When Every Stakeholder Has a Veto

A grower, a packer, a retailer, and a material scientist walk into a room. They agree on the problem. They cannot agree on who fixes it.

That is the coordination problem in fresh produce packaging, stated plainly. Sustainable packaging innovation does not stall because the science is missing. It stalls because more than a dozen distinct stakeholders, sales, marketing, operations, quality, finance, sustainability, equipment partners, regulators, retailers, logistics, production teams, can each effectively veto an innovation by refusing to accommodate it. None of them can mandate its adoption. The result is a system in which everyone agrees change is necessary and no one is positioned to drive it.

In December 2025, the Foundation for Fresh Produce, with funding from the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service and partnership from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research and Clemson University, set out to do something different. Rather than commission another listening session, run another survey, or produce another white paper that organizations would file and not implement, they convened the people who live the problem and gave them a methodology to map it together.

TOTEM was retained to design the engagement and facilitate the day. What follows is a case study in what that work looked like, why we built it the way we did, and what the industry produced when given the right shape of room.

The wrong shape of room

The conventional approach to a question this large is well established. An association commissions a study. A research firm interviews stakeholders one at a time. The findings are synthesized, the report is published, the recommendations are filed. Each interview captures one perspective in isolation. The synthesis happens in a third party's deck. The stakeholders who must collaborate to implement anything never sit in the same room.

This approach has its uses, but it is structurally unsuited to a coordination problem. The output of a survey is a set of opinions. The output of a coordination problem is alignment, and alignment cannot be produced by aggregating opinions collected separately. It has to be built between people, in real time, with the friction visible.

The fresh produce packaging question is, at its core, a coordination problem. Material scientists need to know what cold chain and pack-house conditions their innovations must survive. Grower-shippers need to know whether retailers will commit to volume that justifies investment. Retailers need to know whether store-level execution is realistic. Each constituency holds knowledge the others lack. None of them can answer the central question, will this work in practice, by themselves.

So we designed a different room.

The methodology

The format we chose was an Innovation Event Storm, a facilitation methodology adapted from domain-driven design and event storming, originally developed in software engineering as a way to build shared understanding of complex systems across teams that did not share vocabulary. It has properties that translate cleanly into multistakeholder industry contexts. Participants work on a shared visual canvas. They use color-coded categories to surface different kinds of insight: events that happen at each stage, actors who participate, hotspots where the system breaks, decisions that determine whether things move, opportunities for innovation, actions to pursue. The method does not constrain creativity. It organizes it.

What participants saw on the day was a structured, energetic working session. What we did before the day was the work that made the structure honest.

The pre-event work

Weeks before the event, our team interviewed stakeholders across the value chain to understand what the actual frictions looked like in practice. We mapped the lifecycle, drafted three different conceptual approaches to the day, tore them apart, rebuilt them, and iterated until we had a structure that honored the complexity without collapsing under it. We held multiple geometries of the problem at once, packaging viewed through the lens of cold chain, through the lens of regulation, through the lens of consumer behavior, through the lens of capital allocation, and designed the day so that participants would move between those views deliberately.

In parallel, we worked with the convening organizations on the outreach: identifying the right participants, educating them on the methodology, and explaining why their particular perspective was needed in the room. This is unglamorous work. It is also the difference between a workshop and a working session.

The day

The session was structured around four phases of the packaging lifecycle, each anchored to a stage where decisions get made and innovations succeed or fail.

Participants worked in rotating groups across the four phases, each rotation building on the work of the previous one. What one group identified as a minor friction, another would recognize as a critical barrier. What seemed obvious from a grower's vantage point would reveal hidden complexity from a retailer's. The rotation forced perspectives into conversation that rarely meet at industry conferences, where the format tends to keep buyer and seller, innovator and operator, in adjacent but separate rooms.

What surfaced

The substantive findings of the work are documented in The Adoption Challenge, the report published by the Foundation for Fresh Produce in early 2026. We are not going to repeat that report here. What we want to surface is what happened in the room, and what the structure of the day produced that other formats do not.

Three findings emerged repeatedly across all four phases, surfacing independently in different rotations before participants explicitly named them. That convergence is itself a signal. When the same insight emerges from groups working on different parts of the lifecycle, without prompting, the insight is real.

Universal solutions rarely work

Berries, leafy greens, tree fruit, and root vegetables have fundamentally different cold chain protocols, shelf-life windows, and handling requirements. A solution optimized for apples will likely fail for strawberries. Innovations must either accommodate this variation deliberately or target a specific commodity rather than position themselves as universal. This is not a constraint on innovation; it is a design input innovators frequently underestimate.

Tertiary packaging is the invisible majority

Most sustainability conversations focus on what consumers see: clamshells, bags, wraps. By weight, the majority of packaging in fresh produce supply chains never reaches a consumer. Pallets, corner boards, strapping, slip sheets, stretch wrap. Innovation here requires no consumer behavior change and can deliver immediate cost reduction, yet it receives a fraction of the attention. Several of these tertiary materials face active regulatory pressure under PPWR and EPR frameworks while others are exempt, which means the highest-leverage opportunities for innovation are concentrated in materials almost no one is talking about.

Operational fit beats technical performance

The single insight that surfaced across all four phases, in different rotations, from different stakeholder perspectives: the question that determines whether a packaging innovation gets adopted is not whether it works in a lab. It is whether it works on existing machinery, in existing workflows, with existing staffing, without requiring extensive retraining. Innovations that minimize the delta between current state and future state get adopted. Innovations that require extensive retrofitting do not, regardless of technical merit.

Why this shape of room worked

One of the metrics we watch closely is engagement curve. Most working sessions show an attendance pattern that drops steadily over the day. People drift, take calls, leave early. The Innovation Event Storm produced something different. The majority of participants were still actively engaged at the close, three hours after the structured work began. Participants wrote afterward that they had never experienced a format that produced this kind of cross-value-chain understanding in a single session.

The reason, we believe, is structural. The event storming format does three things that conventional formats do not. It puts buyers, sellers, operators, and innovators on equal footing, which neutralizes the commercial tension that normally constrains what gets said in mixed company. It uses a visual canvas as the primary artifact, which means the work is visible to everyone simultaneously and no participant can quietly hold back insight. And it rotates groups deliberately, which means every participant ends the day having encountered perspectives they would not have surfaced in their own organization.

What comes next

The Innovation in Packaging program is now in its second phase. The findings from the December 2025 session are informing the application criteria, selection process, and program design for a multi-year initiative. The methodology that produced the findings is itself becoming part of how the convening organizations approach future industry-scale collaboration. That is the outcome we work toward: not a one-time event, but a way of working that continues after we step back.

The pattern transfers beyond packaging. Any industry-scale problem where multiple stakeholders hold partial knowledge, where coordination is the bottleneck rather than capability, where the question is not whether innovation is possible but whether adoption can be aligned, can be addressed with this approach. The specific subject changes. The shape of the room does not.