From the Desk of the CEO: October 2025

When Trade Depends on Trust: What Eight Journalists Taught Us About Sustainability

Imagine spending five days showing your work to skeptics. Not hostile critics, but professionals whose job is to evaluate whether American food production meets the standards their readers care about. No press kit or PowerPoint deck. Just farms, fisheries, and food manufacturers opening their doors.

That’s exactly what happened last month when Food Export-Northeast hosted eight European Union journalists for a tour of New England. The exercise was straightforward: demonstrate, don’t declare. The stakes? Market access for hundreds of small- and mid-sized U.S. exporters who can’t afford to be shut out by sustainability perception gaps. 

The European Union is the fourth-largest destination for U.S. agricultural exports, but packaging requirements, labeling standards, and questions about American production practices have become genuine obstacles. The tour was a strategic opportunity for us to showcase the value of U.S. food and agricultural products.

Five Days, Fourteen Operations

Fourteen operations across Maine and Massachusetts. Five days. No scripted messaging.

Maine Commissioner of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Amanda Beal was direct as she spoke to the group: “Everybody eats, right? Including our producers, who focus on healthy soils and look at practices to make our farms more resilient and reduce our climate impact.”

The journalists watched a worker-owned cooperative process organic soybeans into tempeh. They pulled lobster traps aboard a working boat in Cape Elizabeth, toured (and tasted) with the Allagash Brewing team, which uses Maine-grown grains. They harvested cranberries in hip waders at a Massachusetts cranberry bog.

At Tufts University, journalists participated in a sustainability panel with state agriculture and marine fisheries leaders. Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources Ashley Randle reinforced state-level commitment. “Many of our programs are partnership efforts through cooperative agreements or grant funding. Our commitment to those programs is not changing at the state level,” she said.

The pattern across all 14 stops: direct access to how American producers actually operate.

The Case for Transparency

This is exactly what trade promotion should look like in 2025. Transparency builds trust. Trust opens markets. The numbers back this up—sustainability credentials increasingly determine market access in Europe, and buyers from Asia to the Middle East consistently cite sustainable practices in their sourcing decisions.

American producers are already incorporating these practices. Precision agriculture, renewable energy integration, regenerative grazing, water conservation, waste reduction—these aren’t aspirations, they’re current operations. We’re not asking farmers and processors to become something they’re not. We’re asking them to show what they already are.

The journalist tour was proof that reality speaks for itself.

• Family farms preserving land for the next generation.
• Small businesses innovating to cut waste.
• Communities investing in long-term resilience rather than short-term extraction.

Food Export’s role here is straightforward: connect the dots. Help U.S. suppliers tell their sustainability story to international buyers who are actively looking for it. Make sure that the innovations happening in Blue Ox Malthouse in Maine or CommonWealth Kitchens in Boston reach procurement teams in Brussels and buyers in Singapore.

This alignment isn’t just good citizenship; it’s a competitive advantage. When sustainability becomes part of U.S. food and agricultural products’ value proposition, we win ethically and economically.

The Reality Check

Let’s be honest about what this tour addresses – the recognition that we have a perception problem costing us market share.

Eight journalists touring 14 operations is a drop in the ocean. Europe has hundreds of thousands of food buyers, millions of consumers, and regulatory frameworks that weren’t designed with American exporters in mind. One tour doesn’t change labeling requirements. It doesn’t resolve the fundamental tension between U.S. and EU regulatory approaches. It doesn’t eliminate the cost barriers that small exporters face when trying to meet sustainability certification demands.

What We Learned

Our task is not to soften one view with the other, but to weigh them both clearly.

The tour mattered because demonstration works better than declaration. Journalists who see a regenerative sea farm understand sustainability far differently than those who simply read a white paper. That’s real value. However, it also revealed the scale of the challenge in building trust with EU buyers. There, sustainability credentials aren’t nice-to-haves anymore; they’re the key to success.

This is where Food Export’s structure becomes useful. We’re built for this kind of collaboration as a partnership between state agencies and the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. We can weave sustainability into our existing network, ensuring that knowledge and best practices flow between producers and international buyers.

But, demonstration requires infrastructure and state-level commitment, as we saw from Commissioners Beal and Randle, organizations willing to coordinate complex tours and maintain international media relationships, and producers willing to open their operations to scrutiny.

The future of trade won’t be measured by volume alone. It will be measured by the resilience of our supply chains, the transparency of our practices, and the trust we build with global consumers. Sustainability isn’t a constraint on growth—it’s increasingly the prerequisite for growth.

Eight journalists went home with stories to tell. Food Export will keep building these bridges, connecting U.S. suppliers with markets where sustainability matters. Because this is about more than market access—it’s about ensuring that American agriculture continues to stand for quality, innovation, and stewardship in the minds of global buyers who determine whether our products reach their markets.

What comes next is up to all of us.

Your Input Matters

What sustainability practices are you most proud of in your operation? What barriers do you face in communicating them to international buyers? Share your experience—it helps us build better programs and more effective connections.

Brendan Wilson 

CEO, Food Export-Midwest & Food Export-Northeast

Your Input Matters: If there is a topic you wish for me to discuss in this space, let me know. You can reach me at info@foodexport.org. Just put Attn: Brendan Wilson in the subject line.