Creating Social Value Blog / Food

On the Axis of Inquiry: a Novel Approach to Evolving Your Food Business

  There are so many programs, publications, consultancies, incubators and accelerators purporting to answer the question: How do I explore, start, or grow my new food business? There is no single solution. What you need depends on who you are, where you are, who you know, what you know, and the resources you have at…

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The Power of Food, Questions, and Connections

Wednesday, October 17, we will celebrate Babson Food Day, the culminating moment of Food Sol’s year-round ambition to catalyze connections and opportunities for food entrepreneurs of all kinds. That may sound great, but vague also. Here are just two examples. Nadine’s story Last year, Nadine Habayeb MBA’17 pitched a strategic question at the Quick Service…

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Finding New Foods and Trends at the Summer Fancy Food Show

Last week, eight Babson MBAs attended the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York—the fourth consecutive year that Food Sol has been able to facilitate free student access* to the Show through our educational partnership with the Specialty Food Association. The cohort met first with Ron Tanner, VP of Philanthropy and Industry Relations for the Association…

Blockchain for Food

The potential of blockchain technology to transform the food industry is a hot topic—arguably the hottest. I started to unpack this at Babson San Francisco’s THRIVE event last month in a conversation on food blockchains with Ami Patel from ripe.io (here’s the recording, if you’re interested). But we only scratched the surface at THRIVE. Now,…

Showing Up For Purpose

By Jack Barber ’16, Co-Founder of Mainely Burgers. If someone had told me three years ago that my brother, Max, and I would be running our business Mainely Burgers full-time, I would have told them that they were crazy. During my senior year at Babson, I was razor focused on getting a job in finance.…

Food Sol Heads to San Francisco

This month, I’ll be in San Francisco to guest lecture at Stanford University in its graduate-level Food, Health and Nutrition Entrepreneurship course and to facilitate the monthly THRIVE event at Babson San Francisco (thank you, Kim Bryden for the shout-out on Tidbit!) Everyone in food knows that San Francisco is one of the U.S. hotbeds…

Community Table Mapped to Supply Chain

Many teachers say they absorb more in the classroom than they impart. In addition to what they learn from students, the iterative process of learning how to teach is itself an incredible education journey. What I’ve learned from teaching the MBA elective Food Entrepreneurship twice now has shaped the way I look at my role…

Founders of Leading-Edge Cooperative Organic Valley Come to Babson

“Business is all about relationships,” the CEO said. We were not in a classroom or theater listening to a man in a suit. We were seated around a sun-drenched table in the Blank Center co-working space listening to a back-to-the-land hippie farmer who thirty years ago started CROPP (Cooperative Regions of Organic Producer Pools), parent…

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Seventh Babson Food Day

Quite a lot has changed since Food Sol launched six years ago – both across the food industry (from field to fork it’s been interrupted and redesigned) as well as in food education (who teaches what and to whom). When we started, annual events that celebrated farming, food, access, sustainability, justice, animal welfare, and culture…

Teaching Food Entrepreneurship

The Class of 2017 had more food-focused students than I’d yet seen in 6 years at Babson. This sudden uptick fueled my desire to teach them and boosted my confidence that if I offered a course in food entrepreneurship, it might have a shot at running. Run it did. Last September, twenty-five MBAs signed up…