Effective MSD is all about catalyzing the market system and its actors to value behaviors that both serve their business interests and provide benefits back to society. How market systems value safe and nutritious food can be tricky. As the blog points out, even in wealthy countries, the market systems’ journey to focusing on nutrition as a central value proposition of food products included a long phase where efficiency and quality assurance were the dominant factors influencing decision-making — often at the expense of nutrition. While that phase generated highly affordable food and reduced hunger in general, it also tended to reduce the nutritional value of many diets. As MSD practitioners have realized that market systems are always managing competing interests and forces, projects must catalyze a local, context-specific change process that values food safety and nutrition from the start. From an MSD perspective, any change process must evolve internally to the local system, as opposed to a project-driven process, for the value of safety and nutrition to emerge in a way so that market actors perceive it is in their interest to compete on the quality and nutrition of their products.
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