The UK has many of the ingredients considered necessary for food system transformation: a substantial evidence base, active organisations across sectors, growing policy attention and broad recognition that the food system needs to become healthier, more sustainable and more equitable. Yet progress remains slow, fragmented and difficult to see at the scale or pace required.

Our project findings identify three complementary routes to change: policy, market, and local or citizen-led action. UK changemakers default to the policy route, but often combine different routes, while narrative and cultural change cut across all of them.

Five recurring barriers stall progress in the UK: complexity and contested evidence; attachment to the status quo and fear of change; lack of long-term ‘funded leadership’; unequal power and political risk; and research agendas that can be too top-down or impractical.

Crucially, UK changemakers did not simply ask for more research. They wanted better synthesis and translation of evidence, more practical understanding of what works and how change happens, earlier involvement in shaping research, stronger coordination across sectors, and longer-term, more flexible funding.

The central challenge is not a lack of activity or ideas. It is connecting existing knowledge, organisations and opportunities to sustain action over time.

A brief version of this report can be found here.

The main report, authored by TABLE and partners under this same project, can be found here.