The Four Horsemen of the Good Food Movement (Revistited)
Strenghtening the Good Food Movement by thinking about how it might be destroyed.
Note: I’m on vacation this week so here is a reprint of a February 2017 piece I wrote at my old Medium, with new annotations (below in italic block quotes) that discuss this essay from a 2023 point of view. The original text is untouched and I’ve updated the images with Midjourney AI.
A great way to understand how to strengthen something is to think about how you might destroy it if you were the enemy. It’s a thought experiment that can jolt the mind into thinking ruthlessly about where your weaknesses are so you can shore them up once the exercise is done.
The Good Food Movement is vital to ensuring that we can feed future generations without destroying their health or the health of the planet. It’s creating a food system where the inputs and outputs of the system can improve people, planet, and profit.
Today, the movement is comprised of the people who demand better information on how their food was made. It’s the people who shop their values and don’t support companies with damaging practices. It’s the companies and entrepreneurs— big and small — trying to establish more restorative methods of growing, processing, and distributing food. It’s the policymakers who are standing up to corporate greed and protecting our environment while making sure the most vulnerable people in the world don’t go hungry.
But growth in the Good Food Movement is not guaranteed. There’s no assured narrative where the future default is food that’s better for people, planet, and profit. In fact, there are four major things that could proliferate in the next decade and credibly disarm the Good Food Movement and take us backwards in time.
In the Bible, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were Death, Famine, War & Conquest. If these figures rode into your world, the end was near. For the Good Food Movement, there are also Four Horsemen that would usher in the end…
Apathy
When we stop caring about what we eat, the whole movement dissolves. Consumer power in the past decade has pushed the industry to make better for you products. Products that leave a lighter footprint on the planet. Products that are of higher quality and taste.
“We understand that increasing numbers of consumers are seeking authentic, genuine food experiences…and we know that they are skeptical of the ability of large, long-established food companies to deliver them,” said Campbell Soup CEO Denise Morrison. The food industry is listening. And while there’s a lot more to do, the lack of apathy so far has driven great changes across the food system, like fast-food chains going with cage-free eggs, to the explosion of farmers markets across America selling real food.
But distraction and complacency can end all of these gains and let those who make our food take shortcuts until their profit margins are greater and the quality of our food is lesser. If apathy marches into the consumer base, it leaves us open to taking what we’re given and simply putting up with it no matter what.
Note: While I don’t believe that eaters have become more apathetic about the food system since 2017, there have been moments where it feels like the zeitgeist has shifted its attention elsewhere since then. The pandemic was a period where many mainstream eaters rightly shifted focus to more basic, pressing matters of personal health and safety. We saw a temporary resurgence of junk food sales and natural and organic food brands—especially young startups—fell to the backburner as most people simply struggled to find any food at all. As we’ve seen time and time again, things like better nutrition and sustainability take a backseat to basic physiological needs, especially in times of extreme stress.
Denise Morrison abruptly retired from the CEO job in 2018 after lackluster financial performance and a massive $4.87B cash acquistion of Snyder’s-Lance to help the company lean into the then still rising snacking trend. Morrison was set on updating the legacy soup giant to better suit modern tastes for fresh foods and snacking. She led the $1.55B acquision of fresh juice and smoothe maker, Bolthouse Farms in 2012, which was later sold for $500MM in 2019 after rocky performance. Morrison wasn’t fired by her board, but it’s highly likely that she was compelled to retire after a series of bungled investments. It’s yet another example of how mismanaging investments to modernize old food commpanies can lead to the removal of progressive food CEOs.
Consolidation
When a few actors control our food system, the system tends to become more centralized in location, standardized in the choices we have, and the incentives to cater to the consumer become less. It’s all about efficiency.
Imagine all of our food came from one or two huge entities. Would that company have any incentive to innovate? Would that company have any incentive to create localized food systems with a dazzling array of complexity and variety? Anything from produce to processed foods would be made to suit the lowest common denominator consumer at the cheapest price possible.
A consolidated food system wants to gain economies of scale wherever possible to make the mechanism more efficient and profitable. And without the presence of new insurgent companies/organizations to change the conversation (like what we see happening in the natural foods industry), a monolithic food giant would have zero reason to continue to innovate and reinvent how food is grown or made.
When consolidation moves in, our choices wither away and our access to real and true food becomes compromised. Dissent is easily squashed and we’re all forced to settle for whatever is available.
Note: since 2017, more consolidation has happened in Big Food and the food startup funding market has stalled since the pandemic, with young upstart brands looking to change the food system having an incredibly tough time finding investment capital.
I wrote this article in February 2017 and just a few days later, Kraft Heinz made a $143B offer for Unilever that was ultimately rejected. In August of that year, Amazon rocked the food world by acquiring Whole Foods for $13B. Since then, there have been a slew of M&A activity in food including Bayer buying Monsanto for $68B in 2018, PepsiCo acquiring Rockstar for $4B in 2020, McCormick buying French’s Mustard and Frank’s Hot Sauce for $4.2B in June 2017, and JAB acquiring Dr Pepper Snapple Group for $19B in 2018.
With a tough economy and high food prices today, we may continue to see more activity as companies try to consolidate and cut costs.
False Truths
When we tacitly accept what people are selling us as being true, we cede our power to question authority and we’re easy to fool. There are a dizzying array of labels on food — both grown and packaged — and it’s hard to keep up with the minutiae of what each of them actually means.
In fact, many of the most common labels like “natural” and “organic,” either mean nothing at all or are loaded with exceptions that allow for nefarious inputs coming into our food.
If I wanted to cripple the Good Food Movement, I’d try my hardest to make it look like it was stronger than ever then compromise it behind the scenes where no one was looking. Labels like “natural” give us a false sense of security, and can obfuscate the fact that there are less than pure activities going into how food is made.
The industry knows that food shoppers have a 2 second attention span in the grocery aisle, so labeling claims are a convenient shorthand for those looking for higher quality products. And while not all labels are devoid of meaning, the fact that you can write “natural” on a product and have it be made from GMO ingredients or be flavored with an opaque mixture of “natural flavors,” is evidence that the False Truth horse has already left the stable.
Note: the amount of misinformation in the news and on the internet has sadly grown significantly since 2017. Just a year earlier, Trump was elected into office and we officially entered the unfortunate era of fake news. Tensions in the media about what’s true or not have continued to boil over, and we’ve seen more people creating their own platforms to serve as idealogical bubbles when they don’t agree with facts or the mainstream media, from QAnon, to Truth Social, to Black Rifle Coffee. We now live in a Chat-GPT world where the power of LLMs to create massive amounts of misinformation are a force to be reckoned with, especially in the upcoming 2024 American presidential election. Of all the Four Horsemen of the Good Food Movement, this one is the most nefarious and real today and likely for the foreseeable future.
Elitism
When Good Food is only for the most well-off, the movement fails. “23.5 million Americans live in areas without supermarkets or other places where they can access fresh, nutritious foods,” and even when a quality supermarket is accessible, many still lack the education, “perceptions and habits about diet and health,” that are necessary to elicit healthier eating habits.
If I wanted to disarm the Good Food Movement, I’d want to keep it stored away in affluent, hipster conclaves where a loud minority can feel good about themselves, but their progressive values fail to reach the mainstream.
For every honest farm-to-table restaurant in America, there are at least a dozen McDonald’s locations. We need to flip this ratio and make better food a right for everyone, not just for those who can afford it.
Note: humanitarian group Action Against Hunger mentinos that “From 2019 to 2022, the number of undernourished people grew by as many as 150 million, a crisis driven largely by conflict, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic.” Income inequality still remains high in America and across the globe, with the top 10% of wealthy families in the US owning around 76% of all wealth, as of 2019. The ability for those with lower incomes to attain fresh, healthy food is still relatively hard to do. Yet there have been and still are many food organizations focused on making high quality, nutritious foods affordable, from the now defunct but admirable Locol, to great companies like Everytable, Daily Table, FarmboxRX and more.
The Good Food Movement is strong, but we must remain vigilant to support what gains we’ve already made over the most recent generation. The Four Horsemen are all different manifestations of ceding control of what food options we have to put into our bodies. To resist, we as consumers must stay in the driver’s seat and dictate the conversation about what food gets made and eaten.
Unlike a true apocalyptic natural disaster or Biblical event, we as individuals have a lot of say in the matter of where our food system goes. But while the Bible’s version of the end of days heralds itself in grandiose fashion, it’s very easy to let apathy, consolidation, false truths, and elitism fester in small ways each day we shop, cook and eat.
There is no fantastic beast to slay in the interest of prolonging the Good Food Movement. Instead, it’s up to us to do battle in dozens of small, everyday ways throughout our lives. The fight is a small, daily one, and that’s how you keep the Good Food Movement alive and well.
Note: climate danger, public health issues, and inequality are as pressing today as they were 6 years ago when this article was originally written. The battle for a better food system continues and let’s hope we can see more progress toward that goal in the next 6 years.
I’ll be back on schedule next week with a new post. Thanks for reading and I hope you’re having a great summer.
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Footnotes
3 Recent posts from my Substack
3 Highlights from my current reading list
‘Ultra-Processed People’ Review: The Problem With Irresistible by Matthew Rees - WSJ
How existential risk became the biggest meme in AI by Will Douglas Heaven - MIT Technology Review
America Is… - New York Times Opinion
My email is mike@thefuturemarket.com for questions, comments, consulting, or speaking inquiries.
I am assuming you added the images this year. Very cool repurposing of an article with a fresh look and update! I like the idea.