How can we build a future-fit food system?

Nick Hughes

Mike Barry has been working at the coal face of food sustainability for several decades, first as the architect of Marks & Spencer’s pioneering Plan A strategy and most recently as co-founder of food systems consultancy Planeatry Alliance. In this week’s episode of The Small Print, Mike shares with Nick Hughes his vision for a future-fit food system in which businesses and policy makers have created healthy, sustainable food environments; high quality data is driving effective decision making; and industry collaboration is married with competitive leadership to deliver food business transformation at scale.

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Transcript

Nick Hughes: As the war in Iran sends energy prices soaring, the vulnerability of the food system to external shocks has once again been laid bare. Has the penny finally dropped for businesses and policymakers? Or are we still complacent over the need to build a food system fit for the. Mike Barry has been working at the coal face of food sustainability over several decades as the architect of Marks and Spencer’s pioneering Plan A strategy, and most recently as co founder of food systems consultancy Planetary Alliance. In this week’s episode of the Small Print, Mike joins me to share his vision for a future fit food system in which businesses and policymakers have created healthy, sustainable food environments. High quality data is driving effective decision making and industry collaboration is married with competitive leadership to deliver food business transformation at scale. Mike, welcome to the Small Print. It’s great to have you join us. I suspect lots of listeners within the food sphere will know you firstly as the architect of Marks and Spencer’s original Plan A of course, which set the benchmark, I would suggest, for food sustainability strategies. But you’ve done an awful lot of work since leaving Ms. Tell us about the current focus of your work and in particular the work you’re doing at Planetary Alliance.

Mike Barry: Nick, thank you and delighted to be with you in the audience today. And again, I won’t say too much about the Ms. Years. They’ve been sort of well explored just in terms of the context of this podcast. I mean, you know, Ms. Food system at the very heart of the business model. Plan A at the very heart of the business model. And everything I learned there was about the importance of integration, getting ownership across those commercial teams working flat out to serve the customer in very difficult, challenging marketplaces unless they’re engaged. See the business values participation get nowhere. And we can explore that in a little bit. I saw the importance of collaboration there, that no business can solve this on its own, whether it’s working with the brc, the IGD or the Consumer Goods Forum where I did some chairing work. The importance of getting collective alignment Critical importance left Ms. Six years ago, deliberately left the food fashion retail system for a few years just to do something different. Worked across the economy. Love that debate, but the gravitational pull of the food systems dragged me back from my last sprint of my career. So I was delighted to meet ali Morpeth about 15 months ago now. We formed Plantary alliance together. Ali’s an amazing nutritionist, understands the health system inside out. I bring that system to background. We think food that’s good for you is also good for the planet and vice Versa, two sides, same coin. So we spun up planetary lines together. It’s been flying, really going well and I think that’s because of this nexus of food to the individual, food to the planet. It’s because we’re focusing in on the food environment, space in which you make different choices. So as much as we need to do in the production end of things in the field, in forests, fisheries, around the world, we, we need to engage people in better choice making. And so much of that’s in the control and gift of policymakers and commercial leaders. And the final thing to say as introduction, I also chair my local charity, green charity Greener Henley, which is about making this accessible to the wider populace. So many people are not going to come to this discussion through the debate about net zero science based targets are 20, 41.5 degrees or not. They want to know what it means for their local community. So again, we’re part of a resilience movement across the uk, hundreds if not thousands of communities building a bottom up approach to every aspect of a sustainable, healthy future, including a food system as well.

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Nick Hughes: Excellent. Well, that’s a nice intro and I like the fact you started with a very sort of positive bent there and feels solutions focused. And it’s easy to be doom and gloom about the food system, isn’t it? Because we hear a lot of commentary on how the food system is broken and I think footprint listeners are pretty well versed in the issues we face around food insecurity, diet related ill health, negative environmental impact. We all know them and the list goes on. So rather than start by interrogating the problems again, let’s perhaps flip that on its head and ask you, what does a vision for a future fit food system look like in your eyes?

Mike Barry: I love that question, Nick. And I love that we start in a very positive place because again, if we learn from a couple of other sectors that have gone through some form of sustainability induced transformation through the car system and the power system, they’ve got a really simple narrative, certainly to macro level, fossil fuels, to renewables, diesel to electric. Our system, the food system does not have the simplicity of that narrative. It’s just too complicated to boil down to it literally one second sound bite. But I think we can start to flesh out in large part because of the work work of the Atlantic Commission last year, what a food system of the future could look like. Starting with health. You know, we want a food system that promotes health, not undermines it, that helps cure people, not just of physical ailments, but mental ailment. As well brings them joy, happiness and connection in their lives systemically. Very obviously, we need to live within the planetary boundaries that we’ve got. Not, not just live within them, but regenerate a world that has been stripped very significantly bare by the food system. We can talk about those problems later, but I think there’s a huge opportunity to regenerate the natural ecosystems that we all depend upon much for food. I think one of the great things I saw from Lancet was this provocation that the future food system needs to be a just food system for the hundreds of millions of farmers. Small halts and works have worked flat out behind the scenes to deliver for us. And I want to see a food system that shares risk and reward much more equitably down value chains. And it doesn’t at this moment in time. Again, we’ll talk about that later. But I believe fundamentally we can improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people through just food system. And that includes also making a healthy and sustainable diet accessible to the many, not the few. You know, education price should not be a barrier to participation. So I want something that’s positively accessible to everybody. And my final point, and again, very pertinent today, secure and resilience. We need a food system that is much more diverse. It doesn’t have single points of failure. It is a system that can bend but not be broken by extreme weather, by extreme politics that we’re seeing now and into the future. That’s my ambition for the food system of the future.

Nick Hughes: Yeah. And absolutely we’ll come on to get it to the weeds of that resilience point, certainly through the lens of both businesses and policymakers in due course. So that’s the vision for the future fit food system. You hinted that perhaps we’re not too far down the road to achieving that vision just yet. Where are we in your view?

Mike Barry: Well, I’m a great believer in unvarnished truth. I’m excited. Even at the age of nearly 59, I’m really excited about the future. But we won’t get there unless we face into some unpalatable truths and we solve them. So we’ve got many short term challenges in the food system at the moment. Everything from the problems we’ve had with inheritance tax for farmers in recent times, the challenge of cost of living crisis, the challenge of supply chain dislocation. There are a million reasons why we can all just put our head down and say, let’s come back and have this discussion a year or two’s time. We could have had that narrative for the last five years. We can have it for the next 10, 15 years. We’ve got to face into the fact that we can deliver short term food on people’s plates today and prepare for a different future. We’ve got to face into the impact of poor diet. The economic cost of the human cost of today’s system on individuals and society as a whole is immense, growing. We’re a nation that doesn’t have a spare pound and yet we’re costing, with some estimates saying that we’re costing the UK economy 250 billion a year with poor health outcomes, lost productivity as well as poor health. The next challenge I’ve already mentioned, but I’ll just hammer home, you lack that definitional simplicity of diesel to electric. And we’ve got to keep working hard to frame a narrative that is simpler for core business leaders and politicians to engage with and take us on the journey. We are increasingly consolidating the food system which is actually making it less resilient. I would suggest we’ve got too many single points of failure. We need actually a more diverse system. We have a highly centralized approach to policy setting in the UK, everything sort of flows through not just the department in London, but the front door of number 10, many other countries. I see it’s solved at a city level, a regional level, even a local level. Food system has, you know, its roots in those communities. We don’t have that capacity in the UK at all. So, you know, lots of challenges and I guess the final thing. Two thoughts, two final thoughts. I think we’re very complacent. You know, we are a food system that survived the pandemic and we’re a food system that went through the Ukraine crisis. We’ve been through horse meat and genetic modification of map counties in the past and each time we thought here is a crisis that could bring us to our knees. We’ve got through them, through the brilliant hard work of many individuals across our system and many companies. I just don’t think we should be complacent about what’s coming next. It is not like those single issues that you could firefight. This is a poly crisis that we’re facing to. And of course we’ve got a generation of leaders and I include myself in this, not being steeped in systems thinking. We’ve, we’re very tactical. We deal with the here and now. We deal with the narrowness of the food system and not its interaction with the adjacent health system or technology system or rural communities. We don’t have that wider systems debate. So they’re all the reasons and we need to first into them why we’re struggling to get traction, smoke, determine.

Nick Hughes: Okay, lots to unpick there. And I want to firstly come back to this point about complacency, actually, because I suppose we’re looking at complacency through different stakeholder lenses, through the policy lens, business lens, investor, community as well. Let’s start with businesses because clearly they are sort of footprint’s core audience. We’re speaking at a time when conflict in the Middle east is pushing up the cost of energy, which itself is a huge part of the cost base for food businesses. Before you even get in to the ripple effect on the cost of key inputs like fertilizer, packaging, et cetera. And you alluded to this, Mike. I feel like I asked this question after every shock to the system, whether it’s Covid, whether it’s the war in Ukraine, is this a tipping point moment? Do you feel, is there recognition now within boardrooms that legacy business models built on intensive agriculture, cheap calories, cheap labor, hyper efficient logistics lack resilience in a world shaped by conflict, climate extremes and all those other forces pushing against the food system? Or are we still complacent?

Mike Barry: And the answer, Nick, is some and some because I think what I’ve seen the last three, four months through numerous conversations, many private, some public, has been the desire of the security services, military voices turning around and saying we face a very uncertain future as a nation. The bedrock of any nation’s security, stability, resilience is the food system. If we can’t buy a dress, we can’t make a call, we can’t go on holiday, we’ll survive. Without a functioning food system, we won’t. And I think all those crises I rattled off from the last 10, 20 years have been big. You know, pandemic was a massive impact, wasn’t it? It stretched the food systems every single the value chain. So many people worked flat out to make sure the food flowed to people that needed it. I just think that security intelligence narrative is saying we don’t think you’re looking at this in the right way. There are now five or six coinciding things we’ve talked about. Whether it’s extreme weather, farmers leaving the field, whether it’s about geopolitics against threat of hormuz. No one thing on its own will bring the food system to its knees, but all of them together could. And again, I’ve been very, very humble, having worked so many decades in the food system how hard it is to deliver food today at the price point people expect within the constraints that people have. And I fear that what we’ve got now is a lack of imagination that can think that the food system we have today needs not be 5% different, but 50, 60, 70% different from what we have today. And everybody in the room is looking at everybody else saying, well, we’re waiting for the policymakers to tell us to do it. We’re waiting for the commercial businesses to sort of show us the solutions that need it. We’re waiting for investors to turn up and invest into new business model. Everybody’s looking at everybody else. And I think if you’re a senior leader in the food system or that you shape the food system, it’s incumbent on you to be part of these conversations. I’m not placing all the burden upon you as individual or even your organization. But we’ve all got to get our heads, I’m going to use a provocative term, out the sand and see that the food system doesn’t need tweaking, it needs rebuilding. Now, the best time to start, just like planting a tree, the best time to do it was 20 years ago. We didn’t do it. We now need to start rebuilding seriously, despite all those short term headwinds I spoke about a moment ago.

Nick Hughes: Okay, so then sticking with that business lens, and we talk a lot at Footprint about the need for business transformation. We use this word, transformation a lot in the world of climate extremes, geopolitical instability, rapid technological change as well. Do you see? Well, firstly, what does food business transformation mean to you? Because it’s clearly not tweaking around the edges. And you read some very good sustainability reports. I certainly read a lot of them myself. And businesses are doing very good things at a kind of, you know, on a piecemeal basis. But I still don’t get the sense that it’s transformational. What does food business transformation mean to you? And do you see that happening at any kind of scale?

Mike Barry: So let me unpick that, Nick, and I’m going to put four or five building blocks or leaves of transformation in front of you. Let’s make this tangible now for the audience. So the first point is that sustainability on its own is not a motivator for change or sufficient motivator for dramatic change or transformation. I think health is the fact that we have this outsized burden upon the health system that governments eventually will have to recover from us if we’re not careful. We have a consumer that’s tremendously concerned about Health issues. I think it’s in many polls, it’s often the second biggest concern for society in the UK after the cost of living. So we’ve got all around us signals from all the people that matter to us, the policy system, the people buy from us, that the status quo ain’t acceptable. We need to change dramatically. So if we can bring, and we know that a basket of food that’s typically better for your personal health is better for the environment, by and large. So my first point would be we need to better link human health and sustainability together. Sustainability needs to be smuggled within a healthy basket. Second thing is we sometimes look at this and think, right, this is all about collaboration. We need to get everybody aligned or nothing happens or it’s all about competition. Leave it to market forces. Especially nuanced in between is transformation. And my MNS days told me that 70% of what we need to do is shared endeavor across the sector. We need to build a better policy system. We need a line around data use, for example, approaches to how we label, how we engage. But we need to leave 30% of space there for Tescos to Abnus Sainsbury’s Compass, to Abduce Sodexo, vice versa. There has to be space for innovation and competition as well. Data, I think, is critical to do this. We are a staggeringly vast business when it comes to units of stuff. And I would estimate that the UK retail system sells well over 100 billion individual items of food and drink year plus food service. Another 20 or 30 billion coming out of hundreds of thousands of different factories around the world. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of different farms and millions of different small holders being sold to 70 million people in the UK. We ain’t going to solve that with a spreadsheet. We need these data and digital solutions now. We see work being done by, you know, I think this, I’ve seen a partnership recently with Foodsteps and Sainsbury’s, our whole Delhays and how good Mondra were the UK supermarkets and the private label businesses. We need to put data at the heart of what we do and again, a lot of the pathways that we have into the future to decarbonise and make healthy. The products, services that we sell are complicated. It’s really risky when you’re making 2 or 3% net profit each year to bet the farm on a different approach, we need digital twins of our businesses and the food system we sell into that allows us to assess the risks of a particular approach or combination approaches. So I think Data is crucial and then the one I’m going to leave you with Nick, because I think this is so important and under underappreciated is the food environment, the physical and digital space when we make choices. Now be really clear about what I’m saying. I’m not saying here over to you Cobb, SEMA to went through 50,000 different SKUs in a particular supermarket 30 minutes looking at 10 different labels and every product to worry about the price of it. I ain’t saying that. I’m saying about the policy system and the commercial system shaping that food environment to help people make better choices not just at SKU level but at basket level and dietary level throughout the year for them and their families. That to me is the great unlock because as much as we do on the production side behind the scenes that’s done with it the last 20 years and it’s brilliant stuff and need to keep on doing unless we create demand for will remain a niche preoccupation of a small part of our society. We need to democratize and scale. And that’s only when we link demand for better stuff produce behind the scenes to higher standards. Yes.

Nick Hughes: And I guess when we think about food environments and shaping those environments we’ve seen in the policy world recently, some of that start to feed through in terms of advertising restrictions, in terms of bans on promotions, planning restrictions potentially on new takeaway outlets. It feels reasonably underpowered if that’s the word versus what it could be. But where do you see good examples? Let’s again root it in the practical where do you see good examples of businesses shaping food environments to align with those? Well, the consumer demand for certainly for nutritious healthy options and making those the sort of default option, but also that alignment of health and sustainability at a store level or an outlet level within the food service sector.

Mike Barry: And I’m glad you framed it like that Nick, because again I appreciate for many listeners of this podcast, Mike work for businesses that have been tremendously impact factored by new rules on hfss, on marketing, et cetera. That’s the tip of the iceberg. I’m going to provocatively say what needs to happen and so much of what needs to happen won’t or cannot be set by policymakers in Whitehall, even if they have the bandwidth and the understanding to do it. This has got to be a reframing of our imagination about how and what we sell. So good practical examples and interestingly, and I’ve said this before, I’m going to keep kicking as a UK industry on this one, the UK food system has traditionally been a real leader on a global basis about more sustainable and more healthy approaches. I think we’ve lost our way a little bit our leadership position and I now look at continental Europe, I see what businesses like Lidl International are doing across all 30 odd territories. And just disclosure, we do a little bit of work with Lidl gb. I’m just putting that in so people understand the context. But I’m also saying Lidl’s taking a systemic approach across its European operations to drive a planetary health diet approach across the totality of the basket it sells to its customers. Okay. So I think to count, to build upon that, I think Rev Germany, I think Aarhold Delhez, particularly in its sort of Dutch hinterlands are behind again are taking this systemic approach to aligning its entire private level model through mpd, right through to marketing, right through to pricing, promotion and placement in store to point toward people in total towards better choices. That’s the new battleground. Do I see that in the UK retail sector at the moment? No, by and large. Again I’ve talked positively about Lidl in the uk, I’m working with them. But beyond that I think there’s so much more headspace or headroom for us as an industry to step into and engage customers. I’m really intrigued by this trial that Tesco’s are running at the moment with children related thousands of their employees to have an AI enabled recipe app that enables people to build diets specifically for them, for their families given their sort of preferences and diet related. That to me is a first inkling of tools that we could have available to people to help them make big choices, collective choices in a world of overwhelming noise. You know, where the hell do you start if you’re on your own? But apps and again Walmart in the States with this little sparky app in the ChatGPT sphere is starting to do something similar. So these I’m starting to see in continental Europe at strategic level the uk it’s tactical level change. And the final point here is about the importance of food service because what the food environment in food service is often much more controllable. So for the Sodex or the compass of this world, whether it’s a school, whether it’s a civil service building, an office building, you can start to build a longer term, more strategic relationship with the purchaser of food and point them more strategically in the right direction. Sodexo in particular I think have done a great job at starting to inspire people through exciting, healthy, sustainable choices rather than just saying you should have it to save the planet. I think Sodexo’s leadership there I think is really important. We need to see more of it. And again, I’d like probably to talk in a moment, but only after you’ve asked the next question about some of the work I’m now seeing. Curry group do have started to transform from their own sort of hinterland had been a dairy business to a food ingredient business and some of the work that they’ve done to do that as well don’t work with them. But this is just what I’m observing from the outside. But I’ll pause there.

Nick Hughes: This year sees the launch of the first ever Footprint Festival, a two day experiential and immersive sustainability festival set on a working farm in the heart of the Hampshire countryside. Created for senior leaders across food service and hospitality, this one of a kind annual event takes place on September 17 and 18. We’ll blend sensory experiences, transformative content, powerful networking and unforgettable food, drink and entertainment. Early bird tickets are now on sale. Visit footprintfestival.com for more details. To the point about the continental European retailers, Mike, who are, you know, who you perceive to be ahead of the curve in terms of aligning their proposition around healthy sustainable diets. They’re not just doing this for moral reasons, are they? They see this as a source of long term competitive advantage. Do they?

Mike Barry: Absolutely. Because again, go back to the number we just shared a moment ago, typically the second or third top issue in many societies now is health. So again, I’m not framing this around systems, I’m framing this predominantly around health. The ability to help people live a healthier, happier life. There is no greater untapped marketplace need that once filled. Those that fill it first and deliver it in the most effective way possible, which is still a big ***, are the ones that win in the new marketplace. We’ve optimised the food system literally from field to fork around the world to efficiency. It’s food as a fuel that’s been produced at the lowest possible cost, moved at the last possible minute onto your plate. The food system that we all participate in the future is not that just in time, hyper efficient system. Of course that will be part of it, but it won’t be the overarching reason that it’s been designed as it has delivering outcomes, predominantly health and well being. And again, we might talk a little bit later about how the medical world, the pharmaceutical world, the food system and technology system are Starting to merge into new business models, horizontal linkages rather than vertical silos that we have today. I think that is how the food system of the future, whether you win or lose commercially, is whether you are able to participate in that new marketplace.

Nick Hughes: Okay, let’s touch on the Kerry Group example because I think it’s important to look further up the value chain actually at these businesses who are supplying the big catering companies, the retailers, et cetera, because clearly they don’t have quite as great an opportunity to shape customer food environments, but they are shaping the environment in which customer facing businesses are buying food. So what is Kerry Group specifically doing that you’ve been impressed by? And what levers can those manufacturing businesses pull to support the transition to healthy, more sustainable diets?

Mike Barry: And let’s start with a point of humility. It’s really hard for any ingredient company to shift without their marketplace. The retailers, the food service companies saying we’re backing you with supporting you, we’re buying into your innovations and what you’re doing. So let me unpick why Curry sticks out for me a little bit. I think they’ve approached this as a root and branch transformation of their business. Now that is not to say that every aspect of every nook and cranny, every factory production process, ingredient is changing overnight, but their starting point is the food system is transforming. We need to tack towards that transformation at the right proportionate speed. So let’s be very clear. I’m not saying the starting like a startup with a blank piece of paper. So what they’ve done, well from my sort of 20, 30 years experience in this space, firstly they’ve generated a really clear purpose. They developed that in tandem with their workforce. So from the beginning, rather than just two or three people setting a transformation office on behalf of the business saying hey guys, this is where we need to be in three years time down tools and we’re going this way and everybody else going in every factory or every sort of buying group going what the hell’s happening? They’ve been engaged from the beginning in the imperative for transformation and how they can win the value case for them to do it. The second thing is they’ve set targets as a guide, but not hard, hard numbers because the world flexes and shifts. Exactly. Well be in five years time. But underpinning those targets are hard numeric, in effect, digital product passports for each product around nutrition, carbon, other environmental aspects. That allows them to track and flex as much as they follow the pound sign in terms of every sale of every product, the margin on every single one of them. They can now flex and follow the profile, the nutrition, health, environmental profile of their product as well. So they have that intelligence internally to make the right decisions. Thirdly, they’ve invested against this ambition, invested into a biotechnology company, for example, that prolongs the shelf life of product or the ingredients that they provide, that enables their retail clients and food service clients to manage waste much better as well. And I think then they’ve also worked back down their value chain because they’re very still very significantly serviced by the dairy industry as an ingredient provider. They haven’t just sent an email out to their suppliers and to their farmers and say, you know, go green and sort it out. They’ve created structures and incentives that join the dots on the different direction of travel. There’s so much more to it than that. But they’re just few things that say to me that this is a business that’s genuinely trying to transform. I ain’t saying it’s easy, okay? But they’ve got the building blocks of change within their gift now.

Nick Hughes: And it strikes me there’s a point there about this transformation being embedded within the organization and not, I think, sometimes get the sense that businesses pursuing a sustainability agenda, it can sometimes be too personality led, if you like, too reliant on personalities driving this agenda. And of course that, that, that is not sustainable in itself because it’s, it becomes entwined with that person’s staying within the organization and not, you know, leaving and then the whole thing collapses. So just tell us a little bit about the difference between sort of, you know, sustainability being personality driven and how, and the need for organization, for change to be embedded within organizations and what that looks like.

Mike Barry: So again, I’ll just personalise it in terms of Curry for a second, then go broader. So the Chief Stability officer at Curry one, he’s come from a deep commercial background of driving wider transformation across food companies, Curry included, before he alighted on the CSO role. He knows how to get change done in a commercially astute way, aligned with the organization as well as taking tough decisions. That kind of transformation background to me defines a CSO in the future. Okay, so we’re not looking for somebody who can necessarily dance on the table at Las Vegas and know dancing on the roulette wheel and pointing at themselves extroverts. We’re looking at people who can just systemically get alongside an organization, both at a human level and a corporate level, put an arm around its shoulders and take it on a journey. So that’s the skill set. I think that really defines change at the moment. And I go, I know we’ll have a mix of commercial leaders on this call, on this podcast, as well as traditional sustainability people. To my colleagues who’ve come from a sustainability background like I did, I’m going to go into them all. But I look for six key things in a sustainability leader these days. Number one, by a million miles, is empathy, emotional intelligence, the ability to build, willingness to collectively change. The second thing, all right, reasonably close to this, but ahead of everything else, is business knowledge. You need to be a real student of your business. How it makes money, what it sells, the challenges and opportunities it faces in the marketplace. Again, I would challenge the system to communities to be better students of commerciality. You don’t have to be a buyer, you know, lead product innovation, marketing, et cetera, but you do need to understand the jobs that others do on behalf of the business as well. So I think that’s really important as well. But, but to the bottom line, fewer big personalities, more people can just lead and deliver. Stress the word deliver. Transformational.

Nick Hughes: Okay, let’s start to wrap things up with some of those drivers of the future food system. You touched on some of them, the medicalization of food, for example, and the impact of GLP1, drugs, AI, clearly, and the various applications within the food industry. The investment community. We haven’t really touched too much on the investment community, but I know from speaking with you in the past that particularly in the health realm, you feel that investors will have a key role to play within the transition. So what are some of those bigger forces? Do you feel that businesses should be looking out for and investing, you know, if not financially, then certainly some mental bandwidth in understanding how these forces are going to shape their business in future.

Mike Barry: Yeah, really good question. So I, I think we’re now at a point of business model disruption in the food system. Within reason. The last 40 years in terms of the business models we’ve got have been pretty static. You know, a fast food company’s been a fast food company, retailer, retailer, manufacturer, manufacturer, brand to brand. And of course, businesses have come, they’ve gone. But that’s mainly within the poor execution of today’s business model. I think we’re now in such a point of turmoil in the food system, both behind the scenes in terms of resilience of supply and front of house in terms of particularly the health, the product we sell. We’re not going to satisfy consumer demand through tweaking what we have. Okay. And it’s still very, very early days. But I can see the world of technology, the apples of this world, the world of pharma, the GLP providers, whether it’s Eli Lilly or Nordisk. I can see the world of health insurance, the world of bupa, of this of this world, the world of personal nutrition, Zoe, the world of product insight, Yucca, the world of the traditional incumbent retailers and food service companies beginning to morph together now you know, I’ll cut to the chase. I still think people will shop predominantly through big retailers in 5, 10, 15 years time, but those retailers will have a very different ecosystem of participation. Again, the food environment where people make choices and again the reason I rose the Tesco’s example, the West Walmart examples, they’re the first little inklings for me about how we can democratize and mainstream choice making for everybody. Robin Just for the skew. Okay, so I think there’s lots happening around business model innovation. The second thing that’s going to change is the importance of partnership. Again we all sit in BRC collaborations, FDA collaborations, Zero Carbon Forum collaborations, IGD collaborations. They’re brilliant, they’re important. They can be a little bit about managing the status quo rather than actively driving collective change. And again, my point, about 30% is competitive leadership, 70% is collective change. We’ve got to build better collaboration ecosystems to drive the enabling environment for us to transform as well. And then running through all of this is this point about data. And again, there are many different approaches. I’ve listed some of them a little bit earlier emerging in this area. The businesses that can collect across the totality of their value chain, useful data, up to date data, robust data, and then use it. Not to fill in a CSRD report though that’s a tertiary use of it, but to drive co consumer participation in their product mix and their product offer are the ones that win as well. So of course there’s going to be individual drop and technologies out there, but they’re the macro themes I see out there. Different business models, different partnerships and the macro use of data to drive change.

Nick Hughes: Well Mike, it’s been fascinating hearing your thoughts and thanks so much for sharing your insights. Lots for businesses to take away and digest there. And thanks again for joining us on the Small Print.

Mike Barry: Pleasure Nick, as ever.

Nick Hughes: We’ll be back next week with another episode of the Small Print. If you like what you’ve heard, please take a moment to rate, share and subscribe.