25 June 2025

👉🏼 Read the report here 👈🏼

Who was interviewed?

• Alice Ritchie, head of healthy & sustainable diets, Tesco
• Anna Taylor, executive director, The Food Foundation
• Anna Turrell, global sustainability leader
• Caroline Orfila Jenkins, vice president of science and technology, Oatly
• Daniella Vega, global senior vice president health & sustainability, Ahold Delhaize
• Dr. Gunhild Anker Stordalen, co-founder and executive chair, EAT
• Nigel Murray, managing director of Booths & Defra Food & Drink Sector Council member
• Sandra Bogelein, lead analyst for people and net zero, Climate Change Committee
• Sue Pritchard, chief executive, The Food Farming and Countryside Commission
• Tim Lang, emeritus professor of food policy, City St George’s, University of London

15 barriers that interconnect to resist change

Leaders were asked; ‘if the case for a healthy and sustainable diet is so compelling, why hasn’t it happened yet?’ Fifteen key interconnected barriers were identified that act together to create powerful resistance to change. Overcoming them requires not just addressing each in isolation, but fundamentally rethinking how the entire system operates.

🤔MINDSET & APPROACH💭

1. Companies tinker at the edges rather than recognising transformation as necessary: Most food businesses still approach sustainability and health issues as reputational issues to be managed in the here and now rather than recognising that transformation change is needed to ensure future relevance, growth, and resilience.
2. There is a disconnect between sustainability language and business language: The language and metrics around ‘carbon footprints’, ‘nature restoration’ and ‘improved health’ remain meaningless to most people working in food value chains. “We need to speak a business language. Our colleagues talk about products, we talk about carbon. We need to build a bridge between the two narratives. We have massively overcomplicated the food transformation” – Anna Turrell.
3. Short term business decision-making makes it hard to think about long-term transformation: Goals set for 2030, 2040, or 2050 feel like light years away from the daily reality of operating a food business. This disconnect makes it easy to prioritise immediate commercial pressures over longer-term transformation.
4. There is no guiding commercially relevant ‘north star’: Unlike the automotive industry’s (relatively) clear pathway from combustion engines to electric vehicles, food system transformation lacks a single, simple end-state. Multiple simultaneous changes across production, processing, marketing, availability and consumption are needed, which makes it harder to galvanise coordinated action. “We’ve got to reframe what we want from [the British food system”.  I believe that our future macro goal has to be based on the premise that prevention is better than cure for our climate and our health” – Prof Tim Lang.

🏭OPERATIONS AND STRUCTURES 🚚

1. There is a disconnect within businesses between those working on sustainability and those making business decisions: Most businesses either lack the technical experts needed to drive healthy sustainable diet transformation, or, more often, these specialists remain disconnected from core commercial functions. This means the people making daily business decisions are often disengaged from the transformation efforts that only they can implement at scale.
2. Data collection is disordered, clumpy and inaccurate: The food system’s vast scale requires sophisticated digital solutions to measure, manage and improve performance. Yet much of the sector still relies on highly inefficient and inaccurate manual tracking of data.
3. There is an over-focus on production, rather than consumption-side levers:Most interventions target production practices on farms, in fisheries, and inside factories – operations that feel distant and abstract to most consumers and many food industry employees. This focus fails to address the critical consumption-side levers that determine the food choices people make, and the business decisions that shape what’s available, affordable, and appealing.
4. Constant crisis management has left little energy to think big about change: Recent years have brought unprecedented challenges – the pandemic, soaring energy costs from the Ukraine conflict, extreme weather events, and changing farm subsidy schemes. The sector is exhausted, with little capacity to think, let alone act, big or bold. It also remains ill prepared to deal with further, even more consequential shocks.

🏦MARKET AND CONSUMER 🛒

1. Commercial levers are not aligned with public health and environmental goals: The way products are priced, promoted, and positioned actively steers people towards options that are less healthy and less sustainable. Until these commercial levers are aligned with public health and environmental goals, progress will remain limited. “If you want people to take more personal responsibility, you have to give them more agency [and] create environments which allow them to exercise that agency” – Anna Taylor.
2. Sustainable, healthy options are perceived as holding trade-offs for consumers, while the true cost of damaging products remains hidden: Whether real or perceived, many consumers and businesses see sustainable, healthy options as more expensive, less tasty, inconvenient, and failing to respect long established eating cultures. This fuels resistance to change, while the true costs of unhealthy, unsustainable food choices remain hidden from market prices.
3. Consumers are bombarded with product messages, so they stick with the status quo: Consumers are bombarded with nutrition claims, product labels, influencer endorsements, certifications, greenwash, and counter-claims – most of which operate at the individual product level. This overwhelming information landscape creates confusion, erodes trust, and ultimately leads to decision fatigue, so customers stick with the status quo. “What we have learned over the years is how important it is to make communication about quite complex topics, such as sustainable dietary change, as easy and as engaging as possible” – Caroline Orfila Jenkins.

⚖️POLICY & GOVERNANCE 📜

1. Institutional frameworks create a lack of coordination between government departments: The UK has one of the most centralised decision-making systems among Western democracies. When it comes to food, that centralisation becomes a bottleneck: the scale and complexity of the food system means it competes with every other major issue at the doors of government. There is little coordination between health, environment, education, trade, and treasury.
2. There is no long-term policy framework for a very competitive sector to work with: A highly competitive, low-margin sector dealing with multiple short-term pressures needs a well-coordinated, long-term policy framework. Instead, food businesses face a patchwork of contradictory and frequently changing regulations that lack ambition and fail to create the certainty needed for transformative investment. “Governments need to set both ambition and the guardrails for the pace and scale of change that’s needed” – Sue Pritchard.
3. Voluntary initiatives don’t work and are open to lobbying interests: Food businesses and policymakers have set numerous voluntary commitments to reduce their health and environmental footprints, but these are often fragmented and lack collective momentum. Even when sector-wide partnerships are created, they consistently fail to achieve universal participation, leaving leading companies competitively disadvantaged by carrying the costs of transformation while laggards benefit from inaction without consequence. This imbalance is further fuelled by lobbying efforts to weaken or delay the very policies needed to level the playing field, even when more progressive businesses publicly support them. “Only proper regulation can drive the whole sector change we need” – Anna Taylor.
4. More voices are needed – it can’t just be decided between Big Business and Big Government: What’s missing is a joined-up, place-based strategy, supported by national ambition but delivered through local innovation and leadership. “We need to bring many more voices to the table. This cannot just be a conversation in a closed room between Big Government and Big Business. We need to be engaging farmers and their communities. People living on tight budgets. Voices that some may say are ‘hard to reach’ – but they are not if you are willing to go to where they are” – Sue Pritchard.

So, those are the barriers, but how do we make healthy and sustainable diets a reality? Head to Part 3, page 16 of Planeatry’s report. (I’ll digest this for you too, in time, but this week is a busy one!)

A word from Mike Barry, co-founder of Planeatry

(Yes, the Mike Barry, of M&S Plan-A fame. Planeatry is also co-founded by Ali Morpeth, our excellent Policy Champion for sustainable and healthy diets).

“The global food system has begun a complex but very necessary transformation to reduce significantly its impact on society and the planet. Like the transformation of the power and automotive sectors this will see the deployment of multiple new technologies across value chains.

“But even more profoundly, this transformation will be shaped by a change in our relationship with our diet, our weekly shopping basket and individual meal choices. This shift to a healthy and sustainable diet (HSD), one that is good for human and planetary health alike, will re-shape the food system from field to fork.

“Our White Paper, based on the insights of ten leaders from across the global food system, highlights the imperative for this transformation, the barriers that we face in delivering it successfully, and, most importantly, ten practical ways to overcome them.”