The prize process
You might think it simple, this task of ours. We just have to find some great project that is helping to lessen the environmental impact of the way we eat. This process, however, is far from simple.
To do it in the right way means starting a process that takes over a year and involves our entire team and a host of diverse experts around the globe. The main complication? We are not satisfied with simply giving the award to someone who did something great ten years ago that definitely works. Rather, we are ceaselessly searching for those who would change the world now and in the future if only they had the chance.
The first step
To kick the process off, we need nominations. We gather these in a very democratic way, with most of our roughly 1000 yearly nominees submitted through our website by interested people who think they know of a deserving initiative. We’ve made the form as simple as possible: just give us the name of the organization, and if you know it, their website.
We purposefully don’t want a lengthy description of what the nominee does or why they’re being nominated. This might seem counterintuitive at first. Wouldn’t it be better if nominators supplied us with as much information as possible? Actually, no. We ask for as little information as possible for three specific reasons.
The first and most important reason is that we want to remove all barriers to nominating. We have seen that with every extra second it takes, or every extra click someone needs to make, a few more people give up. We’ll never know what they wanted to tell us. And just imagine if an unnecessarily complicated nomination process was the deciding factor between the success or failure of an idea that could ultimately change the world.
The second reason has to do with bias. This early in the process we don’t want to know what someone does well according to someone else, or why someone thinks the nominee should win, and we most certainly don’t want to know much about the person who is nominating, either. We need to make it as easy as possible for us to look at every nominee with equal interest and an open mind. Because we are human, this becomes more difficult if we get biased information from the beginning — especially if a nomination comes from someone working for a well-known organization, or if a nominator is simply very good at expressing themselves and produces text that is more persuasive than others. The risk is not that we end up a winner that isn’t good enough; later stages of the process will prevent that. Rather, the risk is that someone who is a potential game-changer might not get the chance, because they were discarded because their nomination didn’t stand out. Or that
we end up spending unnecessary resources investigating initiatives that someone made sound really worthy, but that aren’t really that good. In short, we want to find out for ourselves who we believe in, because that is the fairest way.
The third reason is that it is very impractical to receive lots of unverified information about nominees. We must independently verify any information that enters our nomination process. Since we receive around 1,000 nominations per year, verifying vast quantities of information about each nominee would be nearly impossible. It takes much more time to verify what someone else believes is important for us to just gather the information we need ourselves.
It is also possible to nominate yourself for the Food Planet Prize. The only difference from a third-party nomination is that we will ask you for a bit more information about your organization. But even then, at this stage we don’t want to know why you think you should win. You will go through the same vetting process as an initiative nominated by someone else. A side note for those of you who are interested in being nominated: it makes no difference if you’re nominated by someone else or you nominate yourself. If you think you should win, nominate! Anyhow.
When a nomination comes in, our next step is to make sure that it is about a real initiative, and that it’s work is somehow applicable to the purpose of the Foundation: “to lessen the environmental impact of how we eat and produce our food.”
The vetting stage
In the initial vetting stage, we lose 15-20% of the nominations because they are not eligible for some reason. It can be prank nominations from Seymour Butts, people asking us to just give them the money already, and random oddballs who clearly have no idea what we are all about. This amount of extra work at the beginning of the process is a small price to pay for keeping those aforementioned barriers to entry very low.
When a nominee is deemed eligible, we complete a form detailing the specifics of the organization and their work. We research the initiative online and briefly summarize what they claim to do and what we think about that. Lastly, we give scores for 18 questions measuring the nominee against the purpose of the Curt Bergfors Foundation. Each question produces a score between 1-5 that, when combined, gives a total score for each new nominee. Each nominee will also receive an email saying something like, “Hey, you. You have been nominated for this thing, we might be in touch in the next few months if we need more information.” This usually ends up in people’s spam folders together with the other “you can win $2 million USD if you do this” emails that we all receive.
After a scorecard form has been completed, the nominee goes into the prize year’s nominations matrix, which is a list with 400 spots. Each spot reflects a specific mix of criteria, distributed across the following fields: geographic origin, food systems sector, type of innovation, and whether the nominee operates a for-profit or nonprofit organization (both are eligible).
To take an example: one nominee might be a North American primary producer, with a social innovation, that is working as a for-profit company. If there is more than one initiative in the nominations flow which fits that same designation, it means that by the time we complete our 400-list for the next year’s prize, only the nominee we most believe in will remain on the list and proceed to the next stage. Some categories are more crowded than others, so this is the first really difficult stage of the vetting process, where we have to remove some alternatives that might seem really qualified.
In other less popular categories, there might be only one nominee, and sometimes none. However, we never rotate in nominees from crowded categories into less crowded ones just to fill the list. The whole purpose with having this matrix is to push ourselves to represent the whole world, the whole food system, and all types of innovations and organizations as equally as we can. And to not become lazy and stick to a system that favors what we already know and like. We firmly believe that those truly disruptive initiatives that the world most needs are often hiding where we least expect them.
The longlist
When our 400-list is full, our nominations team then puts more effort into researching these initiatives and starts the process of turning them into our longlist: roughly 50 strong nominees. The longlist will mathematically have the same distribution as the 400-list, just with fewer spots. So, if Europe has a total of 80 spots on the 400-list, then only ten spots on the longlist will be available for European initiatives.
With the 400-list, equal representation is the most important goal. But on the longlist, the perceived quality of the nominees takes precedence. In practice, this means that you won’t make it to the longlist just because you were the only nominee in a specific designation; you must be truly worthy. It also means that if there are two outstanding nominees from the same category (meaning one would normally be removed), and there is a gap or very weak candidate in another category, we do allow ourselves, on rare occasions, to give that spot to the other outstanding nominee. Put simply, we allow ourselves the freedom to be a little bit more flexible at this stage than in the beginning.
When we have a draft longlist, the nominations team will contact the nominees directly to ask for more information. At this stage, we have a solid enough idea of the merits of an
initiative and now we want to understand their own views on their work. We ask things like what they aim to achieve, what they would do if they won the prize, and what scientific or practical backing their claims of success have, among others.
The information we collect about each nominee is compiled into a short internal document, which is designed to explain what problems the nominee is trying to solve, how the nominee is proposing to achieve their goals, and the extent of their potential impact. This information helps us determine whether an initiative should remain on the longlist.
When the longlist is complete, we present it to the Foundation’s prize committee, which consists of the jury co-chairs and the chair of the Foundation’s board.
The nominations team asks the prize committee whether, given the information we have at this stage, the committee can see any reason why an initiative should not be on the longlist. If the answer is yes, then we’ll make changes until the committee and the nominations team firmly agree and the longlist of roughly 50 initiatives is considered confirmed. This is a crucial step, as it is the first moment in which different sets of eyes will review the work of the nominations team. It is a moment that marks a nominee as an initiative of interest to the Foundation.
The shortlist
After confirming the longlist and receiving feedback from the prize committee, the nominations team narrows down the initiatives to ten exceptional initiatives – the draft shortlist. The list of ten still has a consolidated distribution matrix, to ensure a good geographic and sectoral spread. But as with the longlist, quality is put first. This works well, since we are very strict with the representation at the beginning of the evaluation process. However, in some years it can mean that one part of the world has no initiative on the shortlist, or that a particular part of the food system gets more represented than another. This is fine with us, as long as it fluctuates every year so that, over time, we fulfill our goal to represent the whole world and all parts of the food system. The nominations team will then share with the prize committee their tentative top ten together, with all documentation compiled thus far, and the question, “Is every nominee on this list worthy of being on the Food Planet Prize shortlist?”
If any disagreement pops up, the same applies as for the longlist. The prize committee and the nominations team must completely agree on the list before we move on to the next step.
When there is agreement about the shortlist, we proceed with the evaluation process by commissioning one or two expert reviews of each initiative. In the case where a scientific review is needed, we hire a leading academic expert in the relevant field. If we need a
practical expert opinion, we hire the best person we can find on a case-by-case basis. The identity of our expert reviewers is kept secret, and all communication between the expert and the initiative is carried out through our nominations team to ensure full integrity of the evaluation. The academic expert will look at the scientific evidence for the claims made by the nominee and present a personal judgment of the quality of the work and the team behind it. An example of when we might hire a practical expert is when a nominee is a for-profit company, and we would usually seek out someone who has either experience doing business in a similar way, or running companies of a similar kind but in a different field, or in some cases people who are used to assessing other companies for potential funding. These experts produce a review that serves as a reality check on the likelihood of success of the initiative and the format chosen to run it. In some cases, we do both kinds of reviews.
On top of this, we commission Ernst & Young to conduct a full due diligence and compliance report on each nominee. This is a way for us to make sure that the organization and the people behind it are suitable for receiving the kind of money that the prize awards, and to ensure as much as possible that the nominee acts in a way the Foundation can stand behind.
Lastly, we commission an investigative journalist and a photographer to visit each shortlisted nominee to produce a long-form reportage about what they do. This is not a fluffy inflight magazine feel-good article, but a very important part of our process where we get an unbiased and curious individual on the ground, asking the right but sometimes difficult questions and sharing insights about the context in which the initiative operates.
The final stage
When the full set of material has been compiled, we pass share it with the prize committee with a new question, “Is each one of these nominees a worthy winner of the Food Planet Prize?”
If the answer is no, the nominee cannot proceed and will be removed from the running. At this stage we do not rotate in any new nominees in to fill gaps. We aim for up to ten shortlisted initiatives to be presented to the jury, but in most years we end up with fewer than that. When the prize committee has made its decision, the remaining nominees and all their documentation are shared with the board and they are asked the same question: “Is each one of these nominees a worthy winner of the Food Planet Prize?”
Why do we also ask the Foundation’s board this question? It is because of the way the rules governing our activities are structured. Only the board can formally decide a winner of the prize, and if the board already knows that they – for some reason – cannot approve a
shortlisted nominee, we don’t want to present that nominee to the jury and risk wasting everyone’s time.
When the board has approved the final shortlist, the material is sent to the Food Planet Prize jury. This is our final check where we get to view our potential winners through the perspectives and experiences of this very diverse group of skilled people. Every preceding stage has been about us trying to figure out which ideas have the greatest potential according to the purpose of the Foundation. The next step involves us trusting others to be collectively smarter and wiser than us in determining which initiatives can make the biggest difference to the food planet.
Just as the nominees have been selected to represent different parts of the world and the entire food system, we try to do the same with the jury. We have an equal split between those working with the food system in theory (academia, policy, etc.) and in practice (farmers and distributors). It is unique in a process like this to have the vote of, for example, Johan Rockström (one of the world’s foremost climate scientists) weighed equally as the opinion of a vegetable farmer, or a winemaker. We conduct three jury meetings, two online and one in person in Stockholm. As a prelude to this last meeting, the shortlisted initiatives each have a few minutes to present to the jury, sharing why they believe they should win and answering remaining questions.
The final jury meeting is held onsite in Stockholm on the day when the winner is announced, and at the end of it we hold a vote where we ask all jurors one simple question: “Which of these nominees do you personally believe the most in?” We do not ask them to interpret the purpose of the Foundation, or to worry too much about how they think we would want them to vote. If the nominations team and the Foundation have done their job well, the jury should not even have to think about such practicalities, but really only answer that simple question, allowing them to provide their personal perspective.
After the vote has been conducted, the result is presented to the board as a recommendation. You might see the board’s official choice of winner as a simple formality, since they have already pre-approved the shortlisted initiatives as worthy winners. But legally speaking, the board must accept the recommendation and decide on the winner, and each board member is personally responsible for their decision. This is why this 13-month process of finding the best possible winner is always exciting, all the way to the very last day.inding the best possible winner is always very exciting, all the way to the very last day.
