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Food is complicated.
Globally, population growth is straining food security, and meeting demand comes with environmental trade-offs. Closer up, the picture is no less straightforward. Food businesses don’t scale like tech companies—they involve complex logistics, their products are perishable, and consumers are especially sensitive to cost and quality.
Innovative thinking is helping to address these issues. “New ideas and approaches are revolutionizing how we produce, move, and consume food across the entire food chain,” says Allan Wilkinson, Head of Agrifoods at HSBC UK. “And the world needs more smart minds helping level up the food sector.” Perhaps you’ll be inspired by these stories of Trailblazers who are doing just that…
The challenge: Protecting biodiversity
Global food systems are threatened by biodiversity loss, yet increasing biodiversity in soil—and detecting invasive species risks early—has traditionally been challenging.
According to biodiversity monitoring business NatureMetrics, fewer than 10 per cent of agrifood companies have undertaken comprehensive assessments of their nature-related risks.
Its proposed solution is based on environmental DNA (eDNA)—genetic material that is collected from environmental samples such as water or soil. These are analyzed in eDNA labs and matched against massive reference libraries, building a granular picture of species presence. NatureMetrics then links samples with geospatial, acoustic, camera trapping, and human observation data in its Nature Intelligence Platform, which combines all of that data into actionable insights for better decision-making. In light of the result, a business may choose to change farming practices, land management, or soil treatment.
“Our product not only provides food producers with accurate data that they can trust with their most valuable assets,” explains CEO Dimple Patel, “it can also be used to generate social capital and build trust between farmers, buyers, and consumers."
The challenge: Understanding food industry supply chains
For food businesses, supply chains can be complicated, with certain items featuring many ingredients from a wide range of countries. But tracking all that information is vital to protect against risks.
It’s not that food businesses don’t have data on their raw ingredients, it’s that they have too much of it. Spanning allergens, expiry dates and origins in a mix of unstructured formats, it can be difficult to wrangle. “Managing all that information to deliver transparency across your supply chain can be really challenging,” says Roger McCracken, CEO of Foods Connected.
Foods Connected is a supply-chain management company, which offers cloud-based end-to-end software to track food-industry supply chains via visual dashboards. Recently, they have begun developing a new tool: an AI model that can analyze the data within the Foods Connected platform, helping each client unlock insights from their supply chain at speed. Employees can interact with this information via a natural-language generative AI chatbot, making it accessible and easy to interpret for everyone involved in operations.
Currently, Foods Connected is trialling this AI model in partnership with food manufacturer Finnebrogue, Queen’s University Belfast, and the data company Bia Analytical. If it’s a success, the team plans to make it available to clients in the near future.
The challenge: Scaling while maintaining quality
Producing excellent food at scale and shipping it across multiple markets without losing what first made customers love it—be it quality or low cost—is a monumental challenge.
Butternut Box is a company predicated on quality. It uses human-quality ingredients like cranberries, broccoli, and fish to produce nutritious dog food. And although delivering pet foods at scale might seem like a mission that’s only applicable to a certain sub-set of the food industry, the smart thinking involved generalizes more broadly.
In its quest for quality, Butternut Box has had to embrace a variety of different strategies to keep operating costs low in order to afford a much higher spend on ingredients and manufacturing.
The most significant of these is vertical integration. In 2021, Butternut Box opened a fully integrated £70m factory called Rudie’s Kitchen, which services the whole business. The facility “gives us a lot of control on costs,” says Managing Director Lin Makhijani, “realizing a huge amount of economies of scale.” The brand will soon deliver to mainland Europe by opening a new vertically-integrated facility in Poland.
That same inventiveness extends into the business’s wider operations. The procurement and innovation teams work closely with trusted suppliers to drive efficiencies, from reducing packaging waste and optimizing delivery routes to trialling new ingredient formats. “And our box insulation and volumetrics are highly optimized and tested to ensure the product arrives to the customer in its ideal state—fresh.”
Learn more about HSBC's Agrifoods industry expertise: Agrifoods sector | Corporate Banking | HSBC UK
