While out of home businesses struggle to justify the premium for sourcing organic produce, ministers in England procrastinate over a plan to grow the sector
English organic farmers had been waiting a long time for this moment. Their neighbours to the north, in Scotland, and those across in the EU, had already been buoyed with strategies, support and targets to increase nature-friendly, low-input production of everything from tomatoes and strawberries to yoghurt and beef. Now it was their turn.
“We [were] delighted to see the minister’s interest in organic with her visit to Riverford,” said Rob Haward, CEO of the farm and box scheme business that has been running for four decades. “We now look forward to finding practical outcomes that benefit the whole supply chain through an organic action plan for England, which is expected to land this summer and build on organic’s decade-long market growth.”
That high was short-lived. The new plan is no longer a sure thing.
Just a few days after her visit, food security minister Angela Eagle had been farmed off to the home office as minister for national security. In her place came Stephen Morgan – the third minister to hold the food and farming brief since Labour came to power in July 2024 (following Daniel Zeichner and Eagle). The Portsmouth South MP’s latest ‘annual report’ does not mention food or farming, and reports suggest he has no background knowledge or experience of the sector. He does however see that the “climate and nature crisis is the greatest long-term global challenge that we face”.
This will be scant consolation for a farming sector that many feel cannot fulfil its true promise without political and policy backing. Farming subsidies have shifted since Brexit but remain beset by problems and slim budgets (this week’s Farmers Weekly quoted one senior agricultural expert referring to the relaunched Sustainable Farming Incentive as “a car crash”).
Since Michael Gove, in 2017, there have been seven other Defra secretaries of state responsible for post-Brexit farming subsidies that should abide by the ‘public money for (environmental) public goods’ principle. And all the while organic has by and large been ignored. The incumbent Defra secretary, Emma Reynolds, has at least visited an organic farm – Rose Dale’s organic farm in Buckinghamshire six months ago. But is a sector strategy on her (or Morgan’s) to-do list? And what would be the benefits – including for foodservice companies looking to source more organic food and drink – if the strategy materialised?
Organic growth
Generally, organic is in, if not rude health, good health. The UK organic food and drink market recently registered its 14th year of consecutive growth and has doubled in value in the last decade. Consumers are seeking out organic products for a number of reasons – from higher animal welfare to better soil health and nutrition, but these days there is also the pull of pesticide-free products (chemicals are a topic that citizens are increasingly concerned about).
Food retailers have tapped into this trend. Last year’s overall increase of 4.2% in organic sales was driven by growth in the major supermarkets, who extended ranges and promoted organic more than ever. In UK foodservice, the positives were harder to find – a record year for the Food for Life Served Here scheme being one of them – as total sector sales fell 1.5% in 2025, according to Soil Association figures. Those who track foodservice footfall and performance are not surprised.
Margins are under pressure, and have been for years, but right now the position is “proving terminal for a significant proportion of operators”, David Read, founder at Prestige Purchasing, tells Footprint. “Many are surviving, but only through the strength of their balance sheets, and even those making profits do not have cashflow of a scale to reinvest.”
Paying a premium for organic goods – whether marginal (as it can be for some UK fresh produce) or eye-wateringly high (for chicken, beef or lamb) – is just not a priority for many hospitality businesses. As Read puts it: “Faced with dwindling cash reserves and around a 30% uplift in cost for organic products, operators will (out of necessity as they see it) choose the conventional option every time. I don’t want them to,” he adds, “but I can see why they do.”
Seton Leung, out-of-home practice head at Circana UK, is similarly sympathetic to the plight of businesses that want to buy more sustainable goods but “cannot justify it” in the current economic climate. Pub, bar and restaurant visits have also fallen by 2% in the last year, she explains.
Sustainability is also far down the list of people’s priorities when eating out. January polling of 2,000 people by Circana, shared with Footprint, showed just 42% feel sustainability is relevant to them when visiting restaurants or other out of home outlets. This compares to 59% who expect innovation from foodservice and 72% who expect inclusivity and for businesses to “satisfy consumers who have special diets or food needs”.
Still, businesses “have to be seen to be doing something”, says Leung, especially to attract younger demographics. But changes to menus and the ingredients within them must also turn a profit. Given that restaurant brands, fast food chains and coffee shops don’t have the luxury of offering tiered options like supermarkets it’s always going to be a risk to choose the organic option.
“It is simply easier for foodservice businesses to stick with non-organic products,” says Rob Haward, CEO at Riverford, because “the infrastructure is already established”. He believes the opportunity “clearly exists” to offer both organic and non-organic, but foodservice businesses “will need to work a little harder on the supply side to meet growing demand”.
McDonald’s milks it
More of the well-known brands could join the very few that already source some organic products, and these brands in turn could take the opportunity to “broaden the range of organic ingredients they use across their restaurants and cafés”, Haward suggests.
Pret is the obvious example of a mainstream chain that has bought into – and marketed – organic more than most. McDonald’s has a more limited range, focused on milk. Sceptics believe this narrow focus to be tantamount to greenwashing – the tactic being to use one product line or ingredient to create a menu ‘halo’. Others suggest that ‘every little helps’ to build consumer exposure to organic products, plus McDonald’s sells an awful lot of tea and coffee these days. The chain’s research in 2025 showed spend on takeaway coffees is also skewed towards younger generations in the UK, with millennials and Gen Z forking out £728 and £676 respectively each year. And it is no secret that it’s these younger people who will often seek out sustainability cues.
McDonald’s sources organic milk from Arla – the UK’s biggest dairy cooperative and the world’s largest producer of organic dairy products – for coffees, teas and milk for its Happy Meals (except in Northern Ireland). Conventional milk is used for its milkshakes, frappes, Iced Latte, McFlurry desserts and hot chocolates. The chain, best known for its burgers but pushing its McCafé operations hard, has ploughed almost £1m into supporting Arla’s organic dairy network, sponsoring farms to accelerate the learnings in regenerative agriculture and sharing best practice across the agriculture industry. ReNature, a new biodiversity project across 60 farms, will also identify the existing state of nature on organic farms and help farmers improve biodiversity, soil health and promote habitats for wildlife.
Whether all this work is helping to reduce McDonald’s sizable environmental footprint is unclear. But with the chain admitting in its 2026 sustainability report (page 9) that it is finding the reduction of scope 3 emissions, like those from its dairy suppliers, “challenging”, there is no incentive for it to pour money into projects that increase its carbon footprint.
Arla’s own research, cited in its 2022 sustainability report, shows lower carbon footprints are possible on organic farms (0.99kgCO2e v 1.06kgCO2e). They also tend to use less fertiliser (the input giving farmers a seemingly constant headache this decade due to its price volatility). There can be trade-offs in organic, however, such as lower protein efficiency and higher land-use.
One of the more recent, and larger, studies, calculated the carbon footprints of 3,074 French dairy farms, with organic ones measured at 19% lower (or 11% when in-direct land-use changes are included). The economic performances were “similar” and reaching 25% organic milk in France would reduce the country’s dairy sector emissions by 9%.
What’s England’s deal?
That 25% is the target, set within the EU’s Green Deal, for the agricultural area dedicated to organic to reach by 2030. In 2012 the figure was 5.9%, rising to 10.8% in 2023, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA). This means the pace would need to “more than double in the remaining years” to meet the target, noted the EEA in October. Austria is already there, while Estonia and Portugal are getting close. Meeting the target won’t be easy but at least there is something to aim for, incentivising the policy shifts, stronger supply chain alignment and greater consumer engagement and capacity building required.
Meanwhile, land under organic systems in England currently sits at 301,000 hectares, an increase of 1.5% compared to 2024. Compare this to Scotland’s thriving sector where between 2021 and 2024, the area of Scottish agricultural land committed to organic production (either fully organic or in conversion) grew by 26.6%, from 103,900 hectares to 131,500 hectares. Land entering organic conversion in Scotland grew by 102% between 2023 and 2024. In England the figure was 7%.
Amanda Brown, programme director at Scottish Food & Drink, is among those pushing for even greater ambition. “[T]here is a huge opportunity to grow further,” she said in January following the launch of the ‘Scottish organic action plan’. Running to 2030, the plan prioritises more organic land conversion, greater awareness among the public, and more research and training. There will also be more bespoke industry support to improve supply chain capability and market understanding, as well as the promotion of organic products in hospitals and schools, with research into the “most cost-effective organic ingredients”.
This is a collaborative plan, between the government and the private sector. The outcomes, including emissions reductions, biodiversity goals and increased economic, environmental and social resilience, will also be closely monitored. It is also a plan that leans on the Danish experience, a country that has form in this area: organic’s share of 2024 retail trade was 11.4%, thought to be up there with the highest in the world. Copenhagen has hit 87% organic food share in public kitchens.
Even in Denmark, however, price can often be “an organic party killer”, as Rasmus Prehn, CEO of Organic Denmark put it recently. “Even though we are seeing good demand figures for organic products, they are not nearly as high as they would be if organic prices were more competitive compared to conventional products,” he explained.
Indeed, there is only so far that marketing and making a compelling case for organic to consumers can get you – especially on the high street. At some point ministers here will need not just to step foot on farms but step into the market. Penalising high-input, high carbon, extractive agriculture would show consumers the ‘true cost’ of food but is politically difficult at a time of high food price inflation and a more populist brand of politics. Support for lower-input, lower carbon, nature-friendly and regenerative systems is far easier to stomach – especially if it leads to more provenance, farmer pride and profits, not to mention resilience.
Bertel Haugen, who worked for over a decade with Rude Health and is currently head of innovation and sustainability at Windmill Organics, says the targets in the EU, Scotland and Wales (25% of all vegetables used in primary school meals to be locally grown and organic by 2030) “all send the same signal: that government backs organic because of its proven, evidenced impact on soil health, biodiversity, emissions and fossil fuel dependency; not because it wants food to cost more”.
Haugen is among those who believes the UK’s reluctance to back organic – especially in foodservice settings where footfall is down and margins are wafer thin – stems from an outdated ‘organic equals expensive’ narrative that has not been dismantled. “That’s the real opportunity here,” he adds: “Reframing organic as the most rigorously evidenced solution to problems policymakers [as well as ministers old and new] say they want to solve.”
That sounds like a decent plan. Whether there is a minister at Defra keen to write it, time will tell.
Further reading
Eagle teases new plan for organic
The wait for a plan to boost England’s organic sector has certainly been a long one. What is clear is that the country is falling behind its neighbours.
England’s first ever land use framework aims to maintain domestic food production while freeing land for nature, development and energy. Can it carry off such a delicate balancing act?
