Changing Tastes Overview

Changing Tastes is a food strategy consultancy that has worked at the intersection of sustainability and the food industry for two decades. During that time, our team has pioneered many of the common sustainability practices in the food industry, from creating the first ever sustainability strategy for a major food company to creating the plant-forward culinary strategy. Changing Tastes has created and catalyzed many of the now mainstream changes in what Americans choose to eat and what the retail and hospitality industry offers them.

Changing Tastes believes that food choices are the deepest touchpoints for our concerns about our health, our culture and our planet. They also are the most important choices we make every day. That’s why Changing Tastes has worked exclusively since our founding in 2003 to create a more sustainable, healthy, delicious and profitable food system.

Over the past two decades, we have helped identify and catalyze some of the most significant shifts in the way business and consumers think about food. Our accomplishments include working with General Mills to develop the first sustainability strategy for a major U.S. food company and creating a strategy to drive growth in the once nascent U.S. organic food industry. We accomplished this by making the then novel connection between production practices and personal health, including raising awareness of antibiotic use in dairy and livestock production, and developing the Plant-Forward culinary strategy which is now is a major focus of culinary innovation in the western world. This strategy also continues to contribute to a meaningful reduction in the environmental footprint of the hospitality industry.

We do this by working with our clients to achieve greater success by understanding and finding opportunities at the intersection of five key trends that are driving change in our food system: sustainability, public health, information technology, demographics and the changing role of the culinary professional and foodservice industry. Our firm’s insights at the core of these forces are the basis for the strategy, innovation, sustainability and performance management services we provide to leading nonprofit, philanthropic, business and government institutions.

Our senior team brings more than five decades of experience in sustainability, food and agriculture, including the design of sustainability strategies and reporting programs for the world’s two largest foodservice companies. Our combined experience has informed the efforts of most of the nation’s largest restaurant and hospitality companies and several of the ten largest philanthropies and better known environmental organizations. We have also advised several of the nation’s best-known retail food brands.

Through our work, we have helped to catalyze some of the most significant changes in the food industry, such as working with the natural and organic food industry to reaccelerate growth by developing a new marketing strategy focused on personal health benefits. We’ve also helped the restaurant industry achieve leadership on antibiotic use in prior decades, providing ongoing industry involvement when the first congressional committees addressed the issue more than a decade ago. We have advised the design of sustainability strategies through sustainable sourcing and stakeholder engagement programs for the world’s two largest contract foodservice companies. Along the way, we have created more than $2 billion in additional revenue for the companies with which we have worked.

We’ve also created important new insights to view and manage food cost volatility risk using menu and recipe strategies with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We’ve helped well established programs like Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program redesign their approaches to better engage the foodservice industry.

Among the most currently visible consequences of our work is the recent movement in foodservice to focus on plant-forward dining, a term introduced by our founder in 2010, as a way to integrate both environmental and public health benefits into a coherent culinary strategy. Plant-forward dining is now a main area of focus for culinary innovation and foodservice strategy, and one we have popularized through our work with leading chefs, restaurant companies and through the Menus of Change™ initiative we helped create and now lead for the Culinary Institute of America and Harvard University School of Public Health.

Our First 20 Years

2003

We worked with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to begin a shift from sustainable agriculture to sustainable food, including the planning of a seminal “Food and Society” conference that introduced flavor, freshness, and slow food—not just nutrition—to the lexicon of the family farmer movement and helped it become the local food movement.

We advised the European Union Parliament in support of the Cancun Round of World Trade Organization talks. Our work on Geographically Identified Foods included linking trade policy and food production standards with market-based analysis and strategies to allow traditional producer communities to capture financial value from their craft, including for cheese, olive oil, and olives, and to protect against imitation and substitution in commodity markets.

2004-2005

We worked with General Mills to help them figure out their Cascadian Farms acquisition and ended up developing the first sustainability strategy for a major consumer food products company, including creating the first ever sustainability strategy for a major U.S. food company and introducing the now common practice of making forward-looking measurable commitments to reduce waste, greenhouse gas emissions, water, and pesticide use. We also integrated nutrition and health outcomes with environmental impacts.

2004-2006

We worked with the Organic Trade Association to reaccelerate growth in the natural and organic food sector through new strategic marketing and research efforts, putting in place a new focus on promoting organic food as “healthier for you” and establishing expectations that animal products also not contain antibiotics and hormones. This increased what had been a declining growth rate back to about 15%, where it has remained for over a decade.

2007-2011

Our founder, Arlin Wasserman, served as the first head of sustainability for Sodexo, and as a member of its executive team with responsibility for culinary and nutrition in North America. He created the company’s Better Tomorrow™ sustainability program, the first to integrate menu design with environmental, animal welfare, and social outcomes into both sourcing and menu design. 

2009

Arlin Wasserman created the Plant Forward culinary strategy as a way to achieve better health, environmental, and food cost outcomes. That approach is now a major focus of menu innovation among American and European restaurant and hospitality companies, helping to support meaningful reductions in both red meat consumption and carbon emissions from the sector.

2011

We developed a roadmap for investing in local food systems for the cities of San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver that continues to propel them as not only leaders in sustainability but also some of the most exciting restaurant cities in the U.S.  

2012-2019

We responded to the nascent interest of the Culinary Institute of America and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in having a sustainability program to parallel its nutrition programs by designing and creating Menus of Change™, which we believe may be the most significant sustainability education effort undertaken by a culinary school. 

2014-2020

We led a multi-year effort on behalf of Seafood Watch to have major foodservice hospitality companies work pre-competitively to improve supply chain practices and drive change and innovation among wild-capture fisheries and farming regions they rated and advised on improvements. Due in part to our effort and novel approach, Seafood Watch became the most widely recognized and used sustainable seafood guidance program within the hospitality industry and set the agenda for innovation in seafood supply chains. The effort ended in 2020 concurrent with COVID-19 restrictions on travel and meetings.

2015

We helped Compass Group become the first major foodservice company to make a commitment to address climate change by reducing the amount of meat it serves, designing its commitment and setting a new direction for the foodservice industry. 

2016

We developed a new platform that the suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors that secured certification from Marine Stewardship Council now use to communicate the value of the certification to consumer-facing grocery retail and foodservice hospitality companies and to build the case for investing their marketing dollars to raise consumer awareness of MSC. Four years on, this platform resulted in dramatically increased awareness and influence of MSC.

2018

We helped Aramark design and pilot a successful effort—and the first among major foodservice and restaurant companies—to use novel culinary approaches as an enabling strategy to convert all conventionally raised commodity beef with regionally produced grass-fed meat. The pilot to completely switch beef production approaches at Wake Forest, Georgetown, the SUNY system, and other major east coast colleges proved the switch could also occur within conventional business models and without increased cost.

2019

We conducted an unprecedented study into how Americans will eat fish and seafood over the next five years. With it, we found important levers to affect demand for wild and farmed fish. More importantly, our work revealed a new mindset among consumers that connects ocean health to personal health and food choices, dislodging the conventional wisdom that Americans prefer wild fish and consider it the healthier choice.

We also undertook a substantial effort to develop an entirely new strategy to increase adoption and reliance on the Seafood Watch ratings program while improving its funding base. Further efforts ended in early 2020 with the closure of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and many other venues due to COVID-19.

2020

We assessed western and global consumer markets to identify opportunities to shift the purchase of several types of fish and seafood harvested in South America and in Pacific Ocean fisheries centered around Thailand and Indonesia based on labor conditions, livelihoods, and culinary traditions and attributes with the support of the Walton Family Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

2021

We developed and launched a new sustainability platform for the National Association of College and University Food Services. The platform provides more than 700 NACUFS member colleges and universities with guidance on management, including menu and purchasing recommendations along with training tools for their workforce. The platform also provides a standard benchmarking tool for foodservice operations and their suppliers that both helps prioritize areas of improvement and demonstrate the strategic value of foodservice in higher education sustainability efforts.

2022

We are launching a new message platform for the U.S. food sector to help shift Americans to get a greater share of their food from the oceans and the resulting health, environmental, and culinary benefits. We are developing this message platform in support of the National Seafood Council now being contemplated by President Biden’s administration. It is built upon our groundbreaking research into the consumer and purchasing decision maker attitudes about food choices — with a strong focus on proteins — and the ways in which COVID has reshaped the U.S. food marketplace.