Westmont Magazine Feeding the Planet: Food Security in the 21st Century
For 11 years, Jeff Dykstra ’92 has led Partners in Food Solutions (PFS), an organization that builds capacity for small and medium-sized companies in Africa that process food to provide jobs, drive demand for farmers’ crops, and produce better, cheaper, healthier, locally grown food for consumers. General Mills established the organization in 2008, and hundreds of its employees have advised African businesses.
Jeff says Africa has the potential to feed the planet. But barriers stand in the way. The continent still imports $40 billion of food. A quarter of a billion Africans struggle to get enough to eat. Producing food requires farmers to grow crops and store them before shipping them to companies that process and package the food. The next step is marketing and selling the products and finding a stable market. This complex system doesn’t exist in much of the continent, or it’s fragmented or underdeveloped.
PFS seeks to create a market for farmers. Shortly before he agreed to work with General Mills, Jeff was living in Zambia and drove to the store for peanut butter, which cost about $7 and came from South Africa. As he returned home, he noticed a woman growing peanuts. “I had this thought: Why am I buying peanut butter from two countries away for $7 a jar when there’s a woman growing peanuts five minutes from the grocery store?”
When PFS started examining the food value chain in Africa, they discovered that farmers already receive assistance from good organizations. But at the next step, processing and packaging food, companies face significant challenges. “We realized that if we can help these businesses be more effective as a food company, we can create more demand for farmers' crops," Jeff says. "And if we can help companies make safer, healthier, more nutritious food, we can benefit consumers as well.”
To find these companies, PFS began hiring local food experts, who became the bridge between the African clients and experts at places like General Mills. “We’ve built the team through partnerships with more than 40 local food experts in 10 African countries who connect clients with our experts, employed at our six partner companies.”
This system works because General Mills realized they could help African food companies remotely. People in Minneapolis already served the corporation’s global business needs. A well-scoped project from the eastern province of Zambia doesn’t differ from a well-scoped project from Brazil, China or Russia.
“The model is very simple,” Jeff says. “We find good, high-potential food companies across the continent looking for help, knowing they can grow with the right assistance. We then match those projects with talented volunteers, leading to a better-run food company and positive outcomes. We soon discovered that most of our clients needed technical know-how, business expertise and capital. We found investors throughout the continent, everything from local banks to private equity investors.”
When General Mills realized PFS had grown beyond their capacity to support, they made the organization independent and invited other like-minded companies to join them, deepening the expertise available." For example, we were working with an Ethiopian client growing a local grain called teff and a company that turns teff into a product called injera,” Jeff says. “We looked into our database and found a woman who got her doctorate studying teff.”
“It’s all about the client defining their need,” Jeff says. “We build the team to serve that need.” In addition to the six partner companies, USAID and a variety of donors support PFS. “It’s been a joy to see these disparate actors come together and do something significant,” Jeff says.
“We apply this model with food, but I believe every company of even medium size could provide hundreds or thousands of hours of expertise to help address some of our world’s greatest challenges. We’re living in a different era, when people are starting to believe that to remain profitable, companies need to demonstrate how they make a positive contribution to society. One of our volunteers chose to work at one of our partner companies instead of a direct competitor because of Partners in Food Solutions.
“Volunteering helps employees develop a variety of skills they can use in their work. Solving problems remotely teaches cross-cultural effectiveness, the ability to work with a virtual team, lean manufacturing, and innovation in constrained environments.
“I encourage anyone leading a company to ask, ‘How am I engaging my people? How am I using their skills, their education, their expertise to improve the world in addition to increasing the bottom line?’”