strategy+business | Food for thought

Your ten-minute power-read

for December 2025

Food for thought

Our global food system is unsustainable. Its practices are inflexible, inefficient, and inequitable — but they don’t have to be.

Read, click, and scroll on to explore the four keys to a better food system, and to see how a mixture of fresh ideas, nutritious cross-industry collaboration, and juicy new business models could help feed the future.

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10 min

Click on the keys, below right, to see innovative examples of how public, private, and not-for-profit organizations are teaming up across the value chain to tackle the challenges facing the food system.

Scaling technology and financing

Healthy and sustainable diets

Transparent and efficient supply chains

Climate change threatens key crops that supply 42% of the calories needed to feed the global population.

Better farming practices

Four keys to a better food system:

Last bite

The table is set for reinvention. As value moves through an ecosystem with a potential value of US$10 trillion in 2035, bold players will rethink how we grow, trade, and consume food. In doing so, they’ll cook up a new value chain—ripe with new participants, connections, and opportunities—turning today’s challenges into tomorrow’s sustainable, nourishing growth.

Better farming practices

Transparent and efficient supply chains

Healthy and sustainable diets

Scaling technology and financing

Advanced regenerative and precision practicesrestore ecosystems, conserve water andsoil, reduce emissions, and strengthen resilience, all while boosting yields.

Food system success stories:

Fish farming

Smarter spraying

Next-gen inputs

Sustainable soy

Fish farming

Smarter spraying

Next-gen inputs

Sustainable soy

Food system success stories

Also relevant to:

Transparent and efficient supply chains

Healthy and sustainable diets

Impact areas:

Direct

Indirect

Key enablers

Fish farming

An African aquaculture company uses closed-loop systems that clean and reuse water to raise yields while reducing waste, emissions, and environmental impact. It also deploys drones to overcome infrastructure gaps and reduce supply chain losses.

Also relevant to:

Transparent and efficient supply chains

Smarter spraying

John Deere’s digital farm platform and smart sprayer technology help reduce chemical use and increase crop yields, linking equipment, advice, and operations at scale.

Also relevant to:

Transparent and efficient supply chains

Supportive systems and incentives

Next-gen inputs

A start-up uses AI to find drought- and heat-resistant genes in crops; a second develops technologies to detect stress in plants. A third company, Nuseed, has developed a low-impact cover crop that can be used as feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel.

Also relevant to:

Transparent and efficient supply chains

Scaling technology and financing

Sustainable soy

The Sustainable Soy in the Cerrado Program (PSSC) promotes sustainable, deforestation-free soybean production in Brazil’s endangered Cerrado biome through innovation in agri start-ups.

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Illustrations by Paul Weston

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Stuti Sethi
Strategy&, Director, PwC Netherlands

Harald Dutzler
Global Consumer Goods Leader, PwC Strategy& Austria

Sabine Durand-Hayes
Global Consumer Markets Leader, PwC France

How can we secure the future of food?

PwC’s Voice of the Consumer 2025: A new recipe for the food industry

Reconfiguring the global food system

Further reading: Go deeper on the future of the food system

This special series of our award-winning podcast explores how the global economy will change over the decade ahead — and what that means for business and society.

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More issues

“Best-before” pricing

Cooling on demand

Freshness under pressure

“Best-before” pricing

Cooling on demand

Freshness under pressure

Food system success stories:

Building resilient, transparent, and efficientvalue chains will reduce waste, strengthen food security, and support fairer distribution of value.

About one-third of all food produced is lost or wasted; food supply chains arefragmented and vulnerable to shocks.

Also relevant to:

Transparent and efficient supply chains

High-pressure processing (HPP) uses pressure instead of heat to keep food safe and fresh longer. HPP tolling services allow producers (e.g., of juice, meat, and ready-to-eat meals) to access these benefits without buying expensive equipment.

Freshness under pressure

SokoFresh leases solar cold storage to Kenyan farmers, reducing their post-harvest losses and boosting their revenues, in part by enabling aggregated, better-timed sales.

Cooling on demand

“Best-before” pricing

Better supply chain transparency helped a UK retailer adopt dynamic pricing to discount fruits, vegetables, and other products close to their expiration dates, increasing sales by 2–5%. The move also improved margins by reducing food waste and optimizing transport and inventory costs.

Doorstep dining

Evidence-based eating

From lizard to jab

Cowless milk

Doorstep dining

Evidence-based eating

From lizard to jab

Cowless milk

Food system success stories:

Ensuring equitable access to affordable,nutritious, and sustainable diets will addressundernutrition and overconsumption, whilesupporting the long-term health of people and the planet.

800m+ people are food insecure, while obesity and diet-related disease continue to rise.

Also relevant to:

Better farming practices

Perfect Day, a food-tech start-up, produces animal-free dairy-alternative proteins from whey, using precision fermentation rather than cows, goats, etc.

Cowless milk

GLP-1 drugs, inspired by a hormone first found in Gila monster saliva, regulate blood sugar and appetite. Originally for diabetes, they’re now transforming obesity care and reshaping food and wellness markets.

From lizard to jab

A health-tech company uses at-home testing kits to generate individualized biological insights that guide customers’ daily food choices and overall wellness routines.

Evidence-based eating

Also relevant to:

Transparent and efficient supply chains

Doorstep dining

Customers subscribe to weekly deliveries of fresh ingredients and ready-to-eat meals. Data-driven demand planning, curated recipes, and efficient cold-chain logistics boost convenience and cut food waste.

India’s digital farmland

Follow the chocolate

Tractors as a service

India’s digital farmland

Follow the chocolate

Tractors as a service

Food system success stories:

By aligning finance, policy, technology, and collaboration, we can help everyone—from smallholding farmers to global companies—make the shift to a sustainable food system.

Insufficient finance flows and technology,misaligned policies, and weak collaboration across sectors thwart systemic change.

Also relevant to:

Better farming practices

Digital rental platforms help close the mechanization gap by enabling smallholder farmers to book tractors and implements on demand, matching localized machinery capacity with users via apps, telematics, and pay-as-you-go financing.

Tractors as a service

Chocolate maker Valrhona partners with Tilkal (a SaaS provider) on cocoa bean traceability. Such moves aid compliance with deforestation laws, strengthen ESG reporting, ensure fair payments to producers, and support investment in agro-ecological practices.

Follow the chocolate

India’s digital farmland

Agri Stack, a government-led digital ecosystem in India, creates interoperable platforms to collect and share agricultural data, connect stakeholders, and deliver data-driven services (everything from weather warnings to disaster payments) to farmers.