International Benchmarking Coalition
An International Coalition for Benchmarking the Food Industry
A coalition with the aim of getting Governments, businesses, civil society and investors to use consistent metrics for assessing the food industry’s role in food system transformation at both national and global levels.
The private sector has a key role in driving change, particularly the food industry and those who invest in it.
Supermarkets, caterers and restaurant chains can influence the required shifts in consumption and production, as both gatekeepers to our diets and the funnel through which most commercially produced food is channelled.
Investors in these businesses can also provide crucial impetus by both setting expectations on business performance and by making the decision on where their funds are invested.
Despite this, we still lack a consensus on what metrics the food industry should be using and how we can track industry progress towards healthy, just and sustainable food systems.
This makes it hard for Governments, civil society and investors to engage with the food industry and hold them accountable.
The World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) and The Food Foundation has developed a toolkit that can be applied at a national and global scale so that other organisations and Governments can assess the food industry in their countries in an aligned way, without having to reinvent the wheel.
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We have been collaborating with WBA on an aligned methodology for assessing companies across the food & agriculture value chain on their progress towards food systems transformation. Our “national spotlight” methodology (Plating Up Progress) that has been tried and tested here in the UK for the last three years is deliberately aligned with the WBA’s global methodology, so that national companies that aren’t picked up by WBA’s global benchmark (they benchmark the 350 largest companies), are assessed in the same way.
After hosting an Independent UN Food Systems Summit Dialogue (UNFSSD) in 2021 it became evident that organisations in other countries would also like to implement “national spotlights” and would find a toolkit based on the WBA-Food Foundation methodology useful.
In collaboration with organisations from LMICs and other benchmarking organisations, we developed a toolkit that will allow organisations in their own countries to carry out assessments using a consistent set of metrics. The 'International Benchmarking Coalition' also shares learnings from their own approaches as well as best practice approaches to engaging important stakeholders such as investors and Governments.
Get in touch
If you are interested in joining the coalition or finding out more about this work then please contact Chloe MacKean: chloe.mackean@foodfoundation.org.uk
