Sustainability Focused

An especially unique attribute of the Forever Green Initiative is its focus on commercialization, adoption and scaling. “Broadly speaking, we think of three areas of work: strategy, landscape, and market,” explained Colin. “We need many businesses sourcing these crops, making products and moving them to consumers, either as ingredients or as finished products.”

“Bringing an entirely new crop out into the world while making it something that people can easily become familiar with and start to use is fundamentally a very hopeful act,” observed Christopher Abbott of Perennial Pantry.

River Rock Kitchen & Baking Co’s local community impact starts with sourcing. Under Montana’s leadership, the bakery sources their ingredients from more than a dozen farms, mills, and cooperatives in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

“I’m not that great a cook. I’m a really good shopper,” laughs Beth Dooley, James Beard award-winning food writer, author of more than a dozen cookbooks, Star Tribune columnist, and a regular contributor to MPR.

“We tried over and over and over again to write a song about climate change. It’s really hard to do that, especially for kids,” explained Joe. “In the end the song ‘Trouble in Paradise’ reflected more than just climate change. It ended up surprising us that the song was about a world that was living by the narrative of separation.”

Tahir Sandhu and Gwen Williams of St. Cloud, Minnesota’s Artisan Naan Bakery found that the easiest way to eat the naan and other flatbreads they enjoyed was to make it themselves.  “We started the bakery for purely selfish reasons,” laughed Gwen. “My husband was quite dissatisfied, and had been for years, with the frozen naan, roti and pita that we found in stores.”