FoodS3 began with a simple question...
Where does our corn come from?
The answer, it turned out, was far from simple and the question was asked again and again as the US food and agriculture community progressed along their sustainability journey.
As we sought to answer the question, we found that the upstream corn supply chain was effectively invisible. There was no large, publicly available dataset on the movement of corn, or other commodity crops and livestock within the US. As a result, it was nearly impossible for a consumer-facing company to identify the origin of the feed that nourished the animals that ultimately became their food product.
Why does this matter?
Most of the environmental impacts of the food products supply chain occur in the crop and animal stages of production. Consumer-facing companies making carbon goals or other environmental commitments cannot follow through on these promises if they can’t follow the supply chain. Therefore, tracing opportunities for improvements and actual solutions requires making supply chains visible.
We built FoodS3 to make the invisible actionable.
Who is the FoodS3 team?
Team leader Dr. Jennifer Schmitt has been working on the model since it began in 2015 and started leading the research direction in 2017.
Dr. Nathaniel Springer leads the supply chain and data science components of the model.
Dr. Rylie Pelton leads the life cycle analysis and greenhouse gas aspects.
The team currently includes IonE Postdoctoral Fellows Drs. Will Lockhart, Mo Ollenburger, and Aurup Ratan Dhar. We also have graduate research assistant Annabella Lau and undergraduate researcher Priscilla Bunday assisting with the research.
Our research team is assisted by research project manager Natalie Narváez and communications specialist Ashley Bergman Humphrey. Just as our model is continuously evolving, so, too, is our team, and many faculty, researchers, and postdocs have contributed to FoodS3 over time.
Our Home at IonE
The FoodS3 team is part of the larger Knowledge Initiatives research group at the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of Minnesota. All research staff members are interdisciplinary impact scientists with multiple research portfolios that include FoodS3 work.
IonE strives to build a future where people and planet prosper together, in part by producing and co-creating knowledge and new solutions, network- and capacity-building, and scaling and enabling collective impact.
The FoodS3 work does all this by addressing sustainable supply chain knowledge gaps, building partnerships outside of academia, providing data and insights that empower community groups, environmental organizations, governments, and companies to aggregate their impact through supply chains, and providing open-source science that encourages collaboration and accelerates progress.
