Green Brown Blue - Our food. Our world.

An invitation-only accelerator that gathers domain experts from across the globe to tackle some of the most complex challenges facing our food systems.

Instead of an accelerator for startups or new products, GREEN BROWN BLUE is a food systems solutions accelerator that brings together food companies, NGOS, scientists, entrepreneurs, and food producers to rapidly prototype and release ideas for change. Every six months, new prototypes become free to the public under a Creative Commons license.

Build. Break. Pivot. Repeat.

The path to success is never a straight line. It may require changing direction to address new roadblocks or retracing steps to revisit previously discarded—yet ultimately superior—ideas. Green Brown Blue’s creative and technical teams support accelerators on their journey of discovery with researchers, writers, art directors, and software developers who assist in rapidly prototyping new ideas.

No white papers. No policy briefs.

Our accelerators are a coalition of the willing and the able, with experts who bring their knowledge, experience and passion to first address deceptively complex problems, then build easy-to-understand open source tools to help transform food systems. While research and policy are important catalysts for change, these accelerators make things. Instead of food for thought, it’s food for action.

[Shown here: an interactive tool to help purchasers determine the negative health and environmental impacts in food packaging.]

Over half the world’s agricultural production comes from only three crops. Let’s bring greater agrobiodiversity to global supply chains.

Our FACT (Food, Agrobiodiversity, Clarity, and Transparency) Accelerator believes that the marketplace can accelerate change in our food systems by providing purchasers (and consumers) with more information and visibility into how food is grown, produced, and comes to market.

A well-told story helps buyers across the value chain make purchases aligned with their values and support the food system they’d like to see. In pursuit of this vision, international food and agriculture experts defined 10 Principles for Agrobiodiversity, conducted three transparent supply chain pilots—fonio in West Africa, small millets in India, and amaranth in Mexico—and built Supply Chain Self-Assessment Tools to support food companies in using more diverse ingredients.

Food-related chronic diseases are the biggest burden on healthcare systems. What would happen if we treated food as medicine?

Healthcare providers currently spend much more on treatment than prevention. What if more programs helped patients eat better by improving access to nutritious and affordable food before their patients got sick? Would providing patients with food at a free or reduced cost before they develop chronic diseases lower healthcare costs? Our Food Is Medicine accelerator examined four promising programs: medically-tailored meals, fresh food “farmacies,” produce Rx, and teaching kitchens, then built an interactive FIM Hub to share their findings.

An accelerator devoted to food packaging, because it’s not only important what we eat but what our food comes in.

An international team of scientists, life cycle assessment experts, plastic pollution activists, and food service supply chain purchasers are identifying contaminants of concern in single-use materials to accelerate a shift toward reusables in the food service industry.

Can we create a universal visual language to describe our food systems, one that bridges cultural barriers, increases consumer literacy, and helps shift the marketplace?

Our Food Clarity Framework accelerator brought food experts together with designers to devise a visual language that unites worldwide food system stakeholders to improve communication and collaboration. Their work has now become FOODICONS, an international design challenge sponsored by The Lexicon, Adobe, AIGA, and the Noun Project.

How important are national dietary guidelines? What nations advise their citizens to eat can impact the entire planet.

Nutrition and climate experts from across the globe looked at dietary guidelines in Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, and the Nordic Countries to explain how food choices impact our personal health, the cost of national healthcare, the environment, climate change, and cultures. To make their findings accessible to all audiences, they put a face on data by turning their work into an interactive game for desktop and mobile users.

An evidence-backed, place-based, market-driven model to rapidly transition agriculture to more regenerative practices.

While the principles of regenerative agriculture are universal, their application varies not only by region, but sometimes even farm to farm. The REGEN1 accelerator gathered nearly 100 experts across the value chain in Northern California to develop a regionally-focused supply chain tool that will help purchasers reward farmers and ranchers for their regenerative practices. Their work is supported by a fully integrated communications strategy that introduces consumers to the environmental co-benefits of regenerative agriculture, including sequestering carbon to help mitigate climate change.

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