story a story about the transformative
effect that business can have in
addressing some of society’s greatest
challenges and as I share this today I’d
like to encourage you all to think about
ways your businesses your organizations
can harness your core assets
perhaps in unorthodox ways to make a
meaningful difference against some of
the challenges that our society faces
both near and far this story begins
almost 10 years ago in fact exactly 10
years ago this week in Davos Switzerland
at the World Economic Forum this is an
annual gathering of business and
political leaders and that year Ken
Powell was the newly named chairman and
CEO of General Mills he was three weeks
on the job and was at his first World
Economic Forum and I guess as happens
there he was challenged by Kofi Annan
who was the at the time recently retired
UN secretary-general and Kofi challenged
can with the idea of what could General
Mills do as a six largest food company
to address issues of food security and
nutrition in Africa Ken was wired to get
this question and he was wired to want
to answer it and so he came back and he
put a team together and began wrestling
with that question
how could General Mills not only use
their money but perhaps even more
importantly use their expertise to make
a difference on this important issue at
that time I was living in Lusaka Zambia
with my family and had at that point my
career spent about half of it in
business with organizations like Cargill
and in relief and development and I’d
come to the firm conclusion after living
on the continent that what was most
needed was business investment and
economic development so at that point I
was approached by a member of Ken’s team
and asked to consider helping them
direct this nascent effort this was in
2008 and as some of you might recall
that year there was a global
food crisis there were food shortages
around the world in many different
regions and a shock to the system and
one of the outcomes of that was it woke
up a lot of governments including our
own to the fact that we had really
stopped investing in food systems for
the previous 30 years and we were
instead paying for relief on the back
end during famines and so at the g8 that
year in Italy our government along with
the seven other members of the g8 all
committed to re-up being and investing
in AG food systems so this was the
backdrop that we started investigating
this challenge we started if you think
of a food value chain it’s it’s the the
path our food moves most often from the
farmer through storage to processing and
milling to distribution and then
ultimately into our mouths so if you
think about that food value chain we
started in Africa with the farmer with
farmers like Dorothy this is a woman
outside of the Longway Malawi and like
many of you know most food in Africa is
still grown by women like Dorothy on an
acre or two and as we got to know
Dorothy and others like her we quickly
realized that we were not the the entity
or the organization or the company to
help farmers like that one there were a
lot of organizations already doing that
well and to our expertise didn’t line up
well with a smallholder farmer but the
good news is that a lot of that
investment that I mentioned that started
happening in 2008 started flowing to
help farmers like Dorothy grow more
crops on their acre or two we began to
follow
Dorothy’s crops down the value chain and
began encountering individuals like
Robert this is Robert near Enda who is
an entrepreneur outside of Arusha
Tanzania and he had a small food company
that bought crops from farmers like
Dorothy to turn those into value-added
goods for his community this was the
first big insight we had and the aha
moment was if we can find companies like
this we can help build their business
and accomplish a couple things one we
can create demand for the crops that are
now starting to become a little bit more
abundant
and on the other end of the spectrum
I’ll talk about that in a minute we
could help consumers this was on Roberts
sixtieth birthday and he announced that
day to us that his goal was to double
his business in the next five years and
I’m glad to be able to say that he went
on to do that and more but when we
started finding companies like Roberts
we thought we can help companies like
this even though they’re eight thousand
miles away the challenges and problems
they’re facing are very very much like
the ones that Joyner Mills is facing the
other thing that happened out of this is
we kept following Roberts his his
products we started encountering the
other end of the spectrum from the
farmer kids like Johnson Johnson is a
young man outside of Nairobi Kenya this
was at a school in each day his school
had a school lunch that was provided by
the World Food Program and we realized
that by helping food companies like
Roberts not only were we helping the
farmer we were able to improve
nutritional outcomes for kids like
Johnson to improve products that he was
eating to make them more nutritious to
extend the shelf life to make them more
accessible and so by helping that
processor in the middle we could help
the farmer and we could help the
consumer and if you’re an optimist and
believe that Johnson will join the
growing middle class in Africa when he
goes to shop at the local supermarket
Nairobi increasingly there will be
products that were grown produced and
processed in his country when we lived
in Zambia we would buy peanut butter
they came across too inefficient borders
from South Africa a mile from where we
shop Zambians grew peanuts it makes a
whole lot more sense to buy peanut
butter that is made and grown in a
country where you’re living so as we got
going we realized that to do this at any
level of scale that would actually make
a difference we would need local staff
so we began hiring local food
technologists the woman on the left was
our very first staff person on the
continent Naima Maremma
she’s a Tanzanian food technologist very
talented we gave her additional training
and her job was to find companies like
Roberts understand what their challenges
and opportunities were and then scoped
those into projects that we could go
to work on and that’s exactly what began
to happen the bottom picture on the
right is is Christian des Eaux our
latest hire he’s in Accra Ghana this
happened to be on his first day of work
and I love this picture because one you
see his his passion and enthusiasm
coming out and his smile he also is a
trained food technologist a food
scientist and the woman next to him was
a potential client we were introducing
him to and she is in the midst of
scaling up her food company in fact
we’re standing in a new facility that
was going to be ten times bigger than
her past facility so she was in over her
head a little bit and we had just got
done explaining the role that Christian
would put play and being a bridge to the
expertise and know-how of a company like
General Mills and you can see on her
face
the almost relief and sense of okay I’m
not on my own on this the last piece of
the puzzle and really our unique
contribution is the expertise of people
like Dave and Angela Dave and Angela to
General Mills employees Dave is an
engineer and angela is a product
developer and between the two of them
just the two of them they have almost 40
years of know-how and expertise imagine
what they know what that means to a
nascent entrepreneur a food entrepreneur
in Africa and that’s just two of the
tens of thousands of employees that we
can tap into I mentioned the first
insight we had was working with small
and growing food companies the second
insight we had that that contributed to
the success of this was that if we had
to send Dave and Angela over to an
African country 8,000 miles away then we
could maybe help four or five companies
a year on a dozen projects but if we
could instead take an hour or two a week
from not only Dave and Angela but
hundreds and ultimately thousands of
employees and aggregate that and aim
that at very specific problems that were
identified on the ground then we could
look at this issue at the scale that it
deserved and that’s exactly what we did
we knew we could succeed in this because
that’s exactly how General Mills runs
its own R&D there’s about 1,600 people
most of whom are
ace right here in the Twin Cities
working on problems and products and
challenges of the global business so it
was not a stretch for us to imagine that
even though the food company might be
thirty miles from a paved road in the
Eastern Province of Zambia if we could
understand what the problem or challenge
was then we could build a team of
experts to go to work against that so
from the beginning with that model we
were able to think big and over the
years we went from helping Robert who
was our first client for now helping
more than 725 food companies across the
continent and this this is this grew we
realized we were going to outstrip even
General Mills supply and so that’s what
led to the creation of partners and food
solutions and we started bringing on
other food companies like Cargill the
Hershey Company and just this week we
announced our six partner a company
called ardent Mills which is the largest
flour milling business in the world
based in Denver so we now have access to
literally hundreds of thousands of
talented people to address the problems
and challenges of food companies in
Africa and with that kind of expertise I
think our six partner companies have
almost 700 years of operating know-how
there’s not a challenger problem an
African food company could face that we
can’t find the experts to go to work on
so I’ll close with a couple of
reflections on on lessons we’ve learned
and I think guiding principles that have
aided us the first is a phrase that my
friend and co-founder John Minh – I’m
sure some people in this room know
longtime General Mills employee early on
coined the phrase stumbling forward
stumbling forward partners food
solutions was born out of an RD
community for research and development
and R&D people fail a whole lot more
than they succeed when they’re trying to
do new things you fail and so when we
got this going we we took that mindset
of stumbling forward and the idea of
that is that we had a direction we
wanted to go we wanted to improve food
security nutrition economic development
Africa but we didn’t know exactly how we
were going to get there and we
understood inherently that we were going
to trip along the way and I think a lot
of times especially as America
when we’re thinking about doing
something new we want to try to plan it
out from A to Z and if we had done that
with this effort we would have probably
not done it because it wasn’t going to
work so encourage all of you think about
stumbling forward on the ideas you have
just start we started with a single food
company and that grew to two and then it
grew to four and kept going from there
so that’s the idea of stumbling forward
second one is another term a friend coin
one of our partners is an organization
called root capital root Capital is a
impact investor and their founder Willy
foot I believe coined the phrase of
pathological collaboration pathological
collaboration if you’re trying to
address a major challenge in society
whether that’s local or global there is
no one individual no one organization no
one approach that is going to have all
the answers to that problem and so
embedded even in our name partners and
food solutions from the beginning we set
out to find those organizations in those
entities that can complement what we’re
doing and so for us that meant
ultimately what began at General Mills
became six other food companies hundreds
of food companies across the continent
Africa u.s. aid which is our US
government aid arm the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation impact investors
individual donors and most importantly
thousands of volunteers from our
corporate partners so this idea that
when you’re starting something that
you’re trying to create impact with be a
pathological collaborator find people
who can come alongside you and that’s
how you succeed so I’ll close with that
thank you very much [Applause]