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It’s a Packed House! Expo West Follow Up

March 15, 2016 by dev_team

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Our vibrancy as a community is profound, and our desire to address packaging, climate and leadership is clear!

We convened our OSC2 community at Expo West for our 4th year and it truly was a packed house, 18 Rabbits generously hosted our event at its rented Big House off the Convention Center row of hotels. Our event started at 8 a.m. yet by 7:55 a.m., we already had 50 people there! Thankfully, Equator Coffee was ready with beautiful drip coffee for all! Straus and 18 Rabbits fed us great cups of granola with yogurt and berries.

Ahmed Rahim, my inspiring co-founder in OSC2 and CEO of Numi Organic Tea, called us all to sit and celebrate our accomplishments while looking toward the future. I spoke about our 3 collaboratives.

Along with welcoming our new 2016 members to our CEO leadership team, we shared 3 items at this event related to our 3 OSC2 Collaborative:

  1. Compostable Packaging Progress. Wow! The energy and interest in our progress toward compostable food package solutions is profound. We announced that there are real solutions and they are launching. Alter Eco stole the show with their Gone4Good announcement. They are launching to much industry fanfare, including a Nexty Award for compostable packages.  They so rocked at this event that they were not even upstaged by Oakland Coffee Works’ Founder Mike Dirnt (who also happens to be in the band Green Day). He shared his journey (he co-founded the company with Billy Joe Armstrong) and their support of our collaboration to change the industry. Could we possibly love coffee and Green Day more?
  1. OSC2 Natural Products University. We are launching this wonderful initiative so mission-driven food companies have access to world-class courses on leadership, Excel, finance and everything else needed to run a great company.
  1. Climate Collaborative. Yes—we all talk about climate change, but how do we come together to drive real impact as an industry? OSC2 has been working on this hard, and I spoke on this along with Jessica Rolph (Happy Family founding partner) and Nancy HIrshberg (goddess of climate and sustainability and a major part of the growth of Stonyfield‘s sustainable development). We are launching a program this year with the goal of inspiring every company to do
    more by providing a clearer roadmap of priority commitments and best practices sharing.

The most exciting part is the clear response from everyone that our food industry needs to do more and WANTS to do more. We surveyed everyone and here is a clear indicator of our collective desire to work harder on behalf of climate.

OSC2 2016 Collaboratives we shared at Expo West Community Breakfast:

 

 

 

 

 

The energy was so great and our community is incredibly strong and vibrant. I am more inspired than ever to work hard for our food industry this year!