A Food Strategy For Your City
Creating a city food strategy is a complex and challenging task that requires vision, knowledge, collaboration and cooperation. Many cities around the world have successfully developed and implemented strategies with exciting results. Many more are recognising the power of a food strategy to create locally-relevant policies and interventions that lead to better health outcomes, a stronger local food economy, happier communities and a healthier environment.
We have broken the process of developing and implementing a strategy into 8 themes. You can think of this as the strategy behind the strategy. You can explore each topic with video clips from our webinar series. The whole series is available to watch back on this YouTube Playlist.
1. The building blocks: What is a food strategy and why are cities developing them?
A food strategy sets out a unifying vision for a city’s food system and commits to creating the conditions in which a healthy, just and sustainable food system can flourish.
With 80% of food being consumed in cities by 2050, cities are in a powerful position to be the drivers of a brighter food future. City authorities can create food strategies that work for their region and citizenship in a way that national governments cannot.
The videos below will help set the context and outline the basics of a strategy and provide two case studies of successful strategies.
2. The building blocks: Leadership and governance
Strong leadership and representative governance are essential to the success of a city food strategy.
With food being a cross-sector and cross-departmental issue, it is key to create a board or partnership early on in the process. Securing senior-level political buy-in is a crucial step, as is ensuring decentralised ownership of the strategy, protecting it against personnel and governmental change.
The following videos provide examples of how cities have met this early challenge.
3. What does a food strategy include? – Safe and nutritious diets
Whilst a strategy should lay out a vision for the future, this future will only be realised through practical actions and interventions delivered by the city authorities and by partner organisations.
What types of interventions that enable safe and nutritious diets should be embedded into a strategy? They might include the following:
- Changing food environment through policy and legislation
- Increasing access to healthy diets and tackling food insecurity
- Integrating community and citizen food growing into city development
- Working with businesses to ensure food safety standards
These videos give an introduction to the topic and provide practical examples of such interventions.
4. What does a food strategy include? – Sustainable food systems: Environment, economy and resilience
What makes a food system truly sustainable? Whilst the term sustainability is often used primarily in reference to environmental considerations, by definition a sustainable food system is one that is both environmentally and economically viable, whilst creating and supporting healthy and cohesive communities.
A sustainable food system will also be one that has in-built resilience to shocks and stresses.
Cities can support a thriving food economy through policy and legislation, for example:
Supporting SMEs, start ups and entrepreneurs, eg. Incubators, business rates
Improving infrastructure and access to market for local producers
Food has a very significant impact on the environment, with a third of global greenhouse gas emissions coming from the food system. It also can lead to degraded soils and a loss of biodiversity. Cities can employ some powerful levers to minimise this impact, for example:
- Leading by example through procurement policy
- Addressing food waste and packaging
- Incentivising better business practices
These videos give an introduction to the topic and provide practical examples of such interventions.
5. Your city, your strategy – Engaging stakeholders and citizens in the development of your strategy
City Food Strategies are ultimately intended to ensure the needs of people are met, now and into the future. Understanding the needs of peoplecan only be achieved by directly engaging with them, gaining their insight into the realities of day-to-day life within the city’s food system and working with them to identify priorities and opportunities.
Similarly, a thriving food economy can only be created if food businesses, including retailers, caterers, manufacturers and producers, are consulted and engaged.
A City Food Strategy should be created with the people, for the people. This direct ownership and rooting of strategy in the needs and desires of stakeholders will create a sustainable action plan and increase support for implementation.
It is important to ensure local knowledge, needs and insights are applied to develop a practical and realistic strategy. Consider different methods of engaging stakeholders, including local businesses - producers, manufacturers, retails, caterers - citizens and communities. Engagement can be both focused and cross-sector. Think about how to reach the voices that are not usually heard.
The following videos outline why stakeholder engagement is important and give examples of how it is done in practice.
6. Your city, your strategy – Data, audits and mapping
To create effective strategies, it is essential to have a detailed understanding of the current food system in your city and surrounding areas.
By gathering data, auditing what is currently happening in a variety of areas, and mapping across a wide range of stakeholders, you become better able to identify strengths, weaknesses, challenges and opportunities. From this, a strategy can be developed that will provide the best opportunity for positive change.
Furthermore, this baseline data will enable you to monitor progress and evaluate the efficacy of your interventions.
There are different approaches and data sets that can be utilised to develop a comprehensive understanding of your city setting, including:
- Health and nutrition data
- Mapping - food businesses, community food projects, food access, vulnerable communities
- Auditing current food related policies
- Identifying strengths, weaknesses, challenges and opportunities
This monitoring framework, developed by MUFPP, RUAF and FAO is an excellent tool.
The Milan Urban Food Policy Pact Monitoring Framework
The videos below provide an introduction to this topic and the tool mentioned above, as well as practical examples from cities.
7. Turning strategy into action – Implementing your strategy through leadership and partnerships
Achieving the outcomes you have identified in your strategy will require a city-wide effort and cannot be delivered by a single body. Partnerships are essential to the creation and delivery of your strategy and action plan.
Creating a partnership or forum should be one of the first considerations in your strategy journey. Identifying, managing and coordinating partners will be a key element in the successful delivery of your strategy. Partners will also be key in collecting data, monitoring, evaluating and adaptively improving delivery.
It is important to identify the partnerships that can help drive food system change across and around the city, from within the local authority, to business and private sector, to third sector organisations and civil society groups.
To facilitate effective partnership working consider your approach to:
- Identifying, managing and coordinating partners
- Establishing ways of working, Terms of Reference, monitoring and reporting mechanisms and communication networks
These videos provide information and case studies on effective partnerships.
8. Turning strategy into action – Creating a Good Food Movement
An ambitious strategy with outcomes that will benefit the whole city should be an inspiring and exciting prospect. Realising these outcomes will require a whole city effort, with citizens, businesses, institutions and political leaders all committed to achieving the vision laid out in the strategy.
Creating a Good Food Movement is an exciting and rewarding process, with opportunities for celebration, creativity, community-spirit and, of course, delicious food!
The topics covered in the examples for our speakers include:
- Mass mobilisation - Engaging citizens in city led food system transformation
- Creating an umbrella campaign
- Using awards and certifications
- Creating opportunities for engagement, especially embracing celebration, creativity, community-spirit and, of course, delicious food!
