CPG Brands Need to Front the Costs to Overhaul the Food System, But Consumers Will Pay in Long Term
CPG Brands Need to Front the Costs to Overhaul the Food System, But Consumers Will Pay in Long Term
Food Navigator featured Mitchell Presser in a recap of the FoodBytes! virtual forum, where he discussed the need for an overhaul of the agriculture supply chain.
“When you look at the supply chain – not just the delivery of the food to the retailer – but from the very, very beginning of agriculture, we are looking at a supply chain, a value chain that was probably designed in the 1800s, if not even earlier,” Mitchell said. “And it has been changed by Band-Aids, rather than a full overhaul, and that is because it is really expensive and really hard.”
He explained that the high cost of a full overhaul would require buy-in from stakeholders at every stage in the value chain – farms, manufacturers, retailers, the government, and consumers – but noted every level is not equally incentivized or financially capable of bankrolling change at scale at the same time to drive significant impact, with farmers facing tight financial constraints and limits in their ability to adopt new technologies and methods quickly and at scale with support or a guaranteed return on investment.
“A big challenge to my mind as investor, then, is really how do we reconceive things and how do we create systems [that]…drive the return on investment for farmers to be incentivized to drive change that benefits society and benefits all of us?” Mitchell asked.
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