Tackling the myriad sustainability challenges related to food – from the environmental impacts of food production to the health consequences of inadequate diets – requires systemic interventions that improve sustainability at local, national, and international level.

Recently, several approaches have been developed to guide systemic interventions, but due to the complexity of food systems, taking a ‘food system approach’ is often seen by practitioners and decision-makers as a daunting task requiring considerable resources. In this paper, we develop an iterative, step-based sustainable food system approach that helps navigate complexity and is flexible in its required resources, thus enabling a fast overview or a deep dive as determined by a project’s or organisation’s objectives.

Our approach combines four components: food system, sustainability, political economy analyses, and the development of transformation pathways to advance food system sustainability. The use of each component is organised into steps, involving practical methods and tools. The goal of the approach is to help practitioners and decision-makers describe and diagnose food systems to develop more coherent, effective, and context-appropriate interventions for the necessary transformations.