you want to hear more about how to link high-level challenges with more concrete formulations of what to do. 

• And if you just want to dig into specific demonstrators, a way of showing how to tackle some of the major challenges in the food system, flip to Act III. 

SHORTCUTS TO

1.1 Grand challenges faced by world societies
1.2 How food systems fuel societal challenges
1.3 Food systems as entry points for tackling grand challenges
1.4 From entry points to missions

1.1 Grand challenges faced by world societies 

Grand challenges are the complex societal problems currently in the way of sustainable development. If we do not address these challenges, we risk exacerbating inequality, damaging our ecosystems to the point of no return and reducing the number of years that we live in good health. Because these challenges are so highly interconnected, it can be difficult to break them down neatly into distinct challenge areas. Nevertheless, in Box 1, we outline five grand challenges that illustrate some of the main obstacles we need to overcome to achieve sustainable development.^{[1]8. United Nations. The Sustainable Development Goals. https://sdgs.un.org/}, ^{[2]European Commission. Societal Challenges. https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/ h2020-section/societal-challenges}

SHORTCUTS TO

1.1 Grand challenges faced by world societies
1.2 How food systems fuel societal challenges
1.3 Food systems as entry points for tackling grand challenges
1.4 From entry points to missions

Box 1. Examples of Grand Challenges

The grand challenges of today seem to be mounting. These challenges are now so pervasive that it is hard to dismiss them as “someone else’s problem”. From the Nordic farmer who lost their crop to the extreme heat of 2018 to the families caring for loved ones suffering from cancer, diabetes or cardiovascular disease, and from the refugee seeking greater opportunity in the Nordics to the communities in Iceland and Norway mourning the loss of their mighty glaciers, these challenges resonate on a very personal level with many of us.

Urgent action is needed if we are to tackle these grand challenges and move towards a future where every individual can thrive. Fortunately, the global community has responded to these challenges by rallying behind an ambitious agenda in the form of 17 internationally agreed United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)^{[1]United Nations. The Sustainable Development Goals. https://sdgs.un.org/} (Figure 1). Ranging from the elimination of poverty to the forging of powerful partnerships, these interconnected goals spell out what we need to achieve so that we can have a better future for all.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy. If we are to reach these ambitious goals, we need to understand the multiple drivers behind the grand challenges and work towards systemic change. And no one person can change an entire system. Reaching these goals will require us working together and doing their part to create better futures. Achieving these goals will require changes across all scales – from the local to the global, from government to citizen, and in structures and systems.

Figure 1. The 17 internationally agreed Sustainable Development Goals. sdgs.un.org/

1.2 How food systems fuel societal challenges

You may be thinking, “Wait a minute! I thought this report was about food?” You weren’t mistaken. While food may not be explicitly mentioned in any of the 17 SDG titles, dig a little deeper and you can see that our current food systems are undoubtedly contributing to the challenges behind the SDGs. In fact, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has declared that “transforming food systems is crucial for delivering all the Sustainable Development Goals.”^{[1]United Nations. Food Systems Summit 2021. https://www.un.org/en/food-systems-summit} Table 1 shows that food is a part of some of the grand challenges of today, highlighting how current food systems act as barriers to overcoming each challenge area, both globally and in the Nordic region.

SHORTCUTS TO

1.1 Grand challenges faced by world societies
1.2 How food systems fuel societal challenges
1.3 Food systems as entry points for tackling grand challenges
1.4 From entry points to missions

Table 1. The linkages between food systems and global grand challenges

^{Notes: [1]Willett, W., et al., 2019. Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. The Lancet, 393(10170), pp. 447-492.  [2]WWF, 2020. Living Planet Report. https://livingplanet.panda.org/    [3]Wood, A. et al., 2019. Nordic food systems for improved health and sustainability. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2019-04-03-within-reach.html  [4]FAO. FAOSTAT statistics database. 20120. URL http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data   [5]Baltic Eye, 2016. Nutrient recycling in agriculture for a cleaner Baltic Sea. https://balticeye.org/en/eutrophication/policy-brief-nutrient-recycling-in-agriculture/   [6]FAO, 2011. Global food losses and food waste – extent, causes and prevention. Rome: FAO.  [7]FAO. Food wastage footprint and climate change. http://www.fao.org/3/a-bb144e.pdf  [8]Nordic Council of Ministers, 2017. Policy brief: preventing food waste – better use of resources. http://norden.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1115667&dswid=-2021  [9]Silvennoinen, K., et al., 2015. Food waste volume and origin: Case studies in the Finnish food service sector. Waste Management, 46, pp. 140-145.   [10]Wood, A. et al., 2019. Nordic food systems for improved health and sustainability. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2019-04-03-within-reach.html   [11]2020 Global Nutrition Report: Action on equity to end malnutrition. Bristol, UK: Development Initiatives.  [12]Murray, C. J., et al., 2020. Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet, 396(10258), pp. 1223-1249.  [13]IHME, 2020. Country profiles. http://www.healthdata.org/results/country-profiles  [14]Murray, C. J., et al., 2020. Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet, 396(10258), pp. 1223-1249.  [15]Murray, C. J., et al., 2020. Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet, 396(10258), pp. 1223-1249.  [16]2020 Global Nutrition Report: Action on equity to end malnutrition. Development Initiatives: Bristol, UK.  [17]NCM, 2006. Health, food and physical activity: Nordic Plan of Action on better health and quality of life through diet and physical activity. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers.  [18]Fismen, A. S., et al., 2016. Trends in food habits and their relation to socioeconomic status among Nordic adolescents 2001/2002-2009/2010. PLoS One, 11(2), p.e0148541. [19]FAO, 2017. Food and agriculture: driving action across the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.  [20]Weatherspoon, D., Reardon, T, 2003. The rise of supermarkets in Africa: implications for agrifood systems and the rural poor. Development Policy Review, 21(3), pp. 333-355.  [21]Humphrey J., 2007. The supermarket revolution in developing countries: tidal wave or tough competitive struggle? Journal of Economic Geography, 7(4), pp. 433-450.  [22]Grunfelder et al., 2020. State of the Nordic region 2020. Denmark: Nordic Council of Ministers. https://pub.norden.org/nord2020-001/nord2020-001.pdf  [23]Larsen and Ilsøe, 2019. Atypical labour markets in the Nordics: Troubled waters under the still surface? https://faos.ku.dknord2020-048.pdffaktaark/Nfow-brief4.pdf  [24]From national statistics databases.  [25]Friberg, J. H., and Eldring, L., 2013. Labour migrants from Central and Eastern Europe in the Nordic countries. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers.}

1.2.1 Is food really the issue?

You may be asking yourself whether food is really what we should be focusing on in order to solve the grand challenges. Shouldn’t we tackle the energy sector and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible? Shouldn’t we seek to eliminate infectious diseases and invest in preventative care to make sure that everyone everywhere is healthy? And shouldn’t we focus on creating jobs, not only to reduce the poverty rate but also to ensure that our economies thrive? The short answer is yes – action is needed on multiple fronts to tackle our grand challenges.

What makes food systems unique is that they are an entry point to many of these action fronts. Food systems require a lot of energy from the energy sector, poor nutrition can increase the risk of infectious disease, and agriculture accounts for nearly one third of global employment^{[1]ILO, 2020. Agriculture; plantations; other rural sectors. https://www.ilo.org/global/industries-and-sectors/agriculture-plantations-other-rural-sectors/lang--en/index.htm} (and that’s not to mention the food and drink sector – the EU’s largest manufacturing sector^{[2]European Commission. Food and drink industry. https://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/food_en}). In other words, rewiring our food systems is a way of simultaneously progressing multiple aspects of a sustainable future. At the same time, we must remember that fixing our food systems isn’t a silver bullet – it’s a necessary, but in itself insufficient, area of action.

Perhaps you are convinced that global food systems need to change but believe that food systems in the Nordics are already putting us on a sustainable path. You have probably heard that Nordic food production is some of the most sustainable in the world. What may also come to mind is how the Nordics came up with some of the first national dietary guidelines to incorporate environmental sustainability. The region also has many food waste reduction initiatives as well as a number of other strengths, which are outlined in Box 2.

"The choice is ours. Are we going to use food as a means of destroying the foundations of healthy lives and prosperous societies, or are we going to use it as an ingredient to support a sustainable future for all?"

Box 2. The strengths of Nordic food systems

^{Note: [1]Antman, A., et al., 2015. Nordic agriculture air and climate: Baseline and system analysis report. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers. [2]Hellsten, S., et al., 2019. Abating N in Nordic agriculture - Policy, measures and way forward. Journal of environmental management, 236, pp. 674-686. [3]WHO, 2015. Vaccinating salmon: How Norway avoids antibiotics in fish farming. https://www.who.int/features/2015/antibiotics-norway/en/ [4]Danish Agriculture & Food Council, 2010. Danish pig producers and animal welfare. Copenhagen: Danish Agriculture & Food Council. [5]European Surveillance of Veterinary Antimicrobial Consumption (ESVAC), 2017. Sales of veterinary antimicrobial agents in 30 European countries in 2015. London: European Medicines Agency. [6]NordGen. The Nordic Genetic Resource Center. https://www.nordgen.org/en/ [7]Cederberg, C., et al., 2019. Beyond the borders – burdens of Swedish food consumption due to agrochemicals, greenhouse gases and land-use change. Journal of Cleaner Production, 214, pp. 644-652. [8]Danish Envrionment Protection Agency, 2018. Kortlægning af sammensætningen af dagrenovation og kildesorteret organisk affald fra husholdninger. https://mst.dk/service/publikationer/publikationsarkiv/2018/apr/kortlaegning-af-sammensaetningen-af-dagrenovation-og-kildesorteret-organisk-affald-fra-husholdninger/#:~:text=Kortl%C3%A6gning%20af%20sammens%C3%A6tningen%20af%20dagrenovation%20og%20kildesorteret%20organisk%20affald%20fra%20husholdninger,-18%2D04%2D2018&text=Den%20samlede%20m%C3%A6ngde%20dagrenovation%20udg%C3%B8r,12%2C4%20%25%20er%20plastaffald. [9]Bauer, B., et al., 2018. Sustainable Consumption and Production: An Analysis of Nordic Progress towards SDG12, and the way ahead. Denmark: Nordic Council of Ministers.  [10]Swedish National Food Agency, 2016. Report Summaries from the Swedish Food Waste Reduction Project 2013-2015. [11]NCM, 2012. Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2012: Integrating nutrition and physical activity, 5th edition. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers. [12]Niva, M., et al., 2014. Eating sustainably? Practices and background factors of ecological food consumption in four Nordic countries. Journal of Consumer Policy, 37(4), pp. 465-484. [13]EY, 2015. Nordic food survey 2015: Consumer Trends. https://images.template.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/01062905/Nordic-Food-Survey-Template.pdf [14]FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2020. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI). http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/CA9692EN.pdf  [15]SCB Sweden. Type of household – share of total consumption per household during 2012 in SEK. https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/household-finances/household-expenditures/household-budget-survey-hbs/pong/tables-and-graphs/2012/type-of-household--share-of-total-consumption-per-household-during-2012-in-sek/ [16]Statistics Norway, 2013. Survey of consumer expenditure, 2012. https://www.ssb.no/en/inntekt-og-forbruk/statistikker/fbu/aar/2013-12-17 [17]Statistics Finland. PxWeb Database. http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/ [18]Statistics Iceland, 2018. Household expenditures remain steady in years 2011–2016 according to the household expenditure survey. https://statice.is/publications/news-archive/prices/household-expenditure-survey/ [19]Denmark – Eurostat, 2018. How much are households spending on food? https://ec.europa.eu/eurostatproducts-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20181204-1?inheritRedirect=true%20  [20]Eurostat, 2020. Final consumption expenditure of households by consumption purpose. https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKMARK_DS-423035_QID_7B5FFDBA_UID_-3F171EB0&layout=UNIT,L,X,0;GEO,L,Y,0;COICOP,L,Z,0;TIME,C,Z,1;INDICATORS,C,Z,2;&zSelection=DS-423035INDICATORS,OBS_FLAG;DS-423035TIME,2018;DS-423035COICOP,CP01;&rankName1=INDICATORS_1_2_-1_2&rankName2=COICOP_1_2_0_0&rankName3=TIME_1_0_1_0&rankName4=UNIT_1_2_0_0&rankName5=GEO_1_2_0_1&rStp=&cStp=&rDCh=&cDCh=&rDM=true&cDM=true&footnes=false&empty=false&wai=false&time_mode=ROLLING&time_most_recent=true&lang=EN&cfo=%23%23%23%2C%23%23%23.%23%23%23 [21]World Economic Forum, 2016. Which countries spend the most on food? This map will show you.  https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-much-each-country-spends-on-food/}

Yes, the Nordics have many of the ingredients for a sustainable food system. But many challenges still remain, as shown in Table 1. And the world is changing rapidly. Achieving sustainable food systems in the Nordics will depend on the world making sustainable change, since Nordic consumption and production are linked to what happens elsewhere on the planet. Revised approaches, paradigms and mindsets are what we need to respond to our many complex and interwoven challenges. We now need to update our recipe for sustainable Nordic food systems in order to meet 21st century needs.

We are fortunate that we can change the ways in which we produce food so as to better support health, environmental wellbeing, and equitable jobs. We can grow food in a way that regenerates the Earth rather than destroys it. We could feed two billion people with the food that goes to waste today, which is more than twice the number of people who are going to bed hungry (around 690 million individuals).^{[1]FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO, 2020. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI). http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/CA9692EN.pdf,[2]FAO, 2013. Monitoring food loss and waste essential to hunger fight. http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/203149/icode/}  A true cost approach to foods could incorporate negative environmental and social externalities into the food prices and thus support the more sustainable production and consumption of food – or at least improve the alignment between those who are polluting and those who are paying for that pollution.^{[3]FAO, 2013. Monitoring food loss and waste essential to hunger fight. http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/203149/icode/}  Finally, by choosing to purchase and eat foods with a lower environmental impact, we get closer to meeting SDG12: Responsible Consumption and Production.

The choice is ours. Are we going to use food as a means of destroying the foundations of healthy lives and prosperous societies, or are we going to use it as an ingredient to support a sustainable future for all? We are lucky that we can change the way that we produce foods in order to support health, environmental wellbeing, and equitable jobs. We can start by finding entry points in the food system for tackling our grand challenges.
 

"While 20th-century changes to food systems have brought gains in nutrition and new opportunities in agriculture, they have also posed new challenges to realising sustainable food futures."

1.3 Food systems as entry points for tackling grand challenges

Entry points are places where we can intervene in a food system to make strategic changes that can help tackle the grand challenges. An entry point will identify where to start changing a food system. This intervention point may be a physical place, like a supply chain, a farm or a supermarket, but it may also identify a part of the food system that can change, such as a meal, a food culture or food waste streams. Yet entry points in themselves are not granular enough to constitute a plan, and they don’t indicate how to go about changing the system. We’ll soon get to that, or you can skip ahead to dive into the what (Act II) or the how (Act III) of food system transformation.

Food system entry points may vary from context to context, so it’s important to do the work needed to identify the entry points for your specific food system. For example, in the Nordic context, do we focus on business solutions, citizen engagement, public policy, or a combination of all of these? Do we focus on changing what people consume (demand) or changing what we grow and how we grow it (supply)? Answering these questions requires that we understand a specific system – in this case a food system – in a particular context, and that we recognise the unique capacities of that context to affect systemic change.

There will be many entry points for solving our grand challenges, because the challenges are so multi-faceted. For example, ensuring sustainable meals for all may be one critical entry point for ensuring good health and wellbeing, but so is closing the income gap or providing universal health care. Remember, no single solution is going to “solve” a grand challenge.

Given the urgent need to act, we cannot afford to focus on one entry point at a time. This means it’s not about choosing one entry point over another, or about finding the “perfect” entry point. It’s about identifying the entry points that will have the most impact and understanding how to address them simultaneously and in a co-ordinated fashion.

1.3.1 Identifying food system entry points

Current scientific evidence can help us identify entry points in order to address the grand challenges. For example, shifting our diets, improving food production practices and reducing food waste are clear entry points for achieving better health and greater environmental sustainability.^{[1]Willett, W., et al., 2019. Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. The Lancet, 393(10170), pp. 447-492.} Similarly, there is strong evidence that food environments – which are all of those places where we make decisions about food, such as supermarkets – are critical to shaping our food choices.^{[2]Swinburn, B., et al., 2013. Monitoring and benchmarking government policies and actions to improve the healthiness of food environments: a proposed Government Healthy Food Environment Policy Index. Obesity Reviews, 14, pp. 24-37.} But it’s not just scientists who should identify entry points.

Everyone within a system has a unique perspective of how that system works, meaning they can provide different perspectives on how to tackle challenges. For example, businesses have a deep understanding of what drives demand, food producers have a keen understanding of production challenges and opportunities, and civil society groups have a deep understanding of how societal movements can lead to change. These same actors also understand the different economic forces that enable and limit the actions they can take.

Scientific evidence together with stakeholder knowledge can help us develop visual maps of the food system to help us better see common challenges and opportunities.^{[3]https://www.nourishlife.orgnord2020-048.pdfNourish_Food_System_Map_11x14.pdf} These maps may present a typical overview of a food system, or they may capture the dynamics of very specific food systems at the regional or local level.^{[4]See an example here and at http://matdugnaden.no/} These maps – particularly when they have been co-created with actors in a food system – can help us understand the connections between parts of the food system. This will allow us to better understand where our challenges lie and how we can address those challenges.^{[5]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/} A good example of how mapping can be used comes from the Swedish innovation agency, Vinnova. To get a good overview of what change can happen in a national context, Vinnova brought diverse food system actors together to co-create a “systems map” of Sweden’s food system.^{[6]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/} These maps were created with the specific intent of identifying entry points, which Vinnova calls “angles”. These entry points then served as the basis for choosing and developing a specific mission on food. Check out Picture 1 to see the co-created systems map. You can also skip to Acts II and III to read more about Vinnova’s mission on food.

We would emphasise again how important it is to tailor your approach to determining entry points to the needs in your context. Vinnova is pioneering a systematic approach to selecting entry points.^{[7]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/} They have applied this approach to food systems, and Box 3 outlines the diverse range of inputs they have used to identify key entry points into the Swedish food systems. In this report, our focus goes beyond Sweden to take in the entire Nordic region. The next section describes the sources analysed in this report in order to identify which entry points are most relevant in the Nordic food context.

SHORTCUTS TO

1.1 Grand challenges faced by world societies
1.2 How food systems fuel societal challenges
1.3 Food systems as entry points for tackling grand challenges
1.4 From entry points to missions

Box 3. How are entry points found? The Swedish innovation agency Vinnova used the following input when identifying entry points into Swedish food systems that can be used to tackle grand challenges:^{[1]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/}

1. Sector analysis (roadmaps and research): existing analysis from food-related sectors may help frame or identify entry points.
2. Systems analysis: moving beyond siloed sector analysis, systems analysis looks across the various aspects or “ecosystems” within a food system, such as all things related to school meals.
3. Stakeholder meetings: meetings were held between Vinnova and several hundred food system actors, which contributed to a greater understanding of entry points.
4. Local field research: new place-based research can contribute to a greater understanding of entry points in a local context.
5. Stakeholder workshops: diverse stakeholders from the public, private and social sectors are brought together to co-create a systems map and identify key intervention points (entry points) in that system.

Picture 1
The systems maps created through a participatory process facilitated by Vinnova. The maps provide a macro view of the challenges and opportunities within Swedish food systems, while also highlighting important nuances that characterise the system. Pictures used with permission from the Swedish innovation agency, Vinnova

1.3.2  Nordic entry points

To date, there has been no large-scale effort to identify entry points of Nordic food systems. Yet even in the absence of such an effort, there is a range of existing sources that can be drawn on to start developing a picture of entry points. Table 2 describes several of these sources. While some of the sources relied on practitioner knowledge of food systems to identify entry points, others relied on assessments of scientific evidence. Some of these sources were designed explicitly to identify food system entry points (see Vinnova’s process in Box 3, for example), while others were part of distinct projects designed to achieve different yet related goals. And finally, some of these sources focused on specific countries, while others focused on the Nordic region as a whole. By pooling insights from these separate processes involving a diversity of stakeholders, we can get an idea of where to start focusing our own energy in order to take action.

Table 2. The different sources that were drawn on to identify entry points for this cookbook

^{Note: [1]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/ [2]Wood A., et al., 2020. Insight paper #2 of the Nordic food system transformation series: Eight opportunities for Nordic collaboration on food system challenges. Stockholm Resilience Centre: Stockholm. [3]}

Looking at the scientific evidence and practitioner knowledge laid out in Table 2, eight broad entry points central to the Nordic context start to emerge. These are outlined below. These entry points are at times overlapping. For example, food culture (entry point #3) influences and is influenced by our food environments (entry point #1). These overlaps reflect the interconnected nature of the food system components and show that we need to take a systemic approach to transforming our food systems.

1.    Food environments
Food environments are the physical, digital and social environments where we make decisions about food.^{[1]Swinburn, B., et al., 2013. Monitoring and benchmarking government policies and actions to improve the healthiness of food environments: a proposed Government Healthy Food Environment Policy Index. Obesity Reviews, 14, pp. 24-37.,[2]Downs, S.M., et al., 2020. Food environment typology: Advancing an expanded definition, framework, and methodological approach for improved characterization of wild, cultivated, and built food environments toward sustainable diets. Foods, 9(4), p. 532.}  These environments are peppered with policy, economic and sociocultural signals that influence us to choose certain foods. Examples of these signals include advertising and price promotions in a (physical or online) grocery store and the Nordic norms around foraging for food. Food environments are a powerful lever for change because they influence what we eat, and we know that current diets are a major driver behind several grand challenges.

2.    Circularity
Circularity means reducing waste in the food system. Reducing food waste is a big part of circularity, but utilising “by-products” that would otherwise get thrown away when food is produced or processed and nutrient recycling (of our own human waste and animal waste, for example) are also key to circularity.^{[3]Jurgilevich, A., et al., 2016. Transition towards circular economy in the food system. Sustainability, 8(1), p. 69.}  

3.    Food culture and identity
Food culture is a rich stew of preferences, norms and practices that influence how we produce, consume and waste food. Creating a food culture that celebrates sustainable, modern Nordic food can be key to unlocking changes in different parts of the supply chain that support short- and long-term benefits to people, our planet and our society.

4.    Diet and meals
The science is clear that we must change our diet for many sustainability reasons. Changing the meals on our plates is a very tangible entry point – we all eat! Yet shifting to sustainable meals can seem daunting since there are so many parts of the food system between farm and fork that impact the meals we choose. We can start exploring this entry point by mapping the different places where we consume meals – at home, in school, in restaurants, even on the go! – and then identifying who has the power to influence what meals are served in those settings.

5.    Food supply chains
Traceability in supply chains generally focuses on ensuring food safety rather than sustainability. There are, of course, exceptions, as illustrated by certification schemes that ensure ethically produced or fairly traded food products.^{[4]Marine Stewardship Council. What does the blue MSC label mean? https://www.msc.org/what-we-are-doing/our-approach/what-does-the-blue-msc-label-mean; https://rspo.org/certification} Improved transparency and traceability in supply chains would make it easier for us to see exactly where our outsourced impact is in terms of natural resource use and who in the supply chain has the power to reduce this impact.

6.    Sustainable, resilient food production
There are particular opportunities with regard to new, or indeed old, locations for food production, and new technologies can enable more sustainable production methods. However, defining “sustainable production” isn’t easy, and actions to explore this entry point need to balance the different dimensions of social, environmental, and economic sustainability and consider the trade-offs across these dimensions. For example, land use optimised for a producer might not be optimal for the environment.

7.    Food producers
Food producers are the stewards of our lands and seas and thus they have great promise as an entry point for tackling several grand challenges. Yet there is a need for support to equip these producers with the tools to seize the opportunities offered by a Nordic food systems transformation. Food production livelihoods need to be attractive, sustainable and respected.

8.    Cities
Cities are home to most of the world’s population, including the Nordic population. This means that municipal governments and urban places are uniquely positioned to transform the fight against non-communicable diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Although cities occupy only 2% of the world’s total land, they are significant entry points because they account for over 80% of the global economy (in gross domestic product), 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, and 70% of global waste.^{[5]World Bank, 2020. Urban Development. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment}

1.3.3 Prioritising food system entry points

With a long list of entry points and limited resources, how do you choose which entry points to pursue? There is no perfect recipe for prioritisation because it’s not always clear how to weigh the different entry points.

The scientific evidence can help prioritise actions to some extent. For example, if the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally, then the scientific evidence would point to changing what we produce and reducing land use change as actions with more leverage than, say, reducing emissions associated with food transport (which accounts for only about 6% of food system emissions^{[6]Our World in Data. Food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions}   ). However, other attempts at prioritisation aren’t as straightforward. How do we weigh the importance of working with cities against the need to change food retail environments, both of which would contribute to healthier populations?

There will inevitably be value-based judgments about which entry point(s) will be most effective. Ordinarily, we rely on our democratic institutions to make judgements on which actions to pursue. When the nature of the problem is too complex and uncertain, however, democratic deliberation isn’t enough. We also need to experiment, to find out what types of interventions may actually work, as part of the decision-making process. Also, a broad range of stakeholders need to agree to work towards a common goal. This involves carefully balancing facts, interests, resources and potential impact to bring about a collective judgment about what to do. Finally, we can also search for those windows of opportunity when the timing is right to make a big change. For example, these windows may open when events – such as the current pandemic – focus our attention on a particular problem. Box 4 gives insights into how Vinnova, Sweden’s innovation agency, together with Livsmedelsverket, the national food agency, prioritised which entry points to pursue in Sweden.
 

"We must remember that fixing our food systems isn’t a silver bullet – it’s a necessary, but in itself insufficient, area of action."

Box 4. Vinnova’s list of what to consider when prioritising your entry points^{[1]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/}

• Examples of emerging activity within Nordic society that could be directed towards future strategic Nordic priorities and ambitions, locally and globally
• An issue or topic that generates momentum, attracts attention, and leads to transformative societal outcomes
• A “coalition of the willing” or, in other words, of those who are also interested in this pull
• Scalable activities that have the potential to enable systemic change and which may require a “push” in the form of infrastructural support or policy or regulatory refinement
• Activities that will connect with society, broadly speaking, as well as with private, public and civil society and with the political process, in order to build new consensus

1.4 From entry points to missions

It’s important to remember that an entry point doesn’t identify solutions. Entry points identify the core areas of change that are needed. So, if you are surprised to see certain things missing from our list of Nordic food system entry points – such as “using public education to provide sustainable meals” or “changing procurement policy to encourage sustainable food production” – then you are simply one step ahead!

Before moving on, take a moment to reflect on the potential entry points that make sense in your own context. It’s important to pause and get feedback from the actors you deal with in the food system. Keep in mind, however, that entry points don’t have to be perfect. They can be refined over time as we learn more about what works and what doesn’t. So, while we could spend years identifying every entry point and debating which ones are “better” than others, we simply don’t have time to continuously debate the best way to approach a challenge. If we want to solve our grand challenges, we need to act.

After you have determined your entry points, it’s time to move to the next step: missions. In Act II, you will find out more about what a mission can help you achieve and how to implement one. In Act III, you will take the process one step further and learn more about demonstrators: a way of building local innovation ecosystems to demonstrate exactly how missions are achievable.

SHORTCUTS TO

1.1 Grand challenges faced by world societies
1.2 How food systems fuel societal challenges
1.3 Food systems as entry points for tackling grand challenges
1.4 From entry points to missions

► GO TO ACT I

► GO TO ACT II

► GO TO ACT III

► GO TO ACT IV

ACT II – We’re on a mission

If you’re just joining us, you may be wondering “a mission for what”? In short, the world is facing some pretty big challenges relating to everything from environmental change to gender inequality and from health epidemics to wasteful consumption paradigms. While these may seem distant from the food we see on our plates, our current food systems contribute to many of these crises. The great news is that it is possible to redesign the way we produce, value, consume and reuse our food so that it nurtures more sustainable futures for all.

Seeing the “big picture” is necessary to understanding the scale and scope of our grand challenges. We also need to zoom in to understand how we can set goals for food system changes in particular contexts in order to tackle these challenges. Reaching these goals will take an “all hands on deck” approach, and systemic changes will be needed to tackle these complex and multi-faceted grand challenges. This means that we need to co-ordinate our action to achieve the desired change. Governments, particularly public innovation agencies, can play a key leadership role in co-ordinating this action. In this section, we explore in more detail how food system missions in the Nordics can help address our grand challenges by co-ordinating actions and articulating an agreed outcome for those actions.

SHORTCUTS TO

2.1 Missions to tackle societal challenges
2.2 How do we design food system missions to help tackle our grand challenges?
2.3 Defining Nordic food system missions
2.4 Where next?

2.1 Missions to tackle societal challenges

Missions are nothing new – they have a long history as a means of solving different types of challenges. You may be most familiar with the term “mission” in the context of science and technology. The Apollo space mission to put a man on the moon is a classic example of scientific and technological advancements being harnessed to develop a solution to a complex challenge.^{[1]Mazzucato, M., 2017. Mission-oriented innovation policy: Challenges and opportunities. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose Working Paper.}  

But the idea of a mission is changing, in part because the challenges we face have evolved. As emphasised in Act I, we now face a range of grand societal challenges. These challenges have varying degrees of complexity and uncertainty, and it can be difficult to even define or frame a challenge due to the multi-faceted and ambiguous nature of the problem at hand.^{[2]Wanzenböck, I., et al., 2019. A framework for mission-oriented innovation policy: Alternative pathways through the problem-solution space.}  

Science and technology alone won’t be able to “fix” the social core of these problems – we need to think more broadly about the tools at hand to solve complex problems. We also need to acknowledge the value judgements and interests that lead to different understandings of the problem, which in turn can lead to different preferred solutions. For example, some stakeholders may see economic sustainability as more important than environmental sustainability, leading them to frame a challenge through an economic lens and favour market-based solutions. Other stakeholders may view environmental sustainability as the foundation of all other dimensions of sustainability, leading them to prioritise environmentally friendly solutions.

As such, “societal missions” are emerging as mechanisms to direct multi-stakeholder innovation towards a common understanding of how best to solve our urgent grand challenges. In this context, innovation means doing something differently and deliberately in order to achieve certain objectives.^{[3]Koch, Per & Hauknes, Johan On innovation in the public sector – today and beyond (Second revised edition, 2005), Publin Report No. D20. Accessed here: http://www.aviana.com/step/publin/reports/d20-innovation.pdf} This makes it crucial for stakeholders to agree on the societal objectives that they want to address. In turn, societal missions can support transformative change across a system, such as a food system.^{[4]Wanzenböck, I., et al., 2019. A framework for mission-oriented innovation policy: Alternative pathways through the problem-solution space.} Think about it this way – if the entry points in Act I identified where in a system we could intervene for transformative change, then the missions we describe here are the plan of what to do. Jump to Act III to read more about the distinction between technical and societal missions.  

Missions aim to create transformative change by breaking down high-level grand challenges into more granular components until concrete actions can be developed, as shown in Figure 2. For example, how do we really tackle grand challenges such as inequality, environmental degradation, and malnutrition? As illustrated in Act I, we can use food as an entry point to link all three of these grand challenges. Yet still, how do we use that entry point to create change? We’re getting closer, but we still don’t have enough granularity to act. That’s where missions come in.

Missions are innovation strategies that identify opportunities to address grand challenges, propose innovations that can help overcome these challenges and outline an approach to testing and co-ordinating these innovations.^{[5]Mazzucato, M., 2018. Mission-oriented research and innovation in the European Union. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/mazzucato_report_2018.pdf} A mission includes a portfolio of experiments that relies on multiple paths offering multiple solutions to get the job done. Here, we follow the guidance of Vinnova and EIT Climate-KIC to organise these experiments into a number of place-based demonstrators (read more about demonstrators in Act III).^{[6]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/,[7]EIT Climate-KIC, 2019. Deep Demonstration Design Process – Process Guide.} In this way, missions show that we have the power to effect change, even if our actions are on a very local scale!

"Missions are not about addressing low-hanging fruit, which requires technical solutions and single solutions. Missions aim to bring about change across a system in a way that benefits society by addressing the complex, systemic and urgent problems that affect our lives."

Figure 2. A mission approach
An example of how missions tackle grand challenges by exploiting entry points and breaking challenges down into more concrete, actionable interventions, clustered into different demonstrators.

You may have seen other figures representing a ‘mission approach’. For example, the European Commission has adopted a figure designed by Mariana Mazzucato^{[1]Mazzucato, M., 2018. Mission-oriented research and innovation in the European Union. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/mazzucato_report_2018.pdf}, and the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova has also developed a figure to represent their mission-based approach.^{[2]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/} While all of these figures may look visually different, they are all based on the same underlying principle: a mission is a way to build alignment around grand challenges and connect these challenges to concrete experiments. The differences in the figures reflect the flexibility of the approach. In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all mission process.

2.1.1 Five criteria for selecting missions

What makes a good mission? Below are five criteria that can be used to guide the development and selection of missions. We follow the criteria adopted by the European Commission^{[3]Mazzucato, M., 2018. Mission-oriented research and innovation in the European Union. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/mazzucato_report_2018.pdf} while acknowledging that missions have been described with additional nuance in other mission frameworks:  

1. Missions are bold and inspirational and they’re used to tackle urgent grand challenges. Missions are not about addressing low-hanging fruit, which requires technical solutions and single solutions. Missions aim to bring about change across a system in a way that benefits society by addressing the complex, systemic and urgent problems that affect our lives. Missions thus have a clear transformative agenda designed to enhance the public good.^{[4]Klerkx, L. and Begemann, S., 2020. Supporting food systems transformation: The what, why, who, where and how of mission-oriented agricultural innovation systems. Agricultural Systems, 184, p. 102901.} Despite the urgency of these grand challenges, we often hear of timelines that end in 2030 (the year by which the UN Sustainable Development Goals should be achieved) or 2050 (the year by which the world needs to achieve carbon neutrality in order to limit catastrophic climate impacts). This can give the impression that the “real” action can wait a few years – or decades. Missions aiming to tackle systemic, complex challenges can’t be expected to yield quick results.^{[5]Janssen, M., et al., 2020. Position paper: ‘Mission-oriented innovation policy observatory’. https://www.uu.nl/en/research/copernicus-institute-of-sustainable-development/mission-oriented-innovation-policy-observatory} That said, the time to start working towards our goals for 2030 or 2050 is now.

2. Missions provide clear direction for action by setting measurable and time-bound goals. Missions should have clear criteria that make it easy to see if the mission is a success. For example, we know that a mission to end child overweight and obesity in a particular area is a success when no child is classified as being above a healthy weight. A mission also needs to have a clear timeframe for action. Missions take time, so make sure that the time limit for the mission allows sufficient time to develop networks, experiment and innovate. That said, the end date should be tangible – working towards a 2100 mission, for example, is hard for many people to grasp. Given the emphasis of missions on learning from experimentation, targets and goals can (and should!) be revised in light of new knowledge or a better understanding of what it will ‘take’ to achieve the mission.

3. Missions use innovation and innovation policy to achieve ambitious but realistic change. Missions provide clear direction for a solution, but they don’t assume that we know what those solutions are yet. This means that innovation and an innovative mindset are key to the success of missions. Importantly, missions ensure that resources, agendas and policies are aligned to foster innovation directed at a determined goal. This alignment is critical, since innovation policy has traditionally been neutral with regard to the social output of innovation.^{[6]Wanzenböck, I., et al., 2019. A framework for mission-oriented innovation policy: Alternative pathways through the problem-solution space.} In other words, innovation policy was used to address generic innovation objectives, such as economic growth or the development of enabling technologies, rather than to encourage a specific, transformational direction, such as a shift towards healthier consumption patterns. Nowadays, however, innovation policy is expected to provide clear direction for innovation activities and create a demand for the types of innovations that meet societal needs.^{[7]Wanzenböck, et al., 2020. A framework for mission-oriented innovation policy: Alternative pathways through the problem–solution space.} Again, this does not need to mean designing completely new systems from scratch. It can mean taking existing budgets, resources, infrastructures and more and combining them in a new way.^{[8]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/} It’s taking the everyday ingredients and making a delicious new dish.

4. Missions bring people together to work in new ways. Government has the authority to take the lead in defining innovation outcomes, which gives them a central role in mission approaches. However, because missions set a direction that is then targeted for public funding and resources, public participation is also crucial in the development of a mission-oriented approach to make sure that everyone has their say. In some applications of the mission approach – such as Vinnova’s process introduced in Act I as well as examples that we show in the cookbook – the bottom-up participatory process is important. This means that citizen and stakeholder inputs initially shape the direction of the mission, which are then articulated and tested via prototypes that start building insights and networks. The evidence from these activities can then be used to inform formal political decision-making. This is potentially a reversal of the traditional policy-making process.^{[9]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/}  Regardless of the starting point, governments – particularly government innovation agencies – need to expand their role to enable this civic engagement.^{[10]Borrás, S., and Edler, J., 2020. The roles of the state in the governance of socio-technical systems’ transformation. Research Policy, 49(5), p. 103971.} And this engagement doesn’t stop with the public.

Mission approaches involve multiple sectors, actors and disciplines because large-scale, multifaceted challenges can’t be solved by any one individual or group. Innovation networks are formed as a result of new combinations of researchers, private sector companies, entrepreneurs, investors, governments and others working together to tackle a shared goal. Innovation networks need to be co-ordinated and fostered.^{[11]Musiolik, J., et al., 2012. Networks and network resources in technological innovation systems: Towards a conceptual framework for system building. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 79(6), pp. 1032-1048.} To manage a new type of decentralised governance, governments may now become initiators, facilitators, moderators, and promoters as well as users of innovation.^{[12]Borrás, S., and Edler, J., 2020. The roles of the state in the governance of socio-technical systems’ transformation. Research Policy, 49(5), p.103971.} Thus, government will have a very active role in innovation networks, “ensuring co-ordinated action and legitimacy of both problems and innovative solutions across multiple actors”.^{[13]Wanzenböck, et al., 2020. A framework for mission-oriented innovation policy: Alternative pathways through the problem–solution space.} This is a role governments can play on their own, or in partnership with civic and private organizations.

5. Missions rely on multiple paths offering multiple solutions to get the job done. A mission is not a single project. Missions seek multiple solutions to a challenge, as well as a portfolio of supportive measures, such as policy interventions, measures to deploy and diffuse innovation, and close collaboration with the end-users of innovation.^{[14]Mazzucato, M., 2018. Mission-oriented research and innovation in the European Union. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/mazzucato_report_2018.pdf} The portfolio approach can help to buffer the inherent risk, failure and uncertainty of the innovation process.^{[15]Klerkx, L., and Begemann, S., 2020. Supporting food systems transformation: The what, why, who, where and how of mission-oriented agricultural innovation systems. Agricultural Systems, 184, p. 102901.,[16]Mazzucato, M., 2016. From market fixing to market-creating: a new framework for innovation policy. Industry and Innovation, 23(2), pp. 140-156.}  It also lessens the chance of overlooking blind spots in our understanding of the problem. But this approach consists of more than supporting a wide range of disconnected projects.

Successful mission processes will have the infrastructure and capacity in place to stimulate lesson-learning and interaction across projects, seeing to it that these projects do not develop in isolation (Box 5).^{[17]Mazzucato, M., 2018. Mission-oriented research and innovation in the European Union. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/mazzucato_report_2018.pdf,[18]Wanzenböck, I., et al., 2019. A framework for mission-oriented innovation policy: Alternative pathways through the problem-solution space.}  Successful mission processes will also have a diverse set of funding sources that direct funding to relatively untested innovations rather than continuing to funnel funding to innovation areas that are already receiving a lot of support. By investing in multiple paths with multiple solutions, successful missions can afford to make mistakes and learn from them. Iteration is key to the innovation process, turning mistakes into valuable lessons.

"Challenges come in all shapes and sizes, and every approach needs to be tailored to the problem at hand."

Box 5. New capacities and skill sets are needed!

Individuals will need to be equipped with a range of new capacities and skills to face our grand challenges. Systems thinking is just one important muscle that we need to exercise when working with grand challenges.^{[1]Hawkes, C., 2020. Five steps towards a global reset: lessons from COVID-19. Global Sustainability, 3.} In practice, systems thinking encourages us to explore inter-relationships, perspectives and boundaries. To do this, we need an understanding of the context of the challenge. That makes it important to observe the connections between different parts of the system. And because actors in the system have different views of the system they are a part of, understanding a system requires listening to and making sense of multiple perspectives at once.

2.1.2 Sounds great! Give me the recipe for a Nordic mission!

Unfortunately, there is no recipe for how to work with the mission approach. Challenges come in all shapes and sizes, and every approach needs to be tailored to the problem at hand.^{[1]Mazzucato, M., 2018. Mission-oriented research and innovation in the European Union. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/mazzucato_report_2018.pdf} However, we can use the approach illustrated in Figure 2 to get us started.

• To have a clear goal, you need to know which grand challenge(s) you want to address. Still deciding which challenge you want to focus on? Flip to Section 1.1 to see a few grand challenges that affect our societies and our planet.
• To find our starting points for tackling a challenge, entry points need to be identified. Go to section 1.3.2 to see which entry points are key in the Nordic context.
• To provide clear direction for action, a mission needs to be defined. Below, we outline two potential Nordic food system missions that exploit two different entry points for action.
• To learn more about developing a demonstrator and the different experiments that aim to accomplish a mission, skip ahead to Act III.

We also need to keep in mind that societal missions are relatively new. There are few examples of societal missions completed from start to finish.^{[2]Janssen, M., et al., 2020. Position paper: ‘Mission-oriented innovation policy observatory’. https://www.uu.nl/en/research/copernicus-institute-of-sustainable-development/mission-oriented-innovation-policy-observatory} In the Nordics, for example, the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova and the Swedish food agency Livsmedelsverket have built the foundation for a Swedish mission on sustainable school food, but its mission still has more simmering to do before it’s ready to be presented as a completed dish. As we embark on our journey, we should take care to document whether the claims, promises and design of a mission achieve what the mission has set out to achieve. This will allow us to learn what works well and what can be changed.
 

2.2 How do we design food system missions to help tackle our grand challenges?

To understand how food system missions can help us tackle societal grand challenges, we need to understand how these systems work. In section 1.3.1, we talked about mapping food systems. This was a way of understanding the connections between parts of a system. It was also a starting point for identifying challenges and opportunities within a food system. Figure 3 shows a gigamap^{[1]Gigamapping is super extensive mapping across many sections, layers and scales with the goal of investigating relations between seemingly separate things, categories, and silos. Gigamapping is part of the Systems Oriented Design (SOD) framework.} of the Norwegian food system, developed as part of the Food Dugnad^{[2]The map was developed by Comte Bureau, in a Stimulab-funded project co-led by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and EAT.} project. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive map of a national food system.
 

SHORTCUTS TO

2.1 Missions to tackle societal challenges
2.2 How do we design food system missions to help tackle our grand challenges?
2.3 Defining Nordic food system missions
2.4 Where next?

Figure 3. Gigamap of the Norwegian Food system (in Norwegian; click to enlarge)

These system maps may present a picture of how food systems look now, but we also need to understand what has shaped food systems. In other words, we need to understand the drivers that have shaped everything from the way we produce food to who the powerful actors are. Why? Because changes to our food system need to address the core drivers and influences in food systems if we want to make real, rather than marginal, change. Food systems are the result of complex dynamics – many, many things have come together and combined to shape current food systems. Many of these drivers are deeply rooted in history and economics.^{[1]FAO, 2017. The future of food and agriculture: Trends and challenges. Rome: FAO. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6583e.pdf,[2]Clapp, J. 2020. Food, 3rd edition. Wiley}

Understanding the drivers of global, Nordic and local food systems is beyond the scope of this report. A thorough assessment would take resources, time and diverse expertise. Yet, to give you a taste of what we mean by “drivers of a food system”, we have outlined a few global drivers in Panel 1.
 

Panel 1. Drivers of unsustainable food systems
Here, we provide an overview of a few global drivers that have moulded food systems around the world.^{[1]Béné, C., et al., 2020. Global drivers of food system (un) sustainability: A multi-country correlation analysis. PloS one, 15(4), p.e0231071.} This is just a taste – a comprehensive list would be far too long to discuss here!

^{Notes: [1]Béné, C., et al., 2020. Global drivers of food system (un) sustainability: A multi-country correlation analysis. PloS one, 15(4), p.e0231071. [2]FAO, 2017. The future of food and agriculture: Trends and challenges. Rome: FAO. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6583e.pdf [3]Béné, C., et al., 2020. Global drivers of food system (un) sustainability: A multi-country correlation analysis. PloS one, 15(4), p.e0231071. [4]Pingali, P. L., 2012. Green revolution: impacts, limits, and the path ahead. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(31), pp. 12302-12308. [5]FAO, 2017. The future of food and agriculture: Trends and challenges. Rome: FAO. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6583e.pdf. [6]Hawkes, C., 2008. Dietary implications of supermarket development: a global perspective. Development Policy Review, 26(6), pp. 657-692. [7]Zhao, C., et al., 2017. Temperature increase reduces global yields of major crops in four independent estimates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(35), pp. 9326-9331. [8]National Research Council, et al. 2011. Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia. National Academies Press: Washington, DC. [9]Wiréhn, L., 2018. Nordic agriculture under climate change: A systematic review of challenges, opportunities and adaptation strategies for crop production. Land Use Policy, 77, pp. 63-74. [10]Baltic Sea Centre, 2020. Emerging ocean acidification threatens Baltic sea ecosystems. https://balticeye.org/en/policy-briefs/emerging-ocean-acidification-threatens-baltic-sea-ecosystems/ [11]Pellegrini, P., and Fernández, R. J., 2018. Crop intensification, land use, and on-farm energy-use efficiency during the worldwide spread of the green revolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(10), pp. 2335-2340. [12]Frison, E. Path Dependence and Carbon Lock-In in the Agriculture Sector. https://files.wri.org/expert-perspective-frison.pdf [13]Chhetri, N. B., Easterling, W. E., Terando, A., and Mearns, L., 2010. Modeling path dependence in agricultural adaptation to climate variability and change. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100(4), pp. 894-907. [14]Pingali, P., 2015. Agricultural policy and nutrition outcomes – getting beyond the preoccupation with staple grains. Food Security, 7(3), pp. 583-591. [15]Gómez, M. I., et al., 2013. Post-green revolution food systems and the triple burden of malnutrition. Food Policy, 42, pp. 129-138. [16]Pingali, P., 2015. Agricultural policy and nutrition outcomes – getting beyond the preoccupation with staple grains. Food Security, 7(3), pp. 583-591. [17]Mooney, P., 2017. Too big to feed: exploring the impacts of mega-mergers, consolidation and concentration of power in the agri-food sector. http://www.ipes-food.org/_img/upload/files/Concentration_FullReport.pdf}

2.3 Defining Nordic food system missions    

At this point in the process, you have identified several food system entry points for tackling grand challenges, and thanks to research and stakeholder knowledge, you have a good idea of how your food system works. Now it’s time to start cooking up specific missions. To do this, let’s revisit the criteria for selecting a mission, summarised below in Box 6. In this section, we’ll illustrate what a food system mission in the Nordics that satisfies these criteria might look like. While we are using only two examples here to illustrate the mission approach, keep in mind that many complementary missions will be needed to overcome a grand challenge.
 

SHORTCUTS TO

2.1 Missions to tackle societal challenges
2.2 How do we design food system missions to help tackle our grand challenges?
2.3 Defining Nordic food system missions
2.4 Where next?

Box 6. Recap of the defining characteristics of a mission

1. The mission is bold, inspirational and tackles a challenge of great societal relevance.
2. The mission is ambitious yet can be broken down into concrete actions with targets that are clear, measurable and time-bound.
3. The mission uses innovation and innovation policy to set ambitious but realistic goals.
4. The approach draws on cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral and multi-actor innovation, investments and engagement.
5. A portfolio of projects is needed to complete the mission, with each project reinforcing the other.

The first mission we consider looks at public meals, while the second focuses on food environments. We have chosen to highlight two missions for several reasons:

1. They represent different entry points, illustrating that there are many angles that we can (and must!) take to tackle a grand challenge.
2. They demonstrate the level of ambition needed. As you’ll see below, neither mission is going to be a walk in the park!
3. They match trends seen across the Nordics in terms of which entry points might be significant levers of change. For example, public meals have been seen as a strong lever for change both in research analysis^{[1]Röös, E., et al., 2020. Styrmedel för hållbar matkonsumtion – en kunskapsöversikt och vägar framåt. Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, forskningsplattformen SLU Future Food. https://www.slu.se/globalassets/ew/org/centrb/fu-food/nyheter/2020/slu-futurefood_rapport13_styrmedelforhallbarmatkonsumtion.pdf} and in practice in the Nordics. In Sweden, Vinnova and Livsmedelsverket started to build a mission aiming for sustainable school meals after consultation with stakeholders and in-depth research identified this as an important mission.^{[2]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/}  

The power of the mission approach is its use of complementary missions to tackle shared challenges. When we put these two missions next to each other, we can see that they reinforce one another. For example, supermarkets have the potential for large-scale change, but retailers may lack motivation to fundamentally alter their stores. Key changes are not currently rewarded by the market, which means there is a disadvantage to being the “first mover”. This makes the sector dependent on complex co-ordination. This in turn could make it more difficult to get a coalition of the willing in place. Public institutions, on the other hand, may have the motivation and authority to improve diets. While providing a small proportion of total meals, the quantity of public meals served in the Nordics is sufficient to encourage the development of more sustainable supply chains and new patterns of consumption. If retail can't be expected to invest in new supply chains alone, an initial nudge by the public sector may be what's needed to, for example, mainstream sustainable agricultural production.

Missions also work together to make sure that changes are systemic. In other words, parallel missions ensure that all parts of a system align towards shared goals. For example, students may enjoy sustainable meals at school, but prefer to go to nearby retailers who provide a wider range of options. If only the public meals mission (Mission 2) was supported, students would be able to “cheat” the system by choosing another way of getting their food. By creating missions that tackle all parts of a system, all the options become sustainable options.

2.3.1 Mission 1 – Ensure that, by 2025, all public meals consumed in the Nordics are sustainable and tasty

This mission explores how we can use the “Diets and meals” entry point identified in section 1.3.2 for tackling challenges related to, among other things, poor diets and environmental damage (Figure 4). Remember, our conception of sustainability includes human and planetary health, meaning that sustainable meals are healthy meals. Here, we focus specifically on public meals, or those meals provided in public sector venues such as care homes, prisons, hospitals, schools, recreational centres, and local and national government offices.^{[3]Halloran, A., et al., 2018. Solutions Menu – A Nordic guide to sustainable food policy. Denmark: Nordic Council of Ministers. https://norden.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1214792/FULLTEXT01.pdf} 

Figure 4. A mission approach to achieve sustainable and tasty public meals in the Nordics
A mission on public meals uses “Diets and meals” as an entry point for tackling several grand challenges. A number of co-ordinated demonstrators can be used to achieve this mission.

Every day, 5.5 million meals are served in the public sector across the Nordics.^{[1]Nordic Cooperation, 2018. Children and young people in the Nordic Region must have better food. https://www.norden.org/en/news/children-and-young-people-nordic-region-must-have-better-food#:~:text=5.5%20million%20public%2Dsector%20meals,more%20than%20just%20an%20expense} Although this represents roughly 7% of the meals in the region, what public meals lack in terms of reach, they make up for in other ways. For example, committing to sustainable public meals demonstrates government leadership in sustainable food systems. Leading by example, the public sector can help set norms around food choices, behaviour and food culture.^{[2]Röös, E., et al., 2020. Styrmedel för hållbar matkonsumtion – en kunskapsöversikt och vägar framåt. Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, forskningsplattformen SLU Future Food. https://www.slu.se/globalassets/ew/org/centrb/fu-food/nyheter/2020/slu-futurefood_rapport13_styrmedelforhallbarmatkonsumtion.pdf} And through public procurement and innovative business models, this mission can demonstrate to private sector companies that shifts in value chains are possible and profitable.

This mission has gained momentum across the Nordics. Three Nordic capital cities have signed up to the Good Food Cities Declaration^[3], setting ambitious targets for public meals and citizens’ diets. And as mentioned above, Vinnova is making strides to define a national mission on sustainable school food. To read more about how demonstrators can be designed to help achieve this mission, jump ahead to Act III.

Below we illustrate how the five defining criteria of missions were used to develop a mission on sustainable and tasty public meals.

1. Bold, inspirational action to tackle grand challenges – A mission on sustainable and tasty public meals will demonstrate a bold commitment to food system transformation. Although it will represent only a small proportion of total meals in the Nordic region, this mission can inspire others by showing them that it is possible to redesign the value chain and our policies in order to make sustainable, tasty meals a reality. And if this mission is successful, it can signal progress on several grand challenges: the environmental impact of what we eat would be reduced and meals would be made healthier. And the benefits won’t stop there – this mission can promote sustainable food production, support producer livelihoods and ensure that every child has access to a sustainable, tasty school meal, thus improving equality.
    
2. Targets that are clear, measurable and time-bound - The target “all public meals should be sustainable and tasty by 2025” is clear and time-bound. But to be measurable, we need to set some criteria for what makes a meal “sustainable” and “tasty”. This will require the engagement of multiple actors. To define “sustainable diet”, for instance, national food authorities, national agricultural boards, researchers and others will need to jointly develop indicators. To ensure that meals are tasty, it will be important to engage with those who consume the meals.
    
3. Using innovation to reach ambitious goals – Innovation can play a role in creating tasty new meals or in differentiating the presentation of sustainable and unsustainable meals. Innovation can also be used to write contract procurements so that they favour sustainability. And producers and suppliers will need to innovate to meet new procurement demands.
    
4. Cross-sectoral and multi-actor in nature – The public sector cannot achieve this mission on its own. Changes are needed across the value chain to enable the production, processing and supply of sustainable foods. Open data will be crucial for giving everyone access to the data they need to sustainably change their operations and services. Structural changes and programmes for upskilling food service workers will also be needed in public kitchens so that tasty meals can be attractively prepared and presented. Suppliers, producers, food service workers and those in charge of public kitchens are just a few of the stakeholders who will be key to the success of this mission. 
    
5. Supports a portfolio of more targeted projects – Changing more than 5 million meals a day is no easy feat! No one project could tackle this mission on its own. That’s where demonstrators come in. Again, demonstrators are a method for planning and co-ordinating (“orchestrating”) a portfolio of experiments. Don’t worry – we’ll dig into demonstrators more in Act III. For the purposes of this mission, demonstrators will need to cover a range of public sector institutions such as schools, kindergartens, hospitals, elderly care and government offices. Demonstrators should be tested in a variety of locations, given that not all public meals are centrally controlled. Read on to Act III to see what a portfolio of different demonstrators might look like that collectively helps to achieve the mission.

2.3.2 Mission 2 – By 2030, the sustainable food in all major food retail outlets – including both physical and online stores – should be the easiest and most attractive options for consumers to choose.

Mission 2 focuses on exploring the “food environment” entry point identified in Act 1. Remember, food environments are anywhere we make decisions about food. Food environments are very diverse and include wild food environments such as forests where we forage for mushrooms and berries and lakes and waterways where we fish. Food environments also include places like kiosks, supermarkets, farmers’ markets and restaurants.^{[4]Downs, S. M., et al., 2020. Food environment typology: Advancing an expanded definition, framework, and methodological approach for improved characterization of wild, cultivated, and built food environments toward sustainable diets. Foods, 9(4), p. 532.}  

It’s not possible for a single mission to include all of these food environments at the same time. For this reason, multiple missions need to be developed. In Mission 2, we focus on the supermarket food environment for several reasons. First, Nordic populations get most of their food from supermarkets (jump back to Panel 1 to read more about the food retail boom). Second, the majority of the market share is captured by just a handful of retail outlets.^{[5]DLF, Delfi, HUI Research, 2018. Dagligvarukartan 2018.} Here, we’re using the concentration of power outlined in Panel 1 to our advantage – if we get these powerful actors to take action, they can change a significant number of food retail environments. Finally, retailers play a key role in shaping both food supply (through purchasing and the development of their own brands) and demand (through advertising, price promotions and product placement in stores).

Below we illustrate how the five defining characteristics of missions were used to develop a mission on sustainable food choices in food retail outlets:

1. Bold, inspirational action to tackle urgent grand challenges – It’s clear that a mission to overhaul one of the most frequented food environments of all is a bold move! As previously mentioned, getting one or more of the biggest retailers to change their in-store and online environments can quickly provide inspiration and pull the rest of the sector along in the same direction. If successful, this mission can reduce the environmental impact of what we eat and support better health and wellbeing. This mission can also promote equality by providing accessible, affordable and sustainable food for all.  
    
2. Targets that are clear, measurable and time-bound – The focus of the mission is clear and time-bound. But several aspects of the mission need to be defined if it is to succeed. For example, what is considered to be a sustainable food choice? How do we judge whether a food environment has achieved the goal of making the most sustainable choice the easiest and most attractive one? Does every item need to be sustainable, or should a threshold be set – such as requiring that 90% of all food items are sustainable – to determine a proportion of sustainable food choices? Should sustainable choices be evaluated within the context of diet as a whole or within a narrow product category? For example, when looking at the whole diet, a piece of meat is likely to be less sustainable than legumes. Within the “meat” product category, however, chicken is typically a more sustainable option than beef – a small proportion of meat can fit into a sustainable diet. The process of defining clear and measurable targets is challenging, but it is crucial to the success of the mission.
   
   
3. Using innovation to reach ambitious goals – Innovation in food retail environments may include selling reformulated products that have reduced salt, sugar or saturated fat content or a reduced environmental impact. It may also mean developing new kinds of packaging to reduce food waste or to find new ways of regulating the price of unhealthy and unsustainable foods. And it will probably involve changing the choice architecture of supermarkets to make tasty and sustainable food the default option.
    
4. Cross-sectoral and multi-actor in nature – Retailers cannot change by themselves. Engagement is needed from both supply-side and demand-side actors. For example, producers, processors, distributors and suppliers need to work together to innovate across the value chain. Policy-makers, advertisers within food companies, NGOs, certification bodies and consumer councils can collaborate on innovations to shift demand. Retailers can also collaborate with researchers and policy-makers to share sales data, which is crucial to understanding whether interventions are having an impact on individuals’ food choices. And the general public, which may see some big changes in its local supermarkets, needs to be involved in this journey.
    
5. Supports a portfolio of more targeted projects – What works in one food retail environment in southern Finland may not work in another store in Iceland. Retailers in rural and urban settings may take different approaches. And different retailers may try different experiments. Again, multiple demonstrators in different contexts and with different innovation networks are needed to achieve this mission.

"Food systems are the result of complex dynamics – many, many things have come together and combined to shape current food systems. Many of these drivers are deeply rooted in history and economics."

2.4 Where next?

The mission is starting to take shape, but it’s still not specific enough for action. To help you understand the next steps in the mission approach, Act III will explore Mission 2 – Sustainable and tasty public meals – in more detail. If you’re ready to tackle the questions in Box 7 and jump in at the deep end, then you can move right on to Act III and learn more about demonstrators – orchestrated, on-the-ground experiments that try to tackle bold ambitions!
 

SHORTCUTS TO

2.1 Missions to tackle societal challenges
2.2 How do we design food system missions to help tackle our grand challenges?
2.3 Defining Nordic food system missions
2.4 Where next?

Box 7. Reflecting on your mission
Let’s take a second to reflect on what we still need to define about this mission in order to start cooking up change.

► GO TO ACT I

► GO TO ACT II

► GO TO ACT III

► GO TO ACT IV

ACT III – Demonstrating transformation

By changing how we serve our food, we can better serve humanity and the planet we share with so many other lifeforms. Trying to change the whole food system all at once is simply too complex. But if you’re going to fix only a few pieces at a time, how do you know you’re fixing the right pieces and in the right order?

Since the best way of achieving a mission cannot be known in advance, we must be smarter about how we learn. Full-fledged research and development projects require a lot of money and other resources to carry out, and they are best deployed when you already know what you’re fixing and why. Experiments, on the other hand, are a low-cost, low-risk way of learning how a mission can be achieved. They act as probes into different parts of the system that explore multiple pathways towards our end goal. If the experiments work, they can be scaled up. It’s also possible that they will fail, but they will do so by using a limited amount of resources. And as you may have found, failure is often the best teacher.

SHORTCUTS TO

3.1 Experimentation is key to achieving a mission
3.2 What are demonstrators?
3.3 Rewriting the recipe for meals in school
3.4 What next?

3.1 Experimentation is key to achieving a mission

All missions are achieved through a portfolio of projects – or experiments. Taking a portfolio approach to experimentation means selecting a varied set of experiments based on their potential impact and mission alignment as well as their ability to generate new knowledge. This last selection criterion is important, and it means foregoing some relatively safe solutions in the portfolio so as to leave room for unconventional ideas from unusual suspects. Having a diverse team and strong leadership helps a lot when performing this balancing act in practice.  

Breakthrough solutions are more likely to arise out of innovation portfolios that cast their nets widely. Without active management, innovation portfolios show a strong tendency to privilege low-risk, typically technical solutions, crowding out more unconventional solutions. Considering how many scientific breakthroughs have happened as a result of serendipity, such as Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, it seems reasonable to assume that the more diverse the portfolio of experiments, the more likely we will learn something new and useful.

You may have noticed that innovation proceeds unevenly in society. How is it that the country that accomplished the truly remarkable feat of sending a man to the moon for some reason seems unable to provide an effective education for children in marginalized communities, reverse the rising cost of medical care, keep its air and water clean, and reduce the occurence of drug addiction and drug-related crime?^{[1]https://academic.oup.com/spp/article-abstract/38/9/681/1629269?redirectedFrom=PDF} The principal reason is that it has proved very difficult to discover or develop a body of practice in areas like education and addiction that can be controlled tightly, and replicated easily, that at the same time is effective in the variety of contexts where such practices take place.^{[2]https://academic.oup.com/spp/article-abstract/38/9/681/1629269?redirectedFrom=PDF} When you throw human nature into the mix, the uncertainty is far greater than when you are dealing with technical problems with relatively known parameters and outcomes.
                
When a mission is primarily technical in nature, experiments can be conducted separately from one another. Technical solutions can be developed in isolation because the practices involved in developing them have a certain ‘routine’ about them. People who work on technical challenges typically know, and are able to establish and control relatively tightly, the essential operating aspects of what they are doing.^{[3]https://academic.oup.com/spp/article-abstract/38/9/681/1629269?redirectedFrom=PDF} For instance, if your mission is to put a man on the moon, you can reason that this will require a spacecraft with a certain thrust that can be calculated in advance. The spacecraft will need to have certain functionalities, which will require specific modules such as an engine, a fuselage, a heat shield, a navigation system, and so on.
                
In societal missions, developing standardized solutions is much harder. Solutions are context-specific, and changes to one part of the system will typically cause unexpected changes elsewhere in the same system. In situations where a solution cannot be fully understood outside of its context, experiments cannot be run independently as if in a lab. If one cannot closely identify, control, manipulate, and reproduce what one is trying to analyze, it is very difficult for research and innovation to provide a deep understanding of what is going on in practice – much less illuminate how to improve it.^{[4]https://academic.oup.com/spp/article-abstract/38/9/681/1629269?redirectedFrom=PDF} Instead, experiments must be run in a specific, local and live context to see how different solutions interact with one another and with the system at large. This requires more active portfolio management, which we will describe in more detail in the next section, where we introduce the idea of demonstrators.  

Technical missions and societal missions differ in scope. In a technical mission, individual experiments can be run as part of one large portfolio. In a societal mission, technical innovation is just one part of the recipe. Because social experiments cannot be controlled and replicated in the same way as technical ones, societal missions bundle experiments into distinct demonstrators and test them in context. Demonstrators help reduce the complexity that you need to manage.

"Taking a portfolio approach to experimentation means selecting a varied set of experiments based on their potential impact and mission alignment as well as their ability to generate new knowledge."

3.2. What are demonstrators?

Demonstrators are a specific approach to planning and co-ordinating (“orchestrating”) a portfolio of experiments. The concept has been introduced by both EIT Climate-KIC (deep demonstrations)^{[1]EIT Climate-KIC, 2019. Deep Demonstration Design Process – Process Guide.}  and Vinnova (systems demonstrators)^{[2]Vinnova, forthcoming. Designing Missions Playbook. https://www.vinnova.se/en/m/missions/}. We use the simpler term ‘demonstrator’ to capture what both approaches have in common.

The complexity and dynamism of social systems mean that their transformation requires interventions at multiple levels at the same time. For example, changing behaviour with regard to what someone prefers to eat means changing the things that influence their preferences. What you enjoy eating (and when) is shaped not only by biology or what you know, but also by social factors such as cultural appropriateness, who the meal is shared with, what is considered fashionable and so on. In addition to taste, what you actively choose to eat is shaped by price, availability, placement, marketing, etc., which are in turn shaped by policies on, for example, trade and agriculture, shaped in turn by business models, economic paradigms, political ideology and so on. By design, single-point solutions treat this dynamic variety as an obstacle to behavioural change. Yet taste and culture can also be used as powerful sources of systems transformation.

By orchestrating a portfolio of experiments that act on multiple levels of the system at once, demonstrators allow you to work with, rather than against, this dynamism. A good way of thinking about demonstrators is as an intentional creation of a local innovation ecosystem which, on the one hand, helps connect multiple projects in a given location, and, on the other, helps communicate the importance of those projects in connection with a grand societal challenge. Figure 5 shows the six essential criteria for successful demonstrators.

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3.1 Experimentation is key to achieving a mission
3.2 What are demonstrators?
3.3 Rewriting the recipe for meals in school
3.4 What next?

Figure 5. The six essential qualities of a successful demonstrator

^{Notes: [1]EIT Climate-KIC, 2019. Deep Demonstration Design Process -- Process Guide.}

Now that we’ve told you what a demonstrator is, we’d like to show you a concrete example of what a demonstrator can look like. We will use meals in school in Oslo as an example^{[1]The research was conducted independently by EAT, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Municipality of Oslo.}, based on our own preliminary research, to bring you as the reader closer to what implementing a mission can actually mean in practice. Hopefully, our example will show you just how powerful and useful demonstrators can be. We also hope the example will inspire you to read on to the final section, where we will walk you through the process of setting up a demonstrator.

3.3 Rewriting the recipe for meals in school

Our mission statement on public meals – ensure that, by 2025, all public meals consumed in the Nordics are sustainable and tasty – draws upon research from multiple projects (see section 1.3.2 on Nordic entry points). One such project, Matdugnaden,^{[1]Matdugnaden [“the Food Dugnad”] was co-led by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and EAT, with support from Comte Bureau and Deloitte, and funded by Stimulab, a Norwegian public sector innovation mechanism. See http://matdugnaden.no/ for more information (only in Norwegian). The original map has been adapted to fit the visual layout of this cookbook} analysed how a meal is produced in multiple municipalities in order to visualise how public meals are produced in Norwegian municipalities (Figure 6).

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3.1 Experimentation is key to achieving a mission
3.2 What are demonstrators?
3.3 Rewriting the recipe for meals in school
3.4 What next?

Figure 6. How are public meals produced in Norway?

3.3.1 Reframing meals in public institutions

If you look closely, you will see that the system focuses heavily on the procurement process and that food appears no different from any other commodity for consumption. Food is not specifically linked to sustainability or health outcomes. When purchasing decisions are made, there is typically little to no involvement from the people who serve the food or from people who have expertise in nutrition or sustainability.

When people within this system talk to each other, two additional issues appear. First of all, decision-making processes are dominated by misconceptions about what you can and cannot do according to procurement law (e.g. rigid dialogue with the market and the preference for a single wholesaler). Second, public organisations lack the tools to define what a sustainable meal means for them.

The sum of these findings helps explain why so little healthy and sustainable food is served in Norwegian public institutions today.

3.3.2 Why Oslo?

Oslo is already on a mission to transform its food system. As one of 14 signatories to the Good Food Cities Declaration, the municipality of Oslo has begun to reframe food from being merely a commodity to being a strategy to achieve other societal outcomes: in this case, reducing consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions per capita. The Declaration commits its signatories to work with citizens to achieve a Planetary Health Diet^{[1]For more information about the Planetary Health Diet, please see: https://eatforum.org/learn-and-discover/the-planetary-health-diet/#targetText=The%20planetary%20health%20diet%20is,of%20fruits%2C%20vegetables%20and%20nuts.} for all by 2030 – a diet which offers balanced and nutritious food and which is reflective of those citizens’ culture, geography and demography. Cities will achieve this by implementing the following measures by 2030:

• Aligning their food procurement to the Planetary Health Diet, ideally sourced from organic agriculture^{[2]Here organic is used as a proxy for sustainable production in the absence of more precise indicators.} 
• Supporting an overall increase in healthy plant-based food consumption in their cities by shifting away from unsustainable, unhealthy diets
• Reducing food loss and waste by 50% compared against a 2015 baseline
• Within two years of endorsing this declaration, working with citizens, businesses, public institutions and other organisations to develop a joint strategy for implementing these measures and achieving these goals inclusively and equitably, and incorporating this strategy into [the signatories] Climate Action Plan^{[3]C40 Cities. Good Food Cities Declaration. https://www.c40.org/other/good-food-cities}

3.3.3 Why meals in school?

Public meals for the elderly are a low-hanging fruit. Most of the meals served by the municipality of Oslo are for the elderly who are either in nursing homes or receiving nursing services in their own homes. The food is prepared in a centralised kitchen in substantial volumes, and a shift to the procurement practice would have an impact on the production side of things. As a more closed, centralised system, it means interventions are easier to design and control. But changing meals in such relatively closed institutions has a limited impact on dietary behaviour in society at large. It would not contribute to a systemic shift in food consumption.

Demonstrators aim to inspire large-scale change. We chose to focus on meals in school instead of meals for the elderly for several interconnected reasons:

• School food is an underutilized lever for systems change. In most Nordic countries, the current school food system is well-established and well-functioning, but optimized for outcomes such as low cost and food safety. In setting a different strategic direction, the existing system and budget can begin to deliver on wider outcomes such as sustainability, health promotion and local economic resilience. Thus, the new way of working with school food becomes a way to change connected systems such as agriculture, logistics, education and community.  
• There’s a portfolio synergy. Sweden’s innovation agency, Vinnova, and the Swedish food agency, Livsmedelsverket, have jointly identified school meals as a key mission area for that country, based on a similar analysis as our own. Focusing on a similar part of the public meal system but taking very different approaches facilitates a better learning exchange among demonstrators.
• It’s an unconventional system poised for change. Unlike Sweden, which has a long-standing tradition of serving meals in school, Norway’s packed lunch culture means that most children bring their own food to school and eat it cold. These are not school meals but meals in school.
• There’s political interest. Oslo has proposed introducing free hot school meals across the city. The costs associated with the Covid-19 pandemic response has put that proposal on hold for now, and one can expect the city to be more focused on finding cost-effective solutions. Reimagining today’s cold meals (packed lunches) could provide a more affordable alternative, with potential spill-over effects to the other Nordic countries, including Sweden.
• There’s greater impact potential. Changing what is served to the elderly in institutions will have an impact on Oslo’s supply chain, but the spill-over effects are likely to be limited. There is evidence that dietary habits are established in the early years of life, and that adolescence is a key time period when significant changes in dietary patterns occur.^{[4]Mikkilä, V., et al., 2005. Consistent dietary patterns identified from childhood to adulthood: The Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study. British Journal of Nutrition, 93(6), pp. 923-931.,[5]Micha, R., et al., 2018. Effectiveness of school food environment policies on children’s dietary behaviors: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PloS one, 13(3), p.e0194555.} Children are also taught about food and cooking in school, and there is untapped potential in connecting what is taught with what is eaten.
• There’s potential to shift diets more broadly. There is a link between what children enjoy eating and what parents choose to cook. In general, parents’ eating preferences tend to impact what their children eat. There is limited evidence that the influence also goes the other way and that children’s eating patterns influence what parents eat. What remains largely untested (and is therefore suitable for a demonstrator) are the different ways that meals in school can engage parents, increasing the chance that interventions influence more people. As children’s food preferences evolve, their preferences may have an impact on the dietary pattern of the whole family.^{[6]Birch, L. L., and Davison, K. K., 2001. Family environmental factors influencing the developing behavioral controls of food intake and childhood overweight. Pediatric Clinics, 48(4), pp. 893-907.}A demonstrator for meals in school could provide an inspiring example of how municipalities can support an overall increase in healthy food consumption among its citizens.

3.3.4 Mapping our system

Mapping is a tool used throughout the mission process – the maps just get more granular as you go. Having narrowed our focus to meals in school, our next step was to map the system in that particular place. From the public meal map (Figure 6) we had a general idea of how municipalities worked with meals, but we didn’t yet know exactly how it worked for schools and what dynamics and tensions existed in Oslo. We used the map in Figure 6 to identify the “insiders” who could help us make sense of how Oslo’s system of meals in school worked. This included teachers, city officials, parents, procurement officers and students.

After identifying insiders connected to meals in schools in Oslo, we engaged them by way of interviews and workshops. Using this new information, combined with the insights from the generic public meals map, we were able to visualise the local system that we were trying to change. By grounding our analysis in citizens’ perspectives, our focus broadened from what the municipality has control over to what influences what children eat in school (Figure 7). Comparing the two maps (Figures 6 and 7)  revealed several new opportunities for shifting diets. For instance, there is an untapped potential to strengthen the connection between what is taught about food in the Food and Health course, what is served during after-school activities, and what students bring to eat during lunch.

We then zoomed out to ask which “outsiders” might have valuable perspectives that would help us make better sense of our system. We mobilised some unusual players (at least in the context of school meals), such as top chefs, local farmers, start-ups and product designers, to co-develop potential experiments and help us identify a broader range of collaborators.

"Experiments must be run in a specific, local and live context to see how different solutions interact with one another and with the system at large."

Figure 7. Map of the school meals journey and what influences what children eat at school

3.3.5 Grounding experiments in citizen perspectives

A mission will not inspire people unless they are a part of it.^{[1]Mazzucato, M., 2018. Mission-oriented research and innovation in the European Union. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/mazzucato_report_2018.pdf} One of the six criteria for a demonstrator is that experiments be grounded in citizen perspectives. Below is a summary of some perspectives that we think stood out (Table 3).

Table 3. Selected perspectives on school meals in Oslo

We are about to show you how we turned these insights into a menu of experiments. We will then show you where these experiments would go on the map and discuss potential interdependencies and synergies. A key point here is that some experiments that wouldn’t work that well on their own (e.g. because they would be too expensive) can become powerful solutions when combined with others in a system.
 

3.3.6 A menu of experiments

This is the fun part. We have said that demonstrators are an excellent way of orchestrating experiments within the context of missions. One way of gauging the quality of this statement is against the quality of the experiments themselves and how they are made to interact with one another. Figure 8 shows a selection from a much larger set of potential experiments, organised according to four places in our system:

• The Marketplace (where food transactions are made)
• The Kitchen (where the food is prepared)
• The Table (where the eating experience takes place)
• The Contract (where agreements are made between parties)

Our choice of places, or what Vinnova calls “concepts” in their cookbook, overlap with Vinnova’s design model for school food. This shows, again, that we’re working with similar thinking and practice. It also means that we can connect across the Nordics, using those same places or concepts as translation points. For example, how does the Oslo Kitchen shape up when compared to the Helsinki one? Or how does the Oslo Contract differ from the Gothenburg one?

"A good way of thinking about demonstrators is as an intentional creation of a local innovation ecosystem which, on the one hand, helps connect multiple projects in a given location, and, on the other, helps communicate the importance of those projects in connection with a grand societal challenge."

Figure 8. A menu of experiments
 

3.3.7 Bringing it all together

The real power of demonstrators stems from their ability to identify interdependencies and unlock synergies in the system. Sometimes, it’s the synergies themselves rather than the specific solutions that can contribute most to systems change.

Demonstrators are testbeds for new ways of thinking and acting. The Oslo model proposed below reframes food from being a commodity to being a strategy (i.e. for achieving broader societal outcomes such as health, sustainability, inclusion and local economic growth). Instead of asking how we can make the food that is served less harmful to people and the planet, the Oslo model asks how we can make children live healthier and more sustainable lives overall through food. The result is shown in Figure 9. Having a visual representation of the system you are trying to influence helps you to make new connections between the existing nodes in the system as well as to propose entirely new nodes. 

Figure 9. Demonstrating change

Systems change is not only about changing the nodes of a system; it’s also more about changing the relationship between them. In our example, the Kitchen, with its resident Sustainability Chef, provides a ‘core’ for the demonstrator. It integrates food education and the school’s meal preparation into a unified whole. The idea of circular packed lunches blurs the line between (private) packed lunches and (public) school meals, turning schools into mechanisms of reducing food waste, even providing solutions to parents’ ‘time squeeze’. These in turn synergize with the Table, which creates a carefully designed environment for children to eat communally, and also serves as an alternative meeting point for students after school.

Demonstrators connect ‘soft’ interventions with ‘hard’ hi-tech ones. In our example, a digital platform integrates multiple parallel platforms into a whole, which is extended to also supply packed lunches as a service to parents with little time or knowledge about how to make sustainable food. Because parents still need to make an active choice about what their children should eat, browsing through the platform can be a learning experience in itself. Going digital also opens up for smarter subsidies, which in turn enables municipalities to ensure equal access to sustainable meals at a fraction of the cost of providing free school meals to all. With such a system in place, a school or municipality can experiment with hybrid solutions, such as providing a default sustainable meal option every day for free, with families free to opt out of the offer to bring or buy their own lunch.

Demonstrators foster unconventional collaborations. The Oslo demonstrator would allow the municipality to share the burden of developing solutions with the private sector, for whom sustainable school meals represent an enormous market opportunity. Recent research in Oslo has shown that 9 out of 10 parents would be willing to pay for lunches provided by schools,^[1] and Norway’s largest dairy, Tine, is already experimenting with how to extend its current platform for drinks in school to also encompass packed lunches. By collaborating with the private sector in their development of such a platform, municipalities can ensure that the platform addresses multiple social outcomes, like providing access to various small-scale farmers and food entrepreneurs.

Demonstrators allow experiments that would likely fail on their own to thrive in synergy with parallel experiments. Asking REKO-ring farmers to make more frequent trips to town in order to have face-to-face interactions with school children would probably be a costly endeavour. Integrating the same farmers into a digital marketplace, where they can sell food to schools, as well as to families, gives them access to a larger market. With commercial viability secured, children’s face-to-face interactions with farmers is enriching for all parties. There is also an added political value for municipalities that can connect their progressive food policies with market creation for local food producers.

Changing the legal code of a system can be a powerful mechanism for coordinating change. Improving public procurement processes can only do so much. Our example hopefully shows the wealth of possible experiments a demonstrator can focus on, tailored to the specific needs and resources of a place. Yet procurement contracts, being legal in nature, are especially suitable for standardization. Embedding key nutrition and sustainability requirements in a contract template allows best practice to spread faster between municipalities. As more and more municipalities begin to communicate the same sustainability standards to the market, the faster the market will adapt to these standards. By coordinating their market demands in this way, municipalities can collectively create a strong market pull for more sustainable production.

A demonstrator is other than the sum of its parts. Our example is not meant to be an exhaustive investigation into how a city like Oslo can change its food system. Any demonstrator should be co-created in partnership with challenge owners hosting a demonstrator. What we hope to have shown, however, is the power of mapping the system you are trying to change, come up with a portfolio of diverse experiments, and spend time and effort to think through how these experiments can connect into a new model. It’s ultimately this new model that’s being demonstrated. So while our imagined Oslo model might not turn Lise Mwangi’s story from fiction to reality all on its own, you will hopefully recognize a few key elements of that story in our demonstrator example.

"Sometimes, it’s the synergies themselves rather than the specific solutions that can contribute most to systems change."

3.4. What next?

If our example from Oslo has you excited, you may be asking yourself how you can run a demonstrator. The answer ultimately depends on where you are and the type of support available to you from your national research and innovation agencies. In the annex, you can read about the approach we’ll try out in the Nordics. In the spirit of learning through doing, we expect the process to evolve over time.

The ideas shared in this cookbook are themselves a demonstration of a new way to innovate – not only for economic growth, but for better societal outcomes. Innovation that is rooted in the real needs of both people and planet. This raises the bar higher than usual when it comes to our expectations of research and innovation agencies, expectations that we believe will be exceeded by a new generation of such agencies.

SHORTCUTS TO

3.1 Experimentation is key to achieving a mission
3.2 What are demonstrators?
3.3 Rewriting the recipe for meals in school
3.4 What next?

► GO TO ACT I

► GO TO ACT II

► GO TO ACT III

► GO TO ACT IV

ACT IV – Bringing the cookbook to life

"Momentum is building among policy-makers for the adoption of more experimental approaches."

Box 8. Quenching your thirst for knowledge

There are many great “chefs” out there who are constantly trying to improve the recipes for how we interact with the innovation processes that can change society. We encourage you to keep exercising your systems thinking and your innovation muscles by reading further. Here are a few other “cookbooks” from our bookshelf:

• Solutions Menu: A Nordic Guide to Sustainable Food Policy

• Mission-Oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union

• Vinnova’s Mission Design Playbook

• Towards Sustainable Nordic Food Systems Project Briefs

• Identifying Viable “Need–Solution Pairs”: Problem Solving Without Problem Formulation

• In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change

► GO TO ACT I

► GO TO ACT II

► GO TO ACT III

► GO TO ACT IV

Meet the authors

Afton Halloran (editor and author) is an independent consultant in sustainable food system transitions, external consultant to the Nordic Food Policy Lab of the Nordic Council of Ministers and researcher at the University of Copenhagen. Afton is also the host of the Nordic Talks podcast.

Amanda Wood (author) is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre of Stockholm University in Sweden. She was a co-author of the EAT-Lancet Commission Report on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems, and she now specialises in transdisciplinary research to promote sustainable food systems in the Nordic Region.

Florencia Aguirre (author) is a systems-oriented designer at the EAT Foundation focused on user-centred approaches and participatory methods within complex systems. Her background is on strategic design and social innovation.

Marie Persson (author) is the project manager of Nordic Food Policy Lab at the Nordic Council of Ministers. She facilitates collaborations aimed at new food policy approaches and governance models for sustainability. In 2021 Marie will join the Swedish government agency Tillväxtverket to work on the national food strategy.

Marius Weschke (author) is an implementation officer at EAT, leading and supporting the planning, organising and execution of EAT’s projects and events around the world. He has a background in environmental studies and sustainability science from Lund University.

Ove Kenneth Nodland (author) is EAT’s innovation manager and lead’s EAT’s innovation work. He is trained as an anthropologist (Chicago) and lawyer (Oxford), and has worked with innovation for a decade across the private, public and civil sectors. He believes systems change is best brought on by a combination of bottom-up and top-down innovation.

 

Suggested citation:

Halloran A, Wood A, Aguirre F, Persson M, Weschke M, Nodland O K. 2020. Cookbook for systems change – Nordic innovation strategies for sustainable food systems. Nordic Council of Ministers, Copenhagen.

Acknowledgements
 

Funding: This cookbook is funded by EIT Climate-KIC as a part of the Deep Demonstrations on Resilient Food Systems and Diets (EIT_2.1.6_201017_P461_1B).

The authors would like to acknowledge the following people for their contributions to this cookbook:

• Expert insights: Anders Liebe Delsett, Andreas Svanekil, Dagfinn Hessen Paust, Gaute Vindegg, Ina Roll Spinnangr, Ingrid Kleiva Møller, Julie Baud, Karianne Espeset, Katarina Rina, Line Tveiten, Mariann Karlstad, Marius Johansen, Marthe Norderhaug, Mette Hanneborg, Per Finne, Pontus Hagman, Ragnhild Slettner, Robbin Lantz, Signe A. Odden, Theis H. Omdahl, Will Nicholson, Øistein Christoffersen.
• Design: Angela Morelli, Hye Min An, María Jesús Contreras, Mette Agger Tang and Tom Gabriel Johansen
• Reviewers: Benedicte Wildhagen, Dan Hill, Jenny Sjöblom, Maija Kale, Rebecka Milestad and Elisabet Skylare.

We are thankful for the active participation by Nordic mission alliance members:

Pernille Martiny-Modvig, Henrik Søndergaard and Anne Marie Damgaard – EIT Climate-KIC
Dan Hill, Jenny Sjöblom and Joanna Franzén – Vinnova
Sigridur Thormodsdottir – Innovation Norway
Benedicte Wildhagen – Design and Architecture Norway
Trond Einar Pedersen – Research Council Norway
Svein Berg and Niina Aagaard – Nordic Innovation

As well as for insights from an extended group of Nordic and EU innovation actors:

Barbaros Corekoglu and Marja-Liisa Meurice – EIT Food
Christian Bason, Sune Knudsen and Julie Hjort – Danish Design Center
Hörður G. Kristinsson, Sæmundur Sveinsson, Guðjón Þorkelsson, Anna Kristín Daníelsdóttir – Matís
Johanna van Schaik Dernfalk – Formas – Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development
Tuuli Hietaniemi – Sitra

Executive Summary

Cookbook for systems change – Nordic innovation strategies for sustainable food systems

We can and must work with the strategic innovation of food systems to solve some of our greatest societal challenges

This is the fundamental proposal of the book, Cookbook for systems change – Nordic innovation strategies for sustainable food systems. In essence, this cookbook for systems change is about the role that a strong public innovation system can play alongside the pathways towards sustainable food systems. The book lays out a method for deliberate food system transformation – a mission approach – that can support people, planet and society. This systems change cookbook will provide the ingredients – templates for developing interventions, guides for how to get started and examples of cross-cutting projects – that you can use to create your own recipes for change. 
 

Food: an essential ingredient for systems change
Food systems lie at the heart of grand challenges in health and nutrition, prosperous, livelihoods, climate change and environment. Sustainable and well-functioning food systems are also essential for building resilient and just societies.

Food systems have been driving societal progress for millennia. Yet, some societal progress has come at a high cost to human health and the environment. Urgent action is needed if we are to address grand challenges like inequality, unsustainable consumption and production patterns, environmental degradation, fragile livelihoods and poor health. Food systems are powerful because they can be used to address multiple grand challenge action fronts.

The Nordics are ripe for food system transformations. Eight broad entry points – core areas of change – can get us started: Food environments, circularity, food culture and identity, diets and meals, food supply chains, resilient food production systems, food producers and cities.

Transformation of the food system will take an “all hands on deck” approach, and systemic changes will be needed to tackle these complex and multi-faceted grand challenges. Governments, particularly public innovation agencies, can play a key leadership role in co-ordinating this action.

We’re on a mission!
Societal missions are emerging as mechanisms to direct multi-stakeholder innovation towards a common understanding of how best to solve our urgent grand challenges. A mission approach aims to create transformative change by breaking down high-level grand challenges into more granular components until concrete actions can be developed. This is done by identifying opportunities to address grand challenges, proposing innovations that can help overcome these challenges and outlining an approach to test and co-ordinate these innovations.

Societal missions should be bold, inspirational and ambitious while at the same time offering multiple solutions to get the job done. Such missions should also provide clear direction for action by setting measurable and time-bound goals and use innovation and innovation policy to achieve ambitious but realistic change. Societal missions should bring people together to work in new ways, involving multiple sectors, actors and disciplines.

There is no recipe for a Nordic mission on sustainable food systems but we can design one together. Based on the possible entry points to food systems transformation, this cookbook of strategies explores in detail the example of one specific mission: ensure that, by 2025, all public meals consumed in the Nordics are sustainable and tasty. That said, the possibilities are endless. By pooling existing knowledge and testing new approaches to mission design, the Nordics are in a very good position to collaborate on a shared mission for food system transformation in the Nordics. The Nordic region is an ideal place to demonstrate the types of collaborative systems change needed to meet the existential challenges we are currently faced with.

A mission approach
An example of how missions tackle grand challenges by exploiting entry points and breaking challenges down into more concrete, actionable interventions, clustered into different demonstrators.

Demonstrating transformation
Trying to change the whole food system all at once is simply too complex. Full-fledged research and development projects require a lot of money and other resources to carry out, and they are best deployed when you already know what you’re fixing and why. Experiments, on the other hand, are a low-cost, low-risk way of learning how a mission can be achieved.

The complexity and dynamism of social systems mean that their transformation requires interventions at multiple levels at the same time. By orchestrating a portfolio of experiments that act on multiple levels of the system at once, demonstrators allow you to work with, rather than against, this dynamism.

Demonstrators aim to inspire large-scale change. The six essential qualities of a successful demonstrator are: mission-oriented, demand-led, place-based, iterative, holistic and grounded in citizen perspectives.

Systems change is not only about changing the nodes of a system; it’s also about changing the relationship between them. Sometimes, it’s the synergies themselves rather than the specific solutions that can contribute most to systems change. Demonstrators can help connect the dots.
 

Going from ideas to action
As we encounter unprecedented 21st-century challenges, it’s easy to get lost in the complexity. This is why we need to have a set of different utensils close to hand. A mission approach can help form a new way of thinking, not just about the people, action and orchestration needed to achieve a desirable future, but also about how to collectively imagine a new food future.

A mission approach can be implemented within the Nordic public innovation ecosystem either by fitting it into existing infrastructure or by creating new infrastructure to accommodate it. Research- and innovation agencies in the Nordics can achieve greater impact more effectively by pooling resources, unlocking synergies across current project portfolios, avoiding duplication of efforts, and systematically sharing lessons learned and establishing best practice for how to approach and collaborate on missions

A large-scale Nordic mission on sustainable food systems led by government has never been carried out before… but there are signs that it can be done. Perhaps the Nordic countries’ most important global contribution to achieving the Paris Agreement and the SDGs will not be any specific technology, business model or policy innovation, but rather to demonstrate how a strong public innovation ecosystem is the missing link to overcome the complex societal challenges defining our times.

About this publication

Cookbook for systems change
– Nordic innovation strategies for sustainable food systems

Nord 2020:048
ISBN 978-92-893-6740-0 (PDF)
ISBN 978-92-893-6741-7 (ONLINE)
http://dx.doi.org/10.6027/nord2020-048

Layout: Mette Agger Tang

© Nordic Council of Ministers 2020

Nordic co-operation

Nordic co-operation is one of the world’s most extensive forms of regional collaboration, involving Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland.

Nordic co-operation has firm traditions in politics, economics and culture and plays an important role in European and international forums. The Nordic community strives for a strong Nordic Region in a strong Europe.

Nordic co-operation promotes regional interests and values in a global world. The values shared by the Nordic countries help make the region one of the most innovative and competitive in the world.

The Nordic Council of Ministers
Nordens Hus
Ved Stranden 18
DK-1061 Copenhagen
pub@norden.org

Read more Nordic publications on www.norden.org/publications

This cookbook is funded by EIT Climate-KIC as a part of the Deep Demonstrations on Resilient Food Systems and Diets (EIT_2.1.6_201017_P461_1B).