When I first started The Job Feed, I thought I was mostly solving a visibility problem.
Sustainable food jobs existed. They were just hard to find.
That was true, but it was only part of the story.
After curating opportunities across the sustainable food sector for over 3 years, growing the newsletter to more than 15,000 subscribers, building a LinkedIn community of nearly 20,000 followers, organizing more than 1,000 organizations in our guide, and structuring more than 1,500 job records behind the scenes, I’ve come to see the deeper issue more clearly:
The sustainable food field does not just need more job postings.
It needs better workforce data.
Right now, the talent ecosystem is fragmented. The same kind of work can show up under many different titles. Similar jobs may be described with very different language. Important skills may be buried in long job descriptions. Emerging fields like alternative proteins, food waste, regenerative agriculture, nutrition security, food systems data, and climate-smart agriculture often cut across traditional categories.
That makes it harder for job seekers to search well.
It also makes it harder for employers to communicate clearly, for educators to prepare students, for funders to understand field-level gaps, and for organizations to see where talent is actually needed.
This is something I care about because my background sits at the intersection of food systems, sustainability, informatics, and career development. Before building The Job Feed, I worked on food data projects, ontology and knowledge graph work, sustainability data, government food data systems, and as a career coach. Those experiences taught me that how we structure information shapes what people can see, understand, and do.
The same is true for careers.
If every role is treated as an isolated posting, we miss the bigger patterns.
We miss which skills are showing up again and again. We miss which organization types are hiring. We miss how roles connect across food science, climate, agriculture, policy, public health, communications, operations, and data. We miss where entry-level pathways are strong — and where they are missing. We miss where the field is growing but the language has not yet stabilized.
That is why The Job Feed has been evolving from a newsletter and job board into something more structured.
We still curate jobs because people need actual opportunities. But behind the scenes, we are also paying attention to categories, functions, experience levels, organizations, skill signals, and emerging themes across the sustainable food economy.
For example, a role might be primarily about food waste, but sit within operations. A public health role might focus on nutrition security. A climate role might require agriculture or supply chain knowledge. A corporate sustainability role might require food industry context. A research role might depend on data management, informatics, or technical communication.
Without better structure, those connections are easy to miss.
With better structure, the same information becomes more useful.
A job seeker can see where their skills fit. An employer can reach more aligned candidates. An educator can understand what students need to learn. A funder can see where capacity is missing. A field-building organization can better understand the talent ecosystem it is trying to strengthen.
I’m still learning how to build this well.
One of the biggest lessons so far is that workforce data cannot be purely technical. It has to stay connected to real people and real decisions. A perfect taxonomy is not useful if job seekers do not recognize themselves in it. A sophisticated data model is not useful if employers cannot communicate their needs more clearly. A talent map is not useful if it does not help someone take the next step.
That is the balance I am trying to build into The Job Feed.
The long-term vision is not just to collect sustainable food jobs. It is to help make sense of the sustainable food talent ecosystem: the roles, skills, organizations, pathways, and market signals that shape this field.
Because the sustainable food transition will require more than passion. It will require coordination, capacity, and clearer pathways for people to contribute.
Better workforce data will not solve everything.
But it can help more people see where they fit, and help the field understand what it needs next.
Thanks for being here.
~ Emily @ The Job Feed