Matthew Kessler
I want to start this in a strange place. So the first line of your LinkedIn profile, it really struck me. So you wrote, I was born with CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 322.16 ppm. Today they're hovering close to 430 parts per million.
Mike Barry
Yes, so what took me there? It was all about recognition of how fast the world's changed. But what a world, a steady state world we lived in then. And I think the story of CO2 in the atmosphere is a story of our globe, not just in terms of climate change and CO2 concentrations, it's been the rapid rise of the global population, global consumption, global economic activity, and all the negative impacts that have spun off, particularly around the environment, but also, you know, some significant ones around society as well.
Matthew
I want you to meet Mike Barry.
Mike
What most people won't know about me was my formative years in North of England seeing those hundreds of 1000s of good quality blue collar jobs go. And that welded into my beating heart this sense of social injustice and how the system just tramples individual lives and communities, whether they're around coal mines or potentially around farming and rural communities.
Matt
Mike was trained as a chemist. Some years later, he stepped into the world of big business and joined Mark & Spencers, or M&S, one of the ten biggest retailers in the UK.
Mike
And I've made a conscious decision to work within the belly of the beast to change it. Rather than campaign from outside. And we need both. We need people to do that.
Matt
Over time, Mike found he had a real knack for joining up the dots. In the early 2000s, he helped develop and implement Mark and Spencers’ award-winning Sustainability Program called Plan A, a roadmap for change.
Mike
What M&S learned, and was probably at the forefront of back in the early 2010s was delivering the words on paper. So there's lots of press releases still out there. Said I'm going to be net zero by 2040 to 2050. Nice, lofty ambition. Right thing to aim for. But there is no actual concrete plan to deliver it on a day to day basis.
And you know, a lot my gray hair I carry now is because, deep in the trenches of driving that integration, it was hard, it was hard to change a system sort of created for a different era, a steady state era, and that's where change actually happens, the more prosaic world of getting things done, not just the press release on the day.
Matt
Today we’re going to dive into Mike Barry’s theory of change for the food system, how to get things done.
Mike
I hope I come across as positive, pragmatic, supportive of transformation, rather than clinging on incrementally to what we have today.
Matthew
Welcome to Feed, a food systems podcast, presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler.
Today Mike Barry is a co-founder of consultant company the Planeatery Alliance along nutritionist Ali Morpeth. We take a helicopter view on how to change food systems in a more just and sustainable direction. Drawing from Mike’s retail experience, he explains why simplification is the future of sustainable retail.
Now you've got all these calls for food system transformation, and professionals use it so much in a way, it doesn't really mean anything, or it just means different things to different people. So to ask this question in another way, what's your view of incremental change in the food system?
Mike
I’ll give one minute of frame outside of the food system to ask your food system question.
So two great industrial sectors on the planet have started a very profound system to induce transformation, the power system going from fossil fuels to renewables, and the automobile system going from internal combustion engine to electric those two transformations I've just explained in 30 seconds, most men or women in the street will broadly understand what I'm talking about, where we are and where we need to get to. There's a vast amount of complexity beneath the surface, policy, economics, etc, but the book ends are pretty clear.
Matt
That’s not the case with the food system. The direction of travel is mostly agreed upon, though still debated. And as for the ‘how to get there’, there’s nothing near consensus on that.
So before getting to Mike’s version of the what and the how, he first explains the why.
Mike
The food system, the reason it needs to transform. It's the most polluting on the planet, not just in terms of carbon, which dominates the power sector, in the automobile sector, but every possible social environmental issue, health, nutrition, incomes for farmers, human rights for hundreds of millions of work in the supply chain. Carbon, water, biodiversity loss, soil loss, plastic pollution, you name it.
The food system's got its fingerprints on everything. It's an industry that turns over $10 trillion a year around the world, but causes $15 trillion of negative impact, on planet and people. It's an industry in a classical sense, that is running in deficit. But that deficit is picked up on the balance sheet of society and the planet on our behalf.
The challenge it's got, despite that vast footprint, and the fact that that vast footprint is negatively impacting the sector itself, the extreme weather that it's causing through its greenhouse gas emissions are blowing back, impacting the availability of cost and quality of food dramatically. Farmers and smallholders are leaving the industry in their droves because they make no money from it. It's hard, relentless work. They carry all the risk and none of the opportunity in food value chains.
Despite all that evidence, nothing happens. There's always inertia. There's always incumbency that clings on to the past. But a significant part of the inertia is it is really hard to define where we're at and where we need to go in the way that we can say diesel-electric.
Matt
In October 2025 the EAT lancet reports came out, which lay out the total social and environmental footprints of today’s food systems, and chart a different path forward. Mike puts a lot of stock in these reports.
Mike
It's given us a broad guiding star as to where we might want to get to. Never as neat and tidy as saying it's electric that we have for cars, but we've got a much better appreciation of where we need to get to.
So to answer your very specific question, we've been creeping along incrementally, 1% 2% 3% less bad for the last 10, 15, 20 years, sensing that that's not enough, but having neither the courage of a direction of travel to shift a world where it's 5% 10% 15% less impact every year, which is what we need.
Even though we've now got that sort of those bookends of where we are and where we need to get to, you've still got an industry trapped in the mindset of incrementalism. And there's lots of reasons why you're not being bold and brave at the moment: cost of living crisis, we've come through pandemics. We've come to Ukraine War, the energy crisis. There's so many reasons why the food system is saying, “I get what you say. But can we just wait till next year before we start the transformational journey?” And I'm saying, not sure it's the right analogy running out of runway in terms of starting that dramatic shift that we need to make.
Matthew
Mike and I spend the rest of the call talking about how to get that desirable food systems vision laid out in the EAT Lancet reports - A just and sustainable food system that nourishes all people, ensuring access to healthy, culturally appropriate diets, without breaching ecological limits.
Where the environmental impacts of food are reduced, supply chains remain resilient, workers are well paid, and shelves remain stocked.
To get there, Mike Barry first draws upon his experience in the retail sector.
Mike
So Mark & Spencer's tiny, isn't it? I mean, it's 4% market share at most in the UK, let alone global scale. And yet, M&S is still selling billions of items of food and drink every year through 1000s of shops and websites, all produced in several 100 food factories by 10s of 1000s of farmers and 1000s of raw material sources - the palm oil, the soy, the wheat, the cocoa, the sugar, et cetera, that goes into making those food products. Something like Walmart, is 25 times bigger, probably more now, 30 times bigger than Marks and Spencer. So you do the maths on their complexity of what they've got to change.
So this is a numbers game, to a degree. And one thing I suspect that the food system will have to do to become truly socially environmentally stable is simplify. It is simply too vast and too complex to get your arms round, in a conventional sense, to change, and some of that complexity will have to be removed, either in terms of the length of value chains, participants in value chains, and again, we'll talk a little bit later about the interface with the customer and how they make choices. That will have to be simplified. So if I had to pick one word that defines our journey towards a stable future as a food system, it's simplification.
Matthew
That's really interesting. And, I like to look at retailers, because it is a place of aggregation. It is where food producers, suppliers and consumers all interact. It's where, you know, in the professionals talking about the food system, everyday citizens, it's where they go to shop. It's where they get their food, right? So I think it is an interesting lever for change.
Mike
Just one of the thing that helps M&S with its, you know, the initial surge in the space was its business model was predominantly private label. So I don't know the exact split now, but the M&S joined was, in fact, 100% private label. Every product it sold was an MS product in an MS shop, and ultimately, website. So your ability to control where it's come from, and the stories you can tell your customers, allow you that simplification, within that paradigm.
Matthew
And can you just share what is, what is a private label?
Mike
So private label, in effect, is saying it's a Mark and Spencer product. So from Mark and Spencer shop, it's not branded goods. By and large, you know, the world, the world's big, well known consumer goods companies, this is marks and Spencer's ready meals come marks and Spencer's fruit, meat, fish. Everything has come through the M and S supply chain that it controls. It defines the standards that are met there. And equally, when it puts the customer puts it in their basket, virtually every product they'll put in their basket is an M and S product. So you can turn around and say, I know how it was produced to these consistent, coherent standards. If it's a typical basket in a typical supermarket, let's say 50 products, 20 or 30 of them might be private label from that supermarket, but 20 or 30 will be from some other supplier that probably has reasonable standards, but they will just be different across the waterfront, and therefore harder to reassure the customers that everything in this basket meets some basic standard.
Matthew
So maybe that was part of the secret sauce of Mark and Spencer's?
Mike
Yeah. But again, I would say again, I could come back to this word simplification. Private label is not the only way to be simpler, but it does help, certainly at the beginning of the journey. and I'm really interested in what's happening at places like Lidl and Aldi. And again disclosure, I've done a little bit of work with Lidl, but they again, have a very high proportion of private label. They have a very constrained product range, a few 1000 unique products in their stores, compared to many 10s of 1000s in other supermarkets. Again, I'm not preaching one model or another. I'm just saying that word simplification has probably helped M&S and Lidl make some early strides in this journey.
Matthew
So let's center on simplification and consider what is the role of AI and big data, right? Does that help the journey of simplification? Is that a missing link to keep up with the pace of change? That where we're having this mismatch of changes happening really fast in the world, but industry and the food system is not adjusting and keeping up with that.
Mike
So what I'm about to say, I'm going to put little asterisks or caveat by. I think AI, Big Data is transformational potentially, for the journey to a sustainable food system. However, the asterisk I'm putting by it is at a macro societal level, AI can be potentially hugely damaging to wider society. Which and we can come back to that and then pick that in a moment, but let me explain the positives. So if I was still M&S Now, I'd be developing two AI data enabled tools.
Matthew
Mike explains the two tools he would develop. The first is a digital twin of the business. That’s basically a living, virtual copy of how a company really works. So you can test decisions, spot problems, or try out ideas all before they hit the real world.
Mike
I've shared some numbers with you, billions of items through 1000s of shops and websites, hundreds of factories, 10s of 1000s of farms and raw material sources. I've got to navigate myself from, you know, high carbon, high impact business, to low carbon, low water impact, biodiversity impact, human impact, positive for farmers, positive for growers, etc. And the number of permutations of where I'm heading for is staggering.
There is no one with a spreadsheet can sit there and model how Mark Spencer gets from where it is now to where it needs to get to in the future. It's simply beyond the brain power of any conventional person or even machine of today. Once you have a digital twin of the business that allows you to say, let's just model replacing the livestock based protein in our ready meal range with 10 or 20% of plant based protein. Let's just model and we look through simply put three lenses.
What does it mean for the profits of this business, the customer acceptance of the changes you made, and the actual social environmental benefits it brings? Because there'll be trade offs, there'll be step forward on the environment, might be a step back, and social and vice versa. I can model all the hundreds of 1000s of permutations before I actually unleash them. I can run the test. I can test it in this digital world to say, this is what it would mean. My profits might go up, but customers might come with me, but actually generates a whole new range of environmental, social issues we didn't expect. It’s actually going to make things worse. So digital twin is the number one thing in house to drive the transformation front of house.
Matthew
The second one is for the front of the house. And that’s using AI and big data to help shape the food environment.
Mike
So this is how you market, your loyalty system, the products and the pricing of the promotion you have, the space that you give to certain products in your stores, how they sort of presented to people in stores to make them want to buy them, or not. That food environment is massively underappreciated.
I've already said the average customer walking to do a weekly shop in a supermarket wanting to buy 50 products is overwhelmed by noise in that food environment. And of course, we've got a social food environment around it as well, of influences and noise, misinformation. How do I start to make a choice, and again, I've got a simplistic vision to start with today, which says, soon, I'll go online with my favorite online food retailer. I'll buy 50 products, put them in a basket, and the algorithm will say to me at the end of that process: a high, medium or low carbon basket. I'll turn around. So I've heard of this carbon thing, climate, I'll try medium. Algorithm tells me the six products that stop it from being medium and offers me, in a split second, six replacements based upon my shopping behavior that allow it to be medium carbon.
So suddenly, rather than me looking at all these dozens of labels, reds, greens, ambers, you know, while the kids are crying next me, wanting to desperately get out of the supermarket. I put guardrails around my basket, but don't have to make lots of individual choices. And of course, having put a carbon guardrail round, I could put a salt guardrail around. I could put a human rights guardrail around, whatever my parameters for making choices. That's only possible through algorithmic choice based upon a robust data set, a digital passport of each individual product that's going into a basket. Okay, that's a very simplistic sketch to make a point, but the digital twin behind and the algorithmic choice machine front of house starts to overcome some of the significant barriers we've got this moment in time.
Matthew
That's a really interesting combination to put forward. And I would say there's different ethical concerns around AI generally. But even in those two examples, the behind the scenes versus the front of the house. And what data is being collected, and who owns the data and what do they do with it? There's also the water and energy footprint of these data centers, but like with all these things, context really matters. And for me, there's both good and bad uses of AI. In food and agriculture, more broadly, you're starting to see the different ways it's used, right, from mapping farm fields and searching for specific nutrient deficiencies in the soil, all the way to nutrition personalization, you know, where diets and meals are being tailored to the microbiome in your body.
Mike
AI, robotics, big data, remote senses come incredibly powerful for farmers and smallholders if they're given access to it and have equity in how it's deployed, using the benefits that accrue from it. So I think it's 70 or 80% upside provided, and it's a massive “provided”, the big food system helps and supports farmers to use it and benefit from it. Okay, so I'm just putting that provisor in. Let's move to the consumer bit. So I've talked very, very broadly, very quickly about algorithmic choice. Okay, lots of upsides of that, there might be some downsides we've got to predict, but larger positives.
The next big trend into the food system is the personalization of diet. Okay, that's different from Mike, you know, we might buy and enjoy similar food, but I need a bit more of this, and you need a bit less of that. And I can see a model now where the traditional siloed worlds of food, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, insurance and technology start to dissolve into platforms where, for a certain consideration, sir, I can give you a wrap around wellbeing experience for you and your family predominantly delivered through the food that you consume, but not exclusively. It's about devices. It's about monitors, about health insurance incentives, but the food system will be the heart of those business models. As we personalize diets, oh my goodness, you know that the upsides are enormous, and the health we've already talked about, the negative healthcare costs of the food system, this could be transformation in reducing those. However, who controls that data? If I'm holding, passing over to you as a food business, not just my credit card details, but my personal DNA profile, who holds that? How's it being used? How could it be hacked? And as we've GLPs as a sort of subset of that, does it create a new divide in society where only the wealthy, who are already being old fashioned, talking about who are already men who've already got a 32 inch waist, middle class athletes affluence can now shrink to a 28 inch waist look even better in the mirror. And unless you are morbidly obese, and the healthcare system picks up the price of bringing you away from obesity, there's a vast swathe of old fashioned language, the lower-middle class, the working class, that can't access this new frontier and are excluded from the not just the privatization of the healthcare system, but the privatization in the sense of the food system as well.
Matthew
We’re going to take a break and digest. But two short reflections. First, what if the GLP ones -the pharmaceutical drugs that are dialing up or down the hormones that help control appetite and boost weight loss, follow the same trajectory of electric cars? Where they start as a luxury product, and over time, become more affordable and accessible to all.
My second thought is more of a concern. Who is responsible for building guardrails that prevent against the biggest risk and worst case scenarios of these systems? Is it the AI companies - who seem incentivized to get people and companies to use their systems more, rather than less. Or is it national or international regulation? Perhaps a conversation with a future guest.
After the break,, we’ll talk about the topic of growth, and some positive examples of food systems change.
Matthew
Yeah, I think this is a good place to transition to another area that has broader societal consequences, which is the second thorny question to talk about, which is about business growth. What does business growth look like? And navigating that in a sustainable future? I can absolutely see the food business point of view here. We need to provide good paying jobs, keep the lights on in the store and keep the shelves stocked. I can also relate to the environmental movement concerns here, which is, you know, profit motives, are they always going to obstruct truly transformative action, and is there no way out of these problems other than consuming less overall? So how do you think about this?
Mike
So it's an interesting discussion, because at a macro level, I've got sympathy, at a whole economy level, that we consume too much stuff that we don't need to consume. There's discretionary consumption our lives. Well, you know, you buy an item from an online clothing retailer for a couple of quid or couple of dollars. You wear it once, you throw it away because you've been on Instagram once in it, you don't have seen again in it. That, to me, there is, there is a growth discussion to be had. The food system is a necessity. We need food to survive. So if the global population grows as it will, the food system inevitably grows. It is the type of growth that matters, the kinds of calories we consume, and are those good calories or bad calories produced in good or bad ways? I think is the real discussion. So I think a, and I'm going to use a provocative word in here, a degrowth narrative I don't think works for foods. Now remember, and I'm just going to talk as a former retailer now, net profits in the retail sector are still very low. You're talking two, 3. 4% at best. We're not talking the kind of returns net profits that big Tech's making, or big farmers making,
Matthew
You're saying here that there's, there's razor thin margins -
Mike
Razor thin margins. And again, this, I'm going to sort of qualify this in a second, but overall, retailers are competing ferociously in very active marketplaces. Just ground this in the UK marketplace now 10, 11, big retailers, they fight ferociously every day on price. Okay? And you can talk about how that actually ferocious competition. As good as it is for the end consumer drives environmental and social degradation down supply chains as people look to squeeze cost, you can have that argument. Could retailers and then the manufacturing base that sits beneath them offer longer term partnership to farmer, carry more share, more of the risk, particularly world of extreme weather impacting crops and availability. Could they do more to upskill the farming base through extension services? But I don't sit there and think retailers are getting fat on 2, 3, 4 percent margins. I think the behaviors and structure of procurement could be a lot more supportive.
Matthew
I really appreciate the big picture. And I wonder if we could ground this in some - you gave some examples, but maybe in some more tangible examples of companies or retailers that are navigating this.
Mike
So across the food landscape, I see scattered individual jigsaw piece puzzles of transformative enablers. Very few of them are joined together coherently to start to build the full picture, but I can see some examples of what I look at and think, ah, if every retailer did that, we’d be in a much better place.
Matthew
Mike’s first example returns to the basket approach that some retailers are exploring.
Mike
So rather than leaving the customer to try and make hundreds of individually complex social, environmental decisions as they rush around a shop or online, they're starting to step back and think about the totality of the basket that they offer to their customers. They're aligning everything that happens in their supply chain and how it flows into that basket. So it's much more systemic.
Matthew
While looking at the whole retail food environment is important, he says we also need to look at individual products, and what companies like Bold Bean Co in the UK are doing.
Mike
So it's making the world of beans sexy and desirable in the mass market. Now, there's always been connoisseurs of beans to say. It's way more than just baked beans or chickpeas. It's so much more. And there are so many different graduations of commoditized beans, pretty good beans and amazing beans. They take it to a whole new level of bold bean, the really wrapped together delicious product with a whole storytelling about how you can use those beans to make fantastic recipes, delicious meals. So to me, bull bean is a really modern example of a scalable, sustainable brand.
Matthew
Another company to look at is Tony’s Chocoloney which has this Willy Wonky type of marketing.
Mike
Tony's chocolate only similar, but here he's taking chocolate, which is an industry underpinned by a hugely impactful environmental impact of its supply chain, and again 10s of millions of smallholders who make carry all the risk of producing Cocoa or for very, very, very little return, and Tony's have put equity for those small holders and those producers at the heart of their business model, while still producing a delicious chocolate bar a competitive price that people want to Buy. So we're getting the social, environmental impact that we want to discuss on this technical podcast, but in a way that the average person the shop might want to engage with, because it's exciting, delicious product.
Just a third example, so I talked about data a lot, we need every individual product that flows through the UK global food system to have the same consistency. And carbon footprint the way it's described, where it's reported. So there's project programs like Mandra now, which is working with all the UK supermarkets to drive a common approach to carbon footprinting food, beyond carbon steadily, other environmental impacts, health impacts as well. So that when one retailer says my carbon footprint at my ready meal is 27 grams, and somebody else says my somebody else says, mine's 28 you're comparing apples with apples, not apples with oranges. And the final one I'll just put into the room is about how we buy so I'm going to use an area of the UK for those that know it, called East Anglia. A lot of the vegetables sold in UK supermarkets in season will come from East Anglia. Hundreds of farmers are producing vegetables. They're being bought by hundreds of different food companies from across the UK, maybe overseas. At the moment, everybody's having individual conversations. Farmer X is talking to retailer Y. It's really confusing, difficult, sub scale.
Matthew
Here’s another opportunity for aggregation and simplification. Groups like the Social Association Exchange and 3Keel are creating platforms where multiple different producers who want to produce to the higher standards can meet and effect a marketplace of hundreds of different buyers of their vegetables.
Mike
So the buyers are sort of paying farmers to use regenerative practices, helping them invest into better production systems. The retails, the hospitality companies, are getting better food, better quality, more resilient in the face of extreme weather, with less embedded carbon and harm in them as well. But because it's an active marketplace for the many, it's much more efficient as well, how it operates. So there are examples from across the system, from the food from the food marketplace to production, that we start to see change.
Matthew
These are all interesting examples. To pick up on one of them. In theory, I really like the idea of standardization, and how it can work to build trust and transparency—everyone using the same rules, the same metrics, to measure and communicate what’s inside of and what’s the impact of the food we’re eating.
At the same time, Mike also calls for simplifying the system, making it easier for producers to find markets, rewarding them for good practices, and making it simpler for consumers to shop and eat well. But something is nagging at me. I wonder if this pushes us towards a model where only a few big food companies can operate efficiently at this scale? And if so, what does that mean for corporate power and public trust?
I find there’s a tension here. Simplification is appealing, but it could also risk creating the opposite of what we want—less diversity and less transparency. I asked Mike for his thoughts on this dilemma.
Mike
It’s such an interesting question. I wish we had a whole other podcast on this. Because I think if we had some people on this call with us now that we say, Mike, that's that's wrong. What we need is a very much more resilient, smaller system of millions of small producers with access to the marketplace that are not trying to be a $10 billion a year turnover business. They're happy turning over quarter million, half a million, etc. But because there's so many of them, if one or two of them fail, or one or two fields fail because of extreme weather, the system carries on. Because you haven't got these single points of failure.
When I talk about simplification, I'm not talking about consolidation, okay? And if consolidation comes from what I'm asking from there, I'm framing it in the wrong way. So simplification, remember, I want customers to be able to make simpler choices. We want that to happen, but I don't want Mega Corp to be running it all. That will be failure.
We all sort of travel abroad. And you know, when we go abroad, we sometimes see the fact that in Europe, particularly in Europe, they have big supermarket systems, just like the UK's. I think they also sometimes have a more vibrant alternative food system, the farmers market direct sales from farmers to local populations, some of which is just food culture and heritage, some of which is enabled by local government and national government just giving people level playing field to compete with the bigbies.
I want diversity, but the end point of diversity has also got to be simplification of participation and choice as well. Because my final point, Matt, is I can see all the failings and faults of big food as it's currently constituted. I want to see a very different food system in the future. I don't think there's any plausible pathway to magic away what we have and replace it with a rural a deal of us all buying from the local farmer, just ain't going to happen for 8.2 billion people on the planet. There are significant elements of that small scale, direct marketplace that we need to promote to support far better than today. We also need big food as it's currently constituted, still to be around, but dramatically running in a dramatically different way. And that will mean some participants, big food participants, in every stage of the value chain, need to exit the market because they don't have the business model, the capability or the will to accept the need to transform.
Matthew
I think that's a great place to end. Mike Barry, co founder of the consultancy, Planeatery Alliance, thanks so much for joining us.
Mike
Matt, absolute pleasure.