We are taking stock of climate action in 2020 and what's ahead for the industry through a series of interviews with the 2020 National Co+op Grocers Climate Collaborative Awards winners. This week we sat down with Kurt Baehmann, Sustainability Manager at Outpost Natural Foods, winner of the 2020 Outstanding Company Award. (View our previous interview with Numi Organic Tea).

The CC's Erin Callahan sat down with Numi Tea co-founders Ahmed Rahim and Reem Hassani, winners of the 2020 National Co+op Grocers Climate Collaborative Influencer Award, to talk through the last year in climate action and what's ahead for the industry--including how we bring last year's racial justice movement into our climate work. They also shared some secrets of their decades' long experience driving collaborative action across the natural products industry.

In 2018, we shared details on Happy Family Organics’ regenerative agriculture farmer training pilot (see the full blog here). The program set out to provide free technical support and guidance to farmers in Happy Family Organics’ supply chain on how they could shift to practices that can help store more carbon in the soil, improve watershed health, support biodiversity while also improving overall soil health and land productivity. The project fit into the brand’s larger ambition to help reverse the climate crisis through supply chain reductions and on-farm carbon sequestration.

Two years later, they've completed a second pilot and have now launched a Regenerative Farmer Fund to provide ongoing support to farmers in their supply chain. We sat down with their Sustainability Director, Katie Clark, to learn more.

Mary Jane Melendez Chief Sustainability and Social Impact Officer,  General Mills

Our Director Erin Callahan caught up with Mary Jane Melendez from General Mills about their regenerative agriculture work and their plans for the future! Read their conversation below.

Nutiva was one of the first companies to join the Climate Collaborative in 2017 and has made five climate action commitments, to: Regenerative Agriculture, Energy Efficiency, Food Waste, Packaging, and Transportation. They are also a champion-level donor, helping catalyze action and resource provision to our network of 660 companies. We sat down with them to check in on their climate action, detailed in their new 2019 Impact Report.

Nothing has given me more hope this year than seeing how this community has continued to push forward on climate action. Amid an incredibly eventful and challenging year, hundreds of companies from this network still showed up for the largest ever business climate advocacy day, advocacy trainings, webinars, and more.

Below, you’ll find links to resources we've developed to help businesses in our community advocate for a climate-smart recovery to the COVID economic crisis. You can watch our August 6 Advocacy Training and Briefing here.

We are at a turning point in our country’s history, where circumstances are forcing us to redefine what we stand for—and to get involved in advocating for those changes. It has never been more important to make sure climate is part of that picture, and we are asking this industry to play a vital role in making that case to Congress this fall.

Climate Collaborative companies joined LEAD on Climate 2020—the largest virtual education and advocacy day on climate action

(Virtual, May 14)—More than 120 natural products companies joined the first major call for a climate-inclusive path forward from COVID-19, including KeHE, Numi Tea, Clif Bar, INFRA, UNFI, Amy’s Kitchen, Gaia Herbs, Grove Collaborative, Ben & Jerry’s, and Dr. Bronner’s, among others.

Last Friday, we held a unique all-community call to shape the Climate Collaborative’s path forward from COVID-19. We were blown away by the response, as hundreds of you joined to plan for how our industry can work together to build back to better—better ways of doing business, ensuring supply chain stability, and protecting the planet and the people and communities we work with.

If you weren’t able to join, you can view the meeting in full here, and I really hope you will. We heard from environmental author and activist Bill McKibben, our partner Ceres, and our very own Nancy Hirshberg, a Climate Collaborative co-founder who is helping us build a vital climate response to COVID-19.