Ian Proudfoot, KPMG New Zealand Partner and the firm's Global Head of Agribusiness, shares his key takeaways from last week's World Agri-Tech and Future Food Tech Summits in San Francisco.
I attended the World Agri-Tech and Future Food Tech summits in San Francisco last week. Panels covered topics from regenerative farming to AI, future foods to biotechnology. My notes run to over 30 pages, so I have summarised my takeaways in the PDF (thanks to our KPMG New Zealand design team for turning this around for me so quickly). Seven dominant themes (and one that was unexpectedly missing) from the discussions: We are at an early stage in the impact GLP1s (Ozempic style drugs) will have on society - if you are connected to the food system and are not thinking about what this impact will be on your business you should be! AI was ever present across all panels. If we can supply the models with high quality data and recruit the right data scientists, the potential to improve productivity, enhance precision, reduce cost and generally do things that we have hardly been able to imagine will quickly become a reality. Competing will be harder if these tools are not deployed in your business. Around the world too many farmers are unable to sustain their lifestyle with the revenue they generate from selling food. To ensure farmers keep farming rethinking business models to reward the risk they take on and diversifying the revenue streams a farming business can generate is crucial. Broad agreement that sustainable practices are the only viable way forward but it was stressed that being sustainable should not preclude a business being economically viable. Good business can be profitable and environmentally positive. Nobody is going to solve all the challenges themselves. The need to find aligned partners and collaborators came up many times. Success will depend on values alignment and an ability to think creatively through problems. There is a lot of work to be done in the next decade to imagine and deliver the future of food. The question of where are the dollars going to come from kept being raised. The VC boom is well and truly over, corporates in the sector are conservative meaning progress will come from entrepreneurs sweating their start-up significantly harder and for longer than they would need to in other sectors. A theme that did not feature as much as I had expected; the impact the new administration may have on food systems in the US and globally. There was hope research work continues and regulation is simplified. With the exception of the MAHA Movement (Make America Healthy Again) and its focus on ultra processed food little was said about how the administration may impact the future of food Globally, the food sector and government has a very complex relationship. They are highly dependent on each other yet this dependence stymies the drive to deliver innovation that moves the market forward. What might the food system look like today if it was less dependent on subsidies and more connected to the needs of the consumers and communities that it serves. There is more on these topics and others in the key takeaways summary.