If only our food could talk

Misaligned incentives and massive opportunity in the global food system

Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?

If the global food system were a country, it would be the 2nd largest emitter, behind only China, and would contribute more to climate change than the US, India, and the EU, combined (Our World in Data, Project Drawdown).

Over nearly a decade working across the food value chain, I've come to believe that many of the hurdles we face when trying to unlock this 6 trillion dollar opportunity stem from lack of coordination among supply chain actors.

Poor information capture and flow along the chain from the farm to your mouth (or trashcan) and back leads to wildly conflicting worldviews and incentives among stakeholders that would mutually benefit from being on the same page. This lack of visibility, feedback, and sharing leaves the industry stuck at a "local maximum," where most things work ok, but consumer satisfaction and nutrition are are much lower than they could be and emissions are much higher than they should be.

If only our food could talk as it traveled from farm to fork.

In order to successfully introduce new technologies into the value chain, we need to deeply understand how it works. In the next several weeks, I'll be sharing hard-won stories, insights, and recommendations gained from living and working, hands-on, with suppliers, distributors, retailers, and consumers across three continents.

We’ll travel from smallholder coffee farms in the mountains of Colombia, to a banana ship docked in Costa Rica, to the produce section of one of Europe's largest retailers, and touch on:

Written so far:

• Why many suppliers claim that their best customer is the trashcan

• How the overall disconnect leads to an absurd amount of value being left on the table for upstream actors like fertilizer, seed, and wax companies

• How to reduce a pineapple's carbon footprint by >20% by aligning the value chain around the best knowledge of the consumer

Coming soon:

• Why product management in this environment is more like being Sherlock Holmes than drinking from the data firehose

• What it takes to connect the coffee supply chain: coffee farmers who drink Nescafe and others who don’t know what roasted beans look like

• How billions of dollars have been invested in food waste reduction but nearly nobody knows the specific causes of produce waste

• And more…

My goal is to sharpen & challenge my own thinking, start a conversation with sustainability & Agtech veterans, and set the stage for talented folks who might want to work on these issues but aren’t yet familiar with the idiosyncrasies and counterintuitive dynamics of the food system.