Field Notes #5: The Assumptions are moving

What a summer. And quite literally, what a hot one.

As August draws to a close, I hope there has been at least some opportunity to slow down, switch off and properly rest. I increasingly think we need to give ourselves permission to do that, particularly in a world where being permanently busy has somehow become synonymous with being effective. There is something about summer that creates a little more space to think, notice things and let ideas percolate without immediately having to turn them into an action, a meeting or, heaven forbid, another Teams call.

But I also love this particular moment at the end of it. That slightly delicious back-to-school feeling when September is around the corner, diaries start filling up again and notebooks are metaphorically (or literally, in my case) opened. The possibilities of what we might do with the rest of the year feel almost limitless. I know January is supposed to be the great reset, but I have always thought September has far more energy about it. Perhaps it is years of conditioning, but it feels like a moment for fresh thinking and new conversations, and for asking whether we actually want to return to exactly the same things we were doing before the summer.

Maybe it was the heat that made me notice it more this year, but I have found myself collecting what at first looked like a fairly random set of signals. Greggs adapting its offer as hotter weather changes what people want to eat and drink. The extraordinary journey behind something as simple and familiar as a fish finger exposing the complexity and dependency hidden inside the abundance we have all come to take for granted. AI arriving on dairy farms, with one version of the story focused on its potential to improve animal welfare and another asking whether it will simply make intensive agriculture more intensive. Then there are GLP-1s, which are fascinating not only because of what they might mean for health but because they raise a rather extraordinary commercial question: what happens to a food economy that has spent decades becoming incredibly good at selling us more if a meaningful proportion of people suddenly want to eat less?

When the weather changes the commercial model

One of the examples I haven't been able to stop thinking about is Greggs. Hot weather has already been cited as a material trading issue for the business and this summer its cold drinks offer has been much more visible. On one level, that is simply good product development: the weather changes, consumers want something different and a smart business responds. But I think there is a bigger strategic question sitting underneath it, because so much of our food industry has been built around assumptions of relatively stable seasons, temperatures and patterns of consumer behaviour. What happens when those assumptions become less reliable?

Put very simply, which of today's hero products have been designed for a climate that no longer exists? If summers become consistently hotter, what happens to soup, chocolate, hot drinks and comfort food? And what happens to salads, cold drinks, ice cream and food-to-go? Follow exactly the same temperature shift backwards through the system and you quickly get into crop yields, water availability, animal productivity, ingredient volatility, energy demand, cold-chain capacity and insurance. Climate adaptation is not simply a sustainability issue. It is becoming portfolio strategy.

For years, much of the sustainability conversation has understandably been framed around the impact businesses have on the world: how do we reduce emissions, protect nature, improve health, source more responsibly and reduce the negative consequences of producing and selling food? Increasingly I find myself wanting to turn that lens around. What happens to the business as the world changes around it? What is climate's impact on your P&L? What happens to your portfolio if appetite changes? How much fragility have we accidentally engineered into supply chains in the pursuit of efficiency? These feel like very different questions and potentially some of the most commercially important ones the industry will have to answer over the next decade.

The illusion of permanence

Which brings me to the fish finger. Ed Conway recently traced the journey of an apparently very ordinary fish finger and found a supply chain spanning around 30,000 miles. There is something both extraordinary and slightly absurd about that. A cheap, familiar freezer staple can contain within it a vast network of fishing, processing, ingredients, manufacturing, freezing and logistics spread across the world. Yet the consumer experiences none of that complexity. They simply open the freezer door and expect it to be there.

Modern food systems are incredible in that respect. Decades of efficiency, scale, specialisation, global sourcing and logistics have given us reliable, affordable abundance. We should be careful not to romanticise a past in which food was less available and less varied, and took up a far greater proportion of household income. But I do wonder whether our success has also created an illusion of permanence: we have become so accustomed to abundance that we assume the system producing it will continue to function in roughly the same way.

Efficiency and resilience are not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes efficiency removes redundancy, sometimes specialisation creates dependency and sometimes a wonderfully optimised supply chain is wonderfully optimised right up until the moment something happens that it wasn't designed to withstand.

It has made me wonder whether we need to think not only about continuity of supply but continuity of nutrition too. This is not a new challenge. Food security and resilience have long been concerned with maintaining access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food through shocks and disruption. But I find the framing useful because it makes the test much more human. When disruption happens, can we continue to feed people well? Not simply can we provide enough calories or keep shelves looking full, but can people continue to access the nutrition they need through climate shocks, geopolitical disruption, crop failures, price spikes and changing availability? Seen through that lens, resilience raises different questions about what matters, what we protect and where the genuinely critical dependencies sit within the system.

What if appetite itself is moving?

While much of our resilience conversation focuses upstream on agriculture, climate, energy, water and logistics, another assumption may be changing at completely the opposite end of the value chain: appetite itself. We are exploring GLP-1s at Future Food Movement this autumn because I think their significance goes far beyond the pharmaceutical or health conversation. Nobody yet knows exactly how widespread their use will become or what their long-term impact on food consumption will be, and we should be wary of pretending otherwise. But even the possibility raises a fascinating strategic question.

The modern food economy has spent decades becoming extraordinarily sophisticated at encouraging consumption: more occasions, more convenience, more indulgence, more snacks and bigger baskets. What happens if a meaningful number of consumers simply want less? Suddenly GLP-1s become a question about portion architecture, pack sizes, restaurant economics, impulse categories, alcohol, protein and nutrition, as well as where value sits if volume changes. Perhaps the winning proposition becomes smaller but better. We don't know yet, which is precisely why the question is interesting.

And what are we asking technology to optimise for?

The same is true of technology. I saw two stories about AI and animal agriculture this summer which almost perfectly illustrated the tension. In one, M&S was rolling out AI-powered technology across dairy farms to help identify animal welfare issues earlier. In another, the question was whether AI entering factory farming would genuinely improve animal lives or simply allow an intensive system to become even more intensive and efficient. Both versions can be true because technology does not decide the outcome on its own. The system into which we deploy it does.

AI could help farmers understand animals better, use fewer inputs and forecast more accurately. It could reduce waste and make complex supply chains more transparent. It could also help us optimise a fundamentally unsustainable model faster. So perhaps the most interesting question for food leaders isn't simply what can AI do, but what are we asking it to optimise for? Margin? Productivity? Carbon? Nutrition? Animal welfare? Resilience? Affordability? Those choices will help determine the food system we end up with.

The leadership challenge hiding between the functions

Climate adaptation, global supply chains, continuity of nutrition, GLP-1s and AI can easily become five different conversations owned by five different teams and discussed at five different conferences. I think that would miss the point. They are all manifestations of the same leadership challenge. The assumptions are moving, often simultaneously, while most organisations are still structured to look at them separately.

Sustainability looks at climate and nature. Procurement looks at supply and price, commercial at customers, marketing at consumers, innovation at products, finance at risk and technology at efficiency. Everyone can be doing their job brilliantly and the organisation can still miss what is happening in the spaces between them. I increasingly think those spaces are where some of the biggest risks and opportunities in food now sit.

It is also why I feel more strongly than ever that food-system thinking cannot belong to one function, particularly not sustainability. The ability to understand how climate, health, technology, agriculture, economics, regulation and consumer behaviour interact is becoming a core leadership capability. The challenge is being able to zoom out far enough to see those connections and then zoom back in again and ask: so what does this actually mean for our business?

A question I cannot stop thinking about

I've been wondering what would happen if we made all of this much more tangible. Rather than discussing climate, health, technology, resilience and changing consumer behaviour as separate future trends, what if we put today's businesses, portfolios and products under genuine pressure and asked whether the assumptions behind them still hold?

It is something we have started exploring at Future Food Movement: looking towards 2035 not because it is a magical date, or because any of us can predict exactly what the world will look like then, but precisely because we can't. The interesting question isn't whether we can accurately forecast 2035. It is whether the decisions we are making today remain sensible across a range of plausible futures.

There is one question in particular that I can't stop thinking about: which of your biggest products would you simply never invent if you were starting the business in 2035? Imagine the conversation that could create around an executive table.

Perhaps we have been looking at food-system transition slightly backwards. We have understandably spent years asking what businesses need to do for the transition, but we now need to become equally sophisticated at asking what the transition is going to do to businesses. That doesn't diminish the responsibility to act on climate, nature, health or inequality. It connects those issues directly to strategy, investment, innovation and future value.

There will inevitably be winners and losers as the assumptions move, but disruption does not only destroy value. It reallocates it. Changing climate creates demand for different products. Changing appetite creates opportunities around nutrition and quality. Greater volatility increases the value of resilience, while technology makes things possible that were previously unimaginable.

The businesses that see those shifts early have choices. The businesses that see them late have consequences.

And perhaps that is the thought I want to carry into September. With all that lovely back-to-school energy and the temptation to get straight back onto the treadmill, maybe the most valuable thing leaders can do is resist immediately returning to business as usual and create a little space to ask which bits of “usual” they are still assuming will be true.

We don't need to predict the future perfectly. I don't think we can.

But we do need to get much better at noticing when the assumptions underneath the present have started to move.

Because they already have.

Signals referenced

• Hot weather, food demand and portfolio adaptation, including Greggs' recent trading experience and cold-drink expansion.

• Ed Conway's analysis of the global journey behind the '30,000-mile fish finger'.

• M&S deployment of AI-powered tools on dairy farms to support animal welfare monitoring.

• Contrasting debate about AI, automation and intensification in animal agriculture.

• The growing strategic implications of GLP-1 medicines for appetite, nutrition, portions and category economics.

Explore previous Field Notes

Every month I connect the dots across leadership conversations, emerging signals and developments shaping the future of food.

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