Sustainability challenges such as food security are global in scale yet experienced and responded to locally. To address sustainability challenges requires businesses to develop locally relevant and globally scalable innovations. MNEs are uniquely positioned to innovate for sustainability. MNEs recognize the contribution of locally relevant innovations, but they often struggle to recognize where the most promising solutions lie. One way to enable MNEs to recognize locally relevant innovations is crowdsourcing. However, it is difficult for MNEs to crowdsource sustainability innovations due to limited attentional resources and the tradeoff between local relevance and global scalability. To investigate this topic, we conducted a qualitative study of Thought for Food (TFF) – a crowdsourcing innovation platform for sustainable food and agriculture. We found that, through crowdsourcing, MNEs find a way to generate multiple new and breakthrough ideas. However, they struggle to successfully integrate these ideas into their innovation path. This research contributes to the literature by 1) explaining the contradictory role of crowdsourcing platforms for MNEs to identify locally relevant sustainability innovations and 2) articulating the cross-scale linkages between the local and the global for sustainable development.