The Ingredients for a Food System Revolution

What Past Pandemics Teach Us About the Future of Food and Agriculture

When the pandemic began last year, our team spent months researching and monitoring the coronavirus situation to better understand the implications on the food and agriculture industry. We worked to identify the areas of innovation critical to building a healthier and more sustainable food system, and those areas that would be most impacted by the pandemic.

One year later, it felt time to reassess. We wanted to learn from the past, apply our learnings to Covid-19, and then discern two things – what elements of this are cyclical and what elements of this are structural? To start, we delved deep into pandemic economic history. Our eyes focused on the structural and cyclical undercurrents sculpting post-pandemic worlds. Then, we reviewed our predictions from the last report on the Future of Food with the same structural and cyclical lens.

While there are many factors influencing the future of our food system, the study of past pandemic economic history is starkly consistent – an innovation cycle begins, and old habits and norms do shift.

In this report we will cover:

• Pandemic Economics – Recovery, Innovation, and Economic Factors

• The Future of Food – Structural versus Cyclical