Systemic investing for food system transformation in Switzerland

This is the first in a series of articles about the TransCap Initiative’s systemic investing prototype aimed at transforming Switzerland’s food system.

By Dominic Hofstetter & Johannes Tschiderer

If you visit Switzerland’s spotless towns, swim in its pristine lakes, or hike along its magnificent mountain trails—as both of us routinely do—it’s hard not to be blinded by the idyllic nature of the place. Time runs differently, and the world seems at peace. And yet it isn’t.

Like any other country, Switzerland faces enormous environmental and social challenges. That’s particularly true for its food system, which produces about 50% of the food consumed inside the country—including iconic products such as cheese, chocolate, and Bircher Müesli.

Intensive farming practices that cause soil degradation, water pollution, and biodiversity loss threaten the country’s agricultural production base. The food system is the biggest driver of Switzerland’s negative environmental footprint, accounting for 25% of total impacts and 16% of the country’s domestic carbon emissions, thereby contributing to dangerous climate change.

Healthy and nutritious food remains inaccessible for too many, an untenable example of social inequity and a significant driver of the country’s healthcare costs.

And the heavy reliance on imported food raises questions about food security and the sustainability of global supply chains as well as Switzerland’s responsibility beyond its borders. In fact, the majority of the negative environmental impacts caused by the Swiss food system occur outside the country.

The need to transform Switzerland’s food system is clear to anyone looking at the trendlines. What’s less clear is what a more sustainable and just Swiss food system would look like and how, exactly, we can get there.

Funding the transition

In 2023, a group of 40 scientists released a report that offers a bold new vision for the country’s food system, along with a theory of transformation—a hypothesis for how to realize that vision. The report also sketches the contours of an intervention strategy, a set of steps different societal actors should take to create the conditions for positive systemic tipping points and thereby send the system along a transition pathway.

Central to that strategy is the need for a financial mechanism that funds this transition, such as training programs for professionals in food-related jobs, consumer education and public awareness campaigns, R&D activity for alternative protein products, and funding for farm-level transitions.

Heeding this call, the TransCap Initiative is now setting out to develop a systemic investing program capable of catalyzing the transformation of Switzerland’s food system. With the generous support of Mercator Foundation Switzerland, Fourfold Foundation, and Minerva Foundation, we will spend the next six months exploring the design of such a program and building a coalition for its implementation.

Specifically, we will sharpen the problem and solution frames, create a high-level design of a systemic investment program, develop a structuring, launch, and implementation strategy, and build a core coalition of partners/co-founders. The work will build on the analytical and strategic foundations already in place but operate with a broader aperture (in terms of the many different financial instruments needed) and with a focus on engaging private-sector actors.

Through this project, we hope to lay the groundwork for implementing a first-of-its-kind transformative investment program for national-level food systems transformation. We will pay close attention to all the innovation activity already going on in the system, aiming to build on—and, ideally, amplify—the good work already underway. We will also bring in experience and expertise from outside of Switzerland, be it from our own work on regenerative agricultural transitions or that of others in our network.

Informing broader food systems transformation

Switzerland’s challenges aren’t unique, and food systems tend to be highly interlinked and interdependent. That’s why we hope this project will enable us to uncover critical elements for a blueprint that could inform food system transformations in other countries.

If you care about the future of food and how we could fund the transformation of food systems, get in touch. We are always looking to partner with and learn from those with insight to share.

Do you want to collaborate with us?

There is an urgent need to rethink the way we deploy financial capital for transformative impact in human and natural systems. The field of systemic investing has garnered significant momentum, and now is the time to scale deep and scale out. So we invite challenge owners, systems thinkers, innovation practitioners, investment professionals, ecosystem shapers, and creative voices to join us in figuring out how to redeploy financial capital in service of a prosperous and sustainable future for all.

How is systemic investing relevant to

Foundation

...because the pots of capital operating under a philanthropic logic are orders of magnitude smaller than those operating under an investment logic, so systemic investing is a way for foundations to leverage their capital in the systems they care about.

Corporations

...because their supply chains are becoming increasingly fragile and societal expectations of business are growing. This requires companies to deploy all the tools in their finance toolbox (incl. direct investments, advanced purchase agreements, and supply-chain financing) and partner more strategically with governments, foundations, and NGOs.

Impact Investors

...because single technologies, start-ups, or social enterprises—no matter how ingenious their solutions and how brilliant their teams—are unlikely to change systems by themselves. So what matters is that these single-point solutions are synergistically nested within a broader systems change effort.

Institutional Investors

...because mainstream ESG investing doesn’t benefit places and communities at the pace, scale, and quality required, so institutional investors must channel more capital into real-economy assets in a strategic and collaborative manner.

MDBs and DFIs

...because sustainable development in a VUCA world requires portfolio approaches to systems innovation, and those need to be funded with a different investment paradigm than those dominant in development finance institutions today. And because the public sector cannot finance sustainability transitions alone, so systemic investing is a way to crowd-in private-sector capital in a smart way.

Engage with us

Which option best describes your interest in systemic investing?

Your message has been sent!
Something went wrong – try again
About

Who We Are

The TransCap Initiative is a think-and-do-tank operating at the nexus of real-economy systems change, sustainability, and finance. We operate as a multi-stakeholder alliance coordinated by a backbone team and comprised of wealth owners, innovation leaders, system thinkers, research institutes, and financial intermediaries. Our community is open to anyone committed to our cause and values.

Why We Exist

We exist to improve the way sustainable finance is purposed, designed, and managed so that money can become a transformative force in building a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive society. We believe that the key to accomplishing this vision is to inspire and enable investors to leverage the insights and tools of systems thinking and complex systems science for addressing the most pressing societal challenges of the 21st century.

What We Do

Our mission is to build the field of systemic investing. This means developing, testing, and scaling an investment logic at the intersection of systems thinking and finance. We do that by convening a multi-stakeholder alliance to develop a knowledge and innovation base, test novel concepts and approaches, and build a community of practice.

Our core ideas borrow from the disciplines of systems thinking and complex systems science, challenge-led innovation, human-centred design, new economic frameworks, and financial innovation. Our experiments are contextualised in those place-based systems that matter most for human prosperity—such as cities, landscapes, and coastal zones—as well as in value chains and other real-economy systems. We hope that our work produces knowledge and insights, methods and tools, and a self-organising community of inspired and enabled change makers.

The places and value chains we intend to transform act as centres of gravity for our work. In each of these systems, we will work with challenge owners, communities, innovators, investors, and other stakeholders to design, structure, and finance strategic investment portfolios nested within a broader systems intervention approach.

Learn More

Contact Us

TransCap Core Team
community@transformation.capital