Ali Morpeth is cofounder at Planeatry Alliance, a UK-based food system consultancy bridging the gap between human and planetary health.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of AgFunderNews.
The conversation about healthy and sustainable diets has long been framed downstream around consumer choice, product reformulation and portfolio shifts. But knowledge of how the food system actually operates paints a somewhat different reality.
Food production has always been the foundation of healthy diets. It determines what food is available, affordable and culturally normal long before it reaches a meal on our plates. This has always been true, but climate, cost and capacity pressures across the value chain are now exposing these interdependencies in ways that are becoming increasingly visible.
In our latest Food System Barometer, drawing on interviews with senior leaders across farming, retail, cities, investment, nutrition and sustainability, one message came through unanimously: the system is under strain. Climate volatility, rising input costs, labor constraints and erosion of public trust are already shaping day-to-day decisions across the food economy.
What is lagging is not ambition – from primary producers or from citizens – but a system still designed to optimize for throughput, efficiency and short-term margins, rather than long-term resilience, health and environmental outcomes.
As Guy Singh-Watson, founder of Riverford, told us: “A lot of people recognize that the change has arrived sooner than we thought, and in a more obvious way than we expected.”
Acceleration really matters. When pressure builds faster than the incentives, contracts and policies that govern production, risk concentrates rather than disappearing.
An extractive system is meeting its limits
Across interviews, leaders consistently described the food system currently optimized for volume and efficiency increasingly benign expected to deliver resilience, nutritional quality, environmental protection and social value. This tension is not limited to food production, but is structurally reinforced through contracts, capital flows and policy frameworks.
It makes the underlying issues structural. The food system has been built around extractive logic even as expectations are shifting towards regeneration, fairness and long-term value creation. Farmers, in particular, are being asked to restore soils, protect biodiversity, cut emissions and support healthier diets – often without stable price signals, long-term demand or coherent policy alignment.
From a system perspective, this might be understood as a market failure. Guy Singh-Watson said: “I would describe our food and farming system as an example of market failure.”
One of the tensions our interviewees told us they are grappling with is rational caution. Producers and businesses hesitate not because they doubt the direction of travel, but because the downside risks of moving first remain disproportionately high.
Despite this, examples exist that show a different model is possible. Riverford itself demonstrates that commercial success can coexist with farming with nature and fair treatment of growers. But these models remain the exception, not the rule – precisely because the wider system does not yet reward them at scale.
Supply fragility is becoming a binding constraint – for diets as well as markets
One of the clearest signals from the Barometer is that supply fragility is emerging as a decisive bottleneck. Climate shocks, labor shortages and financial pressure are exposing the limits of production systems optimized for efficiency rather than resilience.
This fragility matters not only for business continuity, but for healthy diets, public health and prosperous populations too. When supply becomes unstable, diversity narrows, prices rise and nutritional quality is often the first casualty. Diet outcomes are quietly undermined not just at the point of choice, but at the point of production.
Organizations across the food system are setting targets on health, climate and sustainability. But without secure, resilient supply, ambition collapses. Procurement strategies, portfolio commitments and dietary goals all depend on farmers being able – and willing – to produce differently over the long term.
Policy has begun to acknowledge this reality. The UK’s Farming Profitability Review framed food security as national security. Minette Batters wrote: “Food security is national security. That principle now needs to be implemented and embedded through a long-term plan for farming and food production alongside nature recovery.”
The principle is sound. But leaders were clear that implementation remains fragmented, leaving producers exposed to volatility while being asked to deliver systemic outcomes.
Health is embedded in the production system
Health is still too often treated as a downstream issue shaped by consumer choice, reformulation or education. From a systems perspective, health is shaped much earlier.
What gets grown. How diverse farming systems are. Whether supply chains prioritize resilience or extraction. These upstream decisions determine the availability, affordability and nutritional quality of food at scale.
This is why health is deeply connected to production systems. Without greater coherence across health, sustainability and farming policy, health targets risk remaining aspirational – disconnected from the procurement models, contracts and support structures that determine what farmers can realistically produce.
Momentum is real – but fragile
The Barometer does not suggest the system is standing still. Momentum is clearly building where incentives, data and decision-making authority align. Digital tools are improving visibility of nutritional and environmental performance. Some procurement models are beginning to reward lower-impact production. Portfolio diversification is moving from narrative commitments into operational experimentation.
But progress remains fragile where deeper structural change is required. Agricultural support systems, long-term demand signals and policy implementation continue to lag behind ambition. These are foundational challenges.
Leaders did not describe these gaps as insurmountable, but as warning signals. Without clearer incentives, stronger coordination and confidence in long-term direction, today’s progress will struggle to scale.
Trust is now a production issue
Another striking signal is the role of trust. Once treated primarily as a reputational concern, trust is now shaping what organisations feel able to do – and what the value chain feels safe investing in.
For producers, trust is embedded in contracts, pricing, risk-sharing and the credibility of long-term commitments. Without confidence that markets and policies will hold, change becomes a gamble.
This is why fairness keeps surfacing as a system condition, rather than an add-on. Fairness for farmers, for land, for biodiversity and for people is operationally necessary for a food system that lasts.
The next phase is system readiness
The transition to healthier, more sustainable diets is not constrained by a lack of solutions. The constraint is readiness. Readiness of markets to reward resilience. Readiness of policy to provide consistent, long-term direction. Readiness of supply chains to share risk rather than offload it. Readiness of capital to invest beyond pilots and proof-of-concepts.
Whether progress accelerates depends on whether the system around it adapts fast enough to support what is already underway.
The full report is available here.
