Recent revelations from Upside Foods employees raise serious questions about how much cultured meat companies have achieved after billions of dollars in investment in recent years, and whether wholecut cultivated meat products will ever be commercially viable. Upside meat has received a fifth of investment in cultured meats up to 2022, using its ability to produce wholecuts (rather than ground meat) as its distinguishing feature against competitors. However, interviews with employees reveal that bioreactors have failed to produce viable products and wholecuts still require intensive human intervention at small scales.

This report brings together farmers from a variety of agroecological backgrounds to understand what they may want from new technologies and how they decide which technologies are appropriate for their business. Through a series of workshops this report establishes the main values that underpin the decision making of agroecological farmers and which technologies could fit into this philosophy. 

This report by IPES-Food, documents a history of growing corporate influence over the governance of the food system. As transnational food and farming companies grow ever bigger, they have convinced governments that they must be central in all discussion on the future of food, and their ability to set the agenda of the food system is ever increasing as a result. The authors propose a set of transformative solutions to democratise decision making and redress the balance of power in the food system.

Successful programmes in both Global North countries (such as United States and Sweden) and Global South countries (including Paraguay and South Africa) demonstrate that public food procurement programmes have the potential to promote food security, stimulate biodiversity, revitalise local economies, foster sustainable production systems and more. However, these programmes can be hindered by a neoliberal government committed to financial austerity and the free market.  

This article examines the dynamics of transition away from an animal product based food system and evaluates the potential for novel plant based products to supplant meat and dairy. The authors found that public funding for the novel products is smaller than that for animal products by factors of 1,200 in the EU and 800 in the US.

Transforming the food system has become a mainstream conversation, but food systems interventions are diverse and generated by varied perspectives on the meaning of equitability and justice. For some, greater equity is gained through increased production or monetary support through aid, for others it requires redistribution of wealth and power or even the complete socio-economic transformation of society. This paper outlines four discourses of food system change; productionism, redistributionism, anti-capitalism and AID: donor rescue and compares the implications of these discourses for food system outcomes.

A group of 32 investors managing $7.3 trillion in assets issued their first ever call to the countries' finance chiefs ahead of a G20 summit, urging the group of wealthier countries to align agricultural subsidies with their climate and nature goals by the end of the decade.

Supermarkets provide the majority of food to consumers in the Western world and are therefore an excellent site for research into food environment interventions. However, such interventions can be hard to research and implement due to the misalignment of public health and commercial priorities, as well as difficulties with brokering relationships between supermarkets and researchers. This paper distils the experience of several studies to provide specific recommendations for conducting high quality research with commercial retail chains.

This study looked at consumer perceptions surrounding the healthiness of processed foods and how this relates to food classification systems and nutrient profiling. It involved an online survey of 498 Swiss consumers. Participants were asked to describe their associations and feelings towards ‘food produced by the food industry’.