ROB CAMERON: The very steps you want to take to mitigate your impacts are the same steps that are going to increase your resilience in the face of increased drought, heat, floods, et cetera. You have a more resilient farm when you’ve got a more natural farm.
STUTI SETHI: If we could do it from scratch, how would we set it up so that the whole system can benefit from the way that we produce our food and do it in a way that works with nature?
ROB: This is not like opening a new factory, where on Day One, boom, the lights are on, you’re making things, away you go, you’ve got production lines humming. No, in the case of agriculture and the natural world, you’re very often doing things today that’ll actually deliver a payback in future.
LIZZIE O’LEARY: From PwC’s management publication strategy and business, this is Take on Tomorrow, the podcast that brings together experts from around the globe to figure out what business could and should be doing to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the world.
I’m Lizzie O’Leary, a podcaster and journalist…
FEMI OKE: …and I’m Femi Oke, a broadcaster and journalist. Today, how do we secure the future of food?
LIZZIE: If you open your kitchen cupboard right now—and to be honest, any podcast, especially Take on Tomorrow, is always better with a little snack—you’ll find food from all over the world: coffee from Brazil, chocolate from Indonesia, fruit from Nigeria, vegetables from Spain.
FEMI: I just smiled when you said fruit from Nigeria. I’m thinking of a great big juicy plantain right now. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. And it’s all possible thanks to a combination of farms, producers, big companies, and transport that make up our food system.
LIZZIE: But this delicate balancing act is under threat. Adverse weather, biodiversity loss, global tensions, and supply chain disruptions all mean that the way we get our food is vulnerable.
FEMI: Exactly, Lizzie. And that raises a question for me. How can we protect our food for decades to come? To find the answer, we will be talking to Rob Cameron, Global Head of ESG Engagement at Nestlé.
LIZZIE: But first, we’re joined by Stuti Sethi, a thought leader with Strategy&, who spends a lot of time thinking about the future of food—and what it means for the world. Welcome to the show.
STUTI: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
FEMI: Stuti, can you help us understand where are we right now. How does our food system currently work?
STUTI: Sure. Well, look, I think you said it in the introduction, right? We have producers, and that’s farmers and growers. They’re all over the world. Something like 600 million of them. On the other hand, we have our consumers, and we’re all consumers of food. So we’re talking about 8 billion people. And in the middle, we have a range of companies, and they could be doing something as simple as taking wheat and milling it and turning it into flour. Or it could be much more complicated, bringing ingredients from across the world to make the frozen pizza that you find on your shelf. And in that system, you have small players. You also have four very big aggregators, or traders, as we call them, who help move these global commodities from the farmers and the growers to some of the processing facilities. And then you have, of course, the CPG [consumer packaged goods] companies. There’s roughly ten really big ones across the world and a lot of smaller ones there. And then you have retailers. And retailers are typically a really local-for-local business. But at the same time, there are a few big companies involved in that space as well.
LIZZIE: Stuti, we’re going to come back to you to hear more about the role of businesses, consumers, and policymakers in securing our food systems a little bit later. But first, Femi, I know you have been digging into this issue with one of the biggest companies in food production.
FEMI: Absolutely. We wanted to understand how businesses are preparing for some of these challenges. So I spoke to Rob Cameron. Global Head of ESG Engagement at Nestlé. And I began by asking him to explain the challenges facing Nestlé in particular.
ROB: Everything in our food systems begins with agriculture. We are entirely dependent upon agriculture for our company’s success and for delivering the foods and beverages that people enjoy around the world. And agriculture, of course, is dependent on nature. And yet, we also know the natural world is under terrific stress. When you look at edible plants, you know, there’s something like 7,000 edible plants in the world. Only about 150 or so of them are actually cultivated. And something like 60% of the world’s calories come from three plants. I mean, if that isn’t a vulnerability, I don’t know what is. So there are these spots of vulnerability in the food systems that I think, you know, really are big risks.
FEMI: Can you give us an example of how you’re adapting or how it is changing the way you do business and produce products?
ROB: Let’s just track it back to, sort of, 2004, 5, 6, with this concept of creating shared value. And this was the realization on the part of the management at the time that a company that already had a near 100-year history at that moment, you know, if it was going to be around for another 100 years, needed to think more broadly—thinking about how it creates value and thinking about how to create value for society by thinking about the environment and thinking about communities, as well as thinking about shareholders. Then we take it forward to, I would say, 2019, when the then-CEO Mark Schneider signed up for the UN Global Compact and the UN agreement on, Can we get to net zero by 2050? So, we became a signatory of that. And that was a big shift for the business. And so, what it meant was we had to publish a net-zero road map, which we did. And when you look at that road map, what you’ll see is that there is a very strong emphasis on agricultural footprint—what we’re buying and where we’re buying it from. So we’ve got to think about how we work with farmers, how we work with suppliers, in order to drive cuts in our emissions base, because that’s the only real place we’re going to make an impact.
FEMI: What are you seeing right now that you think in five or ten years is going to pay dividends because you’ve already anticipated a new way to be sustainable?
ROB: This is an area which I think is a real issue for many, many businesses. If you’re thinking about, OK, so we’re drawing carbon out of the atmosphere in forests. Well, that doesn’t start when you plant a tree. In fact, what you’re doing is you’re making an investment into the future. Now, this is not like opening a new factory where on Day One, boom, the lights are on, you’re making things, away you go, you’ve got production lines humming. No, in the case of agriculture and the natural world, you’re very often doing things today that’ll actually deliver a payback in future. We spend a ton of money on regenerative agriculture or on forests. It’s actually quite hard to capitalize them. I sometimes think it would make life a lot easier if we could.
FEMI: You just dropped that phrase regenerative agriculture into your conversation. Almost anybody who uses that phrase has a completely different description. What’s yours?
ROB: We are on the cusp of the biggest transition in agriculture since the invention of the Haber-Bosch process in the early 1900s. That’s the process by which we were able to create synthetic fertilizers. That’s what led to the massive uplift in productivity in agriculture, but with huge negative consequences as well in terms of fossil fuel impacts. So that’s what we now call conventional agriculture. I would argue regenerative agriculture is actually a series of practices that are designed to deliver the crops that you need, and at the same time improve the environment in which they are growing. So, we have something like 16 separate practices that we would say are steps towards regenerative agriculture. One of those might be, for instance, leaving a margin around the field for wildlife, you know, biodiversity to flourish in a strip of land around the field. Terrific idea. Does that make the field in the middle regenerative? No, it doesn’t. It’s a regenerative practice that, combined with other practices, may get to a point where that farm could be considered truly regenerative. But I think we have to be a bit thoughtful about that. But the practices themselves, they’re often common sense. I mean, they’re things that I grew up learning about when I was at school many, many years ago. Crop rotation, for example, reducing the amount of synthetic fertilizers, using organic fertilizers, planting trees, you know, and so on and so forth. There are a whole series of practices that we’ve mapped out, and we’re working with farmers to help them to put these practices into play on their farms.
FEMI: You’ve mapped out these practices already, but how long will it take for farmers that you work with to take them up?
ROB: When we launched the net-zero road map, we made very clear that we were prepared to put some money behind this. So 3.2 billion Swiss francs total in the period 2020 to 2025 on the whole of the road map, of which 1.2 billion was earmarked for kickstarting regenerative practices. Now, a lot of people would assume that Nestlé is a remote company that buys on the global commodity markets and has no direct relationships with farmers. It is true that we buy a lot of commodities on global commodities markets, but it’s also true that we have direct trading relationships with something in the region of 600,000 farmers. Many of them are coffee farmers, many cocoa farmers, particularly dairy farmers. So that gives us a great opportunity to work with farmers, to encourage them. And how do we do that? Well, technical assistance. We have something like 2,000 agronomists that will get out there on the farm and work with farmers to help them to put these practices into operation. We pay premiums when a product is produced using these regenerative practices. There’s finance available, insurance, and loan schemes, and so on. So, there’s a whole range of interventions. But one thing is clear: at the center of it all, you have to put the farmer. Because if you just turn up at the farm gate and tell the farmer, This is what we want you to do, or you’re not going to get to do business with us, that’s not what farmers want to hear.
It’s a big step. It’s a big step. I mean, Femi, if I said to you, what I want you to do is to change the way that you’re working. I’m going to cut your salary by 30%, but I guarantee you, by changing the way you’re working, your income will improve in two years’ time or three years’ time. You know, that’s a bit of a big bet you’re being asked to make. I’m not sure many of us that are salaried, we’d want to take that on. But in a sense, that’s what we’re asking farmers to do.
FEMI: I’m just thinking about the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Two years ago, 2022, they reported that the global food system accounts for 42% of global greenhouse gas emissions. What does Nestlé do about that?
ROB: It’s absolutely incumbent upon the whole of the agricultural system to start looking at, OK, how are we going to reduce our impacts? We’re not going to get to net zero without significant cuts in agricultural emissions. We have to stop using fossil fuel fertilizers, or at least radically reduce the use of fossil fuel fertilizers. We need to think about emissions from dairy. That’s a huge issue. We’ve got to think about how we fix more carbon in soils, how we plant more trees, integrate more trees into our farm system, so that we’re using farming to draw CO2 down out of the atmosphere and fix it in the ground. All of the steps that we’re proposing, do you know what the real magic sauce of this is? It actually increases farmer resilience. The very steps you want to take to mitigate your impacts are the same steps that are going to increase your resilience in the face of increased drought, heat, floods, and hurricanes and storms, et cetera. You have a more resilient farm when you’ve got a more natural farm. And so for us, whilst I think there is an urgent responsibility on us, actually, there’s also a very, very, very strong case to our investors that this is what we need to do to ensure a resilient supply chain in the future.
FEMI: Well, I feel that you’re quite bullish about the state of our food systems right now. They’re robust, they’re resilient. From your perspective, what will they look like in about ten years’ time? What is that transformation process?
ROB: So firstly to say, I don’t want you to come away from this that I’m somehow bullish about food systems. I do think that food systems will see this through. But I do think there’s a huge amount of work ahead of us to make our food systems, that they’re making a positive impact on the environment and delivering safe, nutritious, and delicious food for consumers. So there’s a lot to do. No question, right? Now, some forecasters have been particularly positive about, for example, precision fermentation, and that this is going to completely disrupt food systems. Technology, advanced technologies will definitely come to bear on the food systems that we have. These technologies, which are struggling at the moment to scale from lab to pilot and then pilot to mainstream, will find their way through, eventually. It’ll take a little bit longer, I think, than some are saying. But that’s one of the changes. I think advanced technologies will be a significant impact on food systems in the future.
FEMI: If you’re a business that’s not involved in food and are looking at the example of Nestlé and similar companies, what are the lessons that can be learned?
ROB: I think one of the things I would point to is—and it goes back to this thing of creating shared value, and—I think, people-centricity. Having just said, yeah, technology is going to make an impact, and it will. But I don’t think we get anywhere with technology. We don’t get anywhere with regenerative agriculture. We don’t get anywhere with cutting CO2 emissions, et cetera, et cetera, unless we’re people-centric. What about consumers? What about farmers? What about employees? What about people in our value chain? Thinking about how people are going to make the difference. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it is. It’s people that make the difference. So I think that kind of communities-first thinking, I think, is incredibly important.
FEMI: Rob Cameron, thanks for joining us.
ROB: Thanks for having me. Great to chat. Thanks, Femi.
LIZZIE: Stuti, Rob talked about the role of regenerative agriculture, but I want to zoom out a little bit. What kinds of conversations are you having right now with clients around food systems? Risks? Opportunities? What is on their radar right now?
STUTI: I actually think clients are looking at this from multiple different perspectives now. There is this sort of immediate question that comes up because there’s a lot of regulation coming their way, particularly in Europe. So, it’s, a lot of it is around the reporting and how do they manage some of that. But what I also see, particularly thinking about things like regenerative agriculture, is that companies have really big sustainability goals. And when it comes to food systems players, typically, the biggest source of emissions is the food system and their crops and their farms. The other side of that is really understanding the risk to the supply chain. This is about climate modeling and getting to know which crops are actually going to be at risk in the future. Also, this year, we’ve seen the volatility in coffee prices. You’ve seen olive oil getting really expensive, and these things have really made companies go, Hey, I need to do something and think about this. Another key thing is that because something like coffee has really been, the way that I see it, the canary in the coalmine, companies start to see, Hey, this is the kind of crop that takes eight years to fruit. So if I need to look at my own value chain, where are the biggest risks? Another crop that sort of makes you think in that way is hops. Hops only grow within a certain longitude and latitude. So if you want beer in the future, you need to make sure that it’s going to be climate resilient. So that’s a really big area. Another thing that I see is a lot of companies are looking at, can they provide a value-added service in helping farmers move towards more sustainable, regenerative agricultural practices?
FEMI: If we are focusing on the future of food and how to make our food systems more robust, what are technological solutions that you are seeing that are impressing you? I’m thinking AI, obviously. What else is there?
STUTI: When it comes to the food system, we have a lot of solutions already. And I’m going to start first with mechanization. So, 45% of Indian agriculture is mechanized today. And if you compare that to Western Europe, we’re talking about 70%. So, there’s still a big role for simpler solutions like tractors. And on the other hand, if I think more about the things that you’re thinking of, so, real new technologies like AI, we’re talking about, you know, at the farm level, it’s the use of data about soil, about crops, about weather, and maybe potentially helping farmers make better decisions in that space. It’s some of the buzzwords that you might hear, like vertical farming, precision agriculture, even little robots that can plant seeds into the ground. But the big issue here is that a lot of these technologies are not yet at scale, and there’s a lot of funding required to get them to the right cost level. I think, maybe, the most interesting one for me right now, which is really tangible, is probably the use of AI in really reducing food waste. Thirty percent of the food that we produce never gets consumed. So, if we can use technology to do things like dynamic pricing at the retailers so that people buy it before it goes to waste, or you can look at how you can maintain the right conditions in transport, those kinds of things, I think, get me maybe the most excited, because you see it really tangibly and quickly.
FEMI: One of the jobs that you do is planning strategy. If you were to talk to policymakers and business leaders about building a better food system, what would you tell them?
STUTI: I think what needs to happen is a lot more figuring out these solutions together and finding new ways of funding the changes we need. When it comes to farming, for example, a lot of it is subsidized, right? And there’s a lot of agricultural policy that exists around the globe because farmers are a really important part of each country’s landscape. I think there is a big role for government there. You know, they can make those decisions around what to incentivize, what to subsidize, what to penalize. And you see that there is already some experimentation with this, right? There are sugar taxes in Brazil. Denmark is going to try out a carbon tax on dairy and on beef in 2030. And I wonder how some of these things are going to play out. I see that there’s a really strong piece there that governments can control. And it’s that mix, right? It’s that real balance of how do you make sure that farmers can actually have a good and successful livelihood? And at the same time, how do we start this shift to a better food system? The big problem with a lot of these things is, Hey, if I’m the first mover, I’m taking on a cost and I might not see the results of that investment for quite some time or somebody else takes the benefit. So creating that level playing field and making it easier to also take these sustainable steps is a big part of it as well.
LIZZIE: Building on that a bit, when you’re talking about being the first mover, steps that don’t pay off immediately, some of the practices that Rob talked about have a longer time horizon, and I wonder how a business leader can take those steps and bring their shareholders, a very key constituency, along with them when maybe there isn’t an immediate payoff to show quickly.
STUTI: In the end, you need to have the vision and you need to create that vision for your shareholders on why you need to do this and what are some of the big issues that you’re going to face. When it comes to the food system, I think there is now pretty clear evidence that we need to make these changes. And you can use resilience as a key point on this. And maybe, the first step is even just starting with the educational aspect, right? On making sure that you understand what your climate risk exposure is and what the exposure is upstream so that your shareholders start to understand that risk as well. And you can show, Hey, these are the actions we need to take. The timeframe and the payoff, honestly, it’s going to really depend on each individual company. So how they make those decisions is really tied up with where they see those opportunities. But I do want to say here, I mean, think about the energy transition and the way that it panned out in electric vehicles, right? We knew about this technology for a very long time. The existing companies didn’t take action. It took a new player like Tesla to come in, and they have made a mint off of it, right? So those opportunities are there, and we need to see who figures it out.
FEMI: As we think about securing the future of food, it’s a conversation that we’re all involved in. Nobody opts out because it’s not our business. Because we all have to eat and we all use the food systems. But if you’re a non-food business, how should you be thinking about the future of our food systems? What’s relevant?
STUTI: I think there’s a lot, actually. So we’ve really spoken, I guess, more about the core food companies, right? But supporting this entire system, you have banks, you have insurance companies, you’ve got manufacturing companies that are providing those tractors we spoke about somewhere earlier. Yeah. So there are actually a lot of different players around this whole space. On the consumer side, there’s also healthcare, of course, because what you eat has an effect on what your health looks like. There’s the infrastructure aspect of this, because when it comes to food systems, Hey, if your food gets stuck in a port, you’ve got a lot of waste happening. So I think there are a lot of different roles to play here. And the more that companies can actually find those new ways of working together, I think, the more likely we are to get this transition and this change to really take place.
LIZZIE: Stuti, when you are thinking about the future of food and food systems, what are you most excited by?
STUTI: I think it’s the idea of us rethinking this system and redesigning what’s now quite complicated, actually. So I think at some point, I started looking into the journey of a typical tomato, and you realize that these things are going back and forth across the globe to get to where they are. So if we could do it from scratch, how would we set it up so that the whole system can benefit from the way that we produce our food and do it in a way that works with nature? That’s what gets me excited.
LIZZIE: Stuti, thank you so much for talking with us today.
STUTI: Thanks for the conversation. It was a lot of fun.
FEMI: I got such a clear idea of futurism from listening to Rob and chatting to Stuti, because I think we often think about technology, our future in technology, and they were thinking about something so basic that we all have to do, which is eat and our food systems, but projecting how we need to be thinking about them. And there was that moment where Stuti mentioned, if we don’t make hops climate resilient, where’s the beer going to come from?
LIZZIE: Where’s the beer? I wasn’t just the only person that perked up at that. I was like, Oh!
FEMI: Maybe that’s how we should be talking about the future of our food systems, because that will really hit home about how important our food systems are.
LIZZIE: I think there were two specific things that stuck with me. This was an episode with a lot of really intriguing specifics: Rob talking about how few edible plants we actually cultivate and eat was really fascinating to me.
FEMI: Shocking!
LIZZIE: Truly shocking. And then the idea that Stuti put forward that you could use AI to do something like reduce food waste by injecting dynamic pricing, right? At the end of the day, come get your tomatoes, corn, what have you, and it’s cheap because we don’t want it to go to waste. That’s brilliant. That’s so simple.
FEMI: Well, that brings us to the end of this episode. For more like it, tap, follow, or subscribe in your podcast app. You’ll get every episode as soon as it’s released. And if Take on Tomorrow helped you think about your business in a new way, please leave us a review—that will help others to find the show.
LIZZIE: Next time on Take on Tomorrow, is it time to completely reinvent your business?
GUEST: Nobody can predict what’s going to happen in the next decade, but I think the one thing that we can all agree on is doing what you’ve done for the past ten years is not going to work.
LIZZIE: Take on Tomorrow is brought to you by PwC’s strategy and business. PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity.
