5 Observations on Public Trust in Canadian Agriculture + Food
Last Week, I had the opportunity to work with my Public Trustworks colleagues in a joint workshop with the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity, called Growing Trust, Protecting Futures: Building your Public Trust Strategy.
The five modules covered everything from aligning public trust to corporate strategic goals, identifying issues that need to tackled, defining target audiences, developing public trust key messaging and finally, execution methods and success metrics.
The format allowed for attendees to take in information from the workshop hosts, then answer prompted questions that were given in advance in a workbook format, which led to breakout rooms to discuss the workbook questions and answers and create dialogue and discussion.
As one of the breakout room moderators, it was interesting to hear the different approaches, yet similar thoughts in how attendees answered questions on public trust within their organizations, while we stimulated conversation to get them thinking of different ways we can look at and approach public trust within our sector.
After spending time in a number of breakout rooms and hearing varied answers from attendees, there were 5 general observations from the experience that stood out for me on the public trust front in Canadian agriculture + food:
Public trust is something our agri-food organizations KNOW is imperative to align with corporate strategic goals, and while many organizations have appeared to have already begun to do this, many know there still a lot of work to be done when it comes to public trust. (Canadians appear to be ahead on this, compared to our US counterparts, who still question why the conversation around public trust is needed).
There may still be confusion as to ‘who’ public trust serves when we work on it as a sector. By working to further public trust, does it ultimately help our farmers (aka. our agri-food organization’s stakeholders) or ultimately, our Canadian consumers, whose public trust we need to provide that ‘social license’ to farm in the first place? I have many more thoughts on this one.
It was also acknowledged how many different stakeholders there are, involved in public trust. This isn’t a conversation simply about farmers or consumers. There are many other stakeholders in our sector, that need to be thought of and included in how we tackle public trust - government, feed and input companies, food retailers, food processors, consumer packaged good companies, investors and many more. They are both people we need to have trust ‘us’ as a sector AND who we need in building public trust with their respective audiences. Who did most workshop attendees recognize as the number one group though, when it comes to public trust? Consumers.
HOW is where the most amount of work needs to be done in public trust. We KNOW it’s something we need to tackle (the strategy is already there for many organizations), but the HOW we tackle it and execute as a sector is where the ‘roll up our sleeves’ work needs to be done. Most people acknowledged in the workshop said this. And how are we measuring success? Are we using the CCFI’s annual Public Trust Research Report as our annual indicator, or are there other metrics to identify and benchmark to see if/what efforts are working? And ultimately, are we all executing towards a common goal as a sector (if you know of a common public trust goal that already exists, please do get in touch with me!)
And HOW do you we do the HOW? Through $$$ invested in organizational budgets for public trust. If we took a fraction of what we invested in research and development within our sector, and put it towards public trust, we may just be able to move the needle. If we purposefully, collaboratively, and strategically decide which direction that needle moves in, it will be the best money invested in the sustainability of our sector’s future.
So many other comments from workshop attendees had me stewing on the public trust topic since last week. It was a good reminder for me, that consumers drive the bus in everything we do. It may indeed warrant another post soon re: thoughts on how Starbucks-Apple-Nike have approached ‘public trust’ aka. ultimately sales to drive home their products importance in the everyday lives of their customers.
Hats off to my Public Trustworks colleagues and CCFI for the workshop last week and a huge thanks to those who participated from the industry. There’s still time to register for the upcoming CCFI Public Trust Summit on October 17-18, 2023. See you soon!
