This report provides disclosure of conflicts of interest of the 20 members of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee who determine the national Dietary Guidelines for America. The report found that almost half of the members had a medium to high risk of conflict of interest due to connections with industry actors.

Supported by thirty six well-known organisations, Royal Colleges and charities, a new campaign ‘Recipe for Change’ is calling on the Government to introduce a new industry levy to make food healthier. The campaign highlights research by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine demonstrating that salt and sugar levies could prevent over 1 million cases of cardiovascular disease (CVD), 571,00 cases of type 2 diabetes, 11,000 cases of cancer and 249,000 cases of respiratory disease.

Given the huge impact that the food system has on climate change, the food industry is coming under increasing pressure from investors, politicians, environmental groups and consumers to clean up their operations and set out strong net zero targets. However this is exerting downward pressure on farmers who are being forced to comply with large industry players' demands or risk losing their contracts.

In the UK, there is a pervasive narrative that people don't want a ‘nanny state’ intervening in the food system, they only want ‘cheap food’. This report, based on extensive public dialogue sessions in Birmingham and Cambridge, and a new national poll of 2,000 people, shows that citizens across all demographics, ages and political groups reject these concerns and overwhelmingly back increasing government intervention to fix the food system.  

58 academics have joined forces with two NGOs, the Environmental Paper Network and Fern, to draft a letter to MEPs warning them about misleading industry funded studies, including those by McDonald’s and the European Paper and Packaging Association. The letter highlights that the reports directly contradict the European Commission’s Impact Assessment and the UN report on single-use, and are sowing doubt about policies to reduce single-use packaging.

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.