Rainbow bagels, unicorn food and milkshakes as big as a person’s head are so yesterday. What will be on plates over the next 12 months? As 2018 arrives, culinary leaders at Sodexo, the leader in Quality of Life Services, have named their food trends for the year. Kevin Cecilio, Sodexo’s senior director, culinary innovations, believes these five trends will be on the table over the next 12 months.

With food waste from local manufacturing threatening to overwhelm available waste treatment capacity in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the City has begun a project to convert that waste to energy. Tetra Tech is leading the design phase of a $38-million waste-to-energy biodigester as part of the city’s goal of using 100-percent renewable energy to power city buildings by 2025. Biodigesters combine organic waste with microorganisms in air-tight tanks, creating a biogas that produces energy to power and heat buildings.

For purpose-driven companies, these are interesting times. We have always believed that our mission at Salesforce is to improve the state of the world. In fact, studies show that purpose is a number one driver behind business success. Brand perception, consumer loyalty, employee retention and stakeholder optimism are all tied to how a company actson its purpose.

Brown-Forman Corporation received a perfect score of 100 percent on the 2018 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), a national benchmarking survey and report on corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ workplace equality, administered by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Brown-Forman joins the ranks of 609 major U.S. businesses which also earned top marks this year. This is the eighth consecutive year Brown-Forman has received a perfect score.

Last week the team went to the EDIE Sustainability Awards 2018. We were proud to be a finalist for the employee engagement and behavioural change category for our Sustainable September campaign. Unfortunately we lost out to Virgin Atlantic Airways (Congratulations to them!) but we are still very proud of the recognition and excited to continue in our progress towards our 2025 Sustainability goals as a corporation! Sharene Katsoulas, Isabel Gonzalez Jungblut, Jenny Wassenaar

Science has been around since the beginning of human civilization. It was the engine behind Aristotle’s ambitious effort to fly and even earlier than that, it helped the Babylonians fashion an understanding of time and their universe.

Volume & Velocity. Those may well be the key characteristics of developments in corporate sustainability and in sustainable investing in the year 2018.

Brown-Forman Corporation was named one of the best-managed U.S. companies in the first-ever list of well-run businesses by the Drucker Institute, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Brown-Forman ranked 37 out of 250, scoring five stars (out of five) for employee engagement and four stars (out of five) for customer satisfaction, innovation, social responsibility, and financial strength.

Recent research from Chile’s National Institute for Youth, shows that many Chilean youth from ages 15 to 29 struggle with excessive debt. Four percent of Peruvians between the ages of 15 and 19 years old carry debt; and this amount increases as they get older, of those between the ages of 20 and 24, 36% carry debt; and 55% of Peruvians aged 25 to 29 years old carry debt.

Employees from the Arrow Electronics office in Neu-Isenburg, Germany recently volunteered their time at local food bank Speisekammer. For several weeks, Arrow employees helped food bank staff transport, unpack and dispense food to the low-income families who utilize Speisekammer’s services.