How can we create just and regenerative routes to market for the UK food system?

Download the infographic as a PDF

Transforming the UK food system to embrace regenerative practices depends on forging innovative and equitable routes to market. This pivotal shift demands not only bold individual, action but also a united collective drive. Recognising this need, Forum for the Future convened a collaborative workstream with a group of 20 organisations – from farming, innovation, civil society and food industry sectors – over the first half of 2024. Through a series of collaborative workshops, this workstream explored the potential for regenerative routes to market for regenerative food, generating actionable insights and forging a pathway towards a more just and regenerative food system. 

The workshops revealed several key insights and guiding principles crucial for shaping the future of regenerative pathways to market. Here, we’ve identified five critical areas that are pivotal for advancing routes to market: 

1. Aligning on a vision of the future 

The workshops brought together a diverse group from across the food system to understand what’s already happening to support new routes to market, and where there is alignment on challenges, efforts, outcomes and ideas. While it wasn’t a full diagnostic workshop, this discussion gave us a shared vision based on the outcomes that mattered to the group as central to achieving a just transition to regenerative agriculture in the UK. Collaborative processes like this enable the group to see the whole picture and how their work fits into a wider systemic approach to change. 

We grappled with a key question: Will adapting existing markets be enough to achieve the outcomes of a just and regenerative food system (similar to the path of organic produce) or do we need to create entirely new markets? Answers to this varied, but we did agree on a future vision that leverages the skills and resources of all existing food system stakeholders. This shared vision enabled participants to find common ground, explore their roles and understand what others are doing within the food system. 

Using a futures process, we saw a future where: 

• business, land and supply chains models that centre equity and democracy have mainstreamed or become the norm;  

• government policy supports more local food production that engages communities and consumers and achieves better health outcomes;  

• government policy and regulation support the infrastructure for more diverse and decentralised local production, in a way that replaces or augments traditional supermarket supply chains;  

• finance and innovation on farm drive climate adaptation, diversification, and a just transition. 

2. Identifying opportunities for how we create routes to market for regenerative produce 

Many of the organisations and farmers involved in the workstream are already championing, investing in and innovating ways to enable a regenerative transition of the UK food system and new routes to market. Our goal was to spotlight these efforts and demonstrate how more collaborative action and increased funding and support from other actors in the system, such as retailers, government and local authorities, could amplify their impact.  

Through insightful discussions and provocations, the group identified three key opportunity areas for enabling new routes to market: 

1. Promoting regenerative produce by highlighting the true costs and benefits of food and its production through new accounting, pricing and taxation 

2. Innovating new business, land, sourcing and procurement models that more equitably distribute value and risk in the supply chain so that regenerative practices become mainstream 

3. Creating new infrastructure that enables regenerative agriculture through more local food production, aggregation and distribution
   

You can download the opportunity provocations we used here. 

3. Incorporating true cost accounting 

Through our collaborative discussions, the group recognised that true cost accounting could be a game-changer for bringing more regenerative products to market. By accounting for the true value of food, including environmental benefits, nutrient density, and positive social outcomes, this approach could ensure that food produced regeneratively is the first choice for procurement and therefore consumers. As the story of organic food illustrates, achieving this shift isn’t an easy or linear journey and requires multiple interventions. 

To help unlock this potential, and in the absence of a recognised, uniform definition and regulation of ‘regenerative’ agriculture, we need more actors trialing certification and metrics - such as the Global Farm Metric, A Greener World, and the Cool Food Calculator - that make the benefits of regenerative practices visible. This involves publishing and aggregating outcomes from farms to clearly show the advantages. Organisations are already developing this thinking and trialing data capture. 

Government policy and regulation can support in this area, including taxing food with poor outcomes more heavily, or mandating reporting on multiple outcomes. Additionally, retailers can help by adapting and redefining procurement specifications to better support regenerative outcomes. 

4. Enhancing infrastructure for more local food distribution 

In our discussions, the workstream participants were also passionate about the opportunities for enhancing local infrastructure, which is vital for increasing the production and distribution of regenerative food. We highlighted the need for more resilient and distributed local supply chains with local production models, such as Community Supported Agriculture and urban farming. Supporting infrastructure includes data collaborations for bioregional and local food hubs, and integration of more local processing and aggregation of regenerative, local produce. Additional enablers include campaigns that invest in local production capabilities and platforms that enable suppliers to access and procure from these local sources. 

We also addressed the challenge of engaging and working with processors, who are often not equipped to work with small or diverse product or ingredient batches. However, we noted several solutions for building an enabling environment for scaling local processing, including  programmes, such as Roots to Regeneration, that explore the mindset needed for regenerative transition, and policy advocacy that works with processors, such as abattoirs. 

We also acknowledged that retailers have the infrastructure and efficiencies of scale to support new routes to market, and should at least experiment with engaging with distributed, local food networks. Policy advocacy should encourage government and local authorities to develop procurement and sourcing policies to grow local food system capacity while also supporting data infrastructure and pushing for landscape-level policy development that enables farmers to meet multiple outcomes. 

5. Embedding more equitable distribution of value and risk in the supply chain 

Finally, there was a desire to distribute value and risk more equitably within the supply chain. From new business models based on commoning or stewardship ownership, to the more equitable elevation of different voices in the conversation, all work to center equity and democracy in our food system was seen as welcome and necessary, with a key role for government to support this through funding and policy. 

What else needs to happen? 

The culmination of this workstream is a visual map capturing the ambition, opportunities, actions and challenges shaping the journey towards a future with markets for regenerative produce at scale. We invite interested food actors to explore the map to help them understand where they might fit in this picture, where their potential for action lies, and who they could connect with to make more progress. 

Throughout the workshop series, we experimented with how collaborative action can unlock new opportunities and ideas. Acknowledging that so many of the challenges require collective action, we asked participants what they could do together to address their respective individual barriers. These conversations between people who might not otherwise have the chance to meet or work together, were a valuable part of the overall process. 

The workshops enabled a diverse and ambitious group of changemakers to build shared visions and explore bold ideas for the food system. But this is just the beginning. We encourage other actors in the food system to consider the power they have to try something new and to connect with other actors within and beyond their own supply chains and sectors, to combine forces on nurturing routes to market for regenerative foods as part of the UK’s urgently needed food transition. 

“The curation has been incredible. In our early sessions I think I was sceptical about how we could make progress in this complex topic. But the scenarios we worked through today summed things up perfectly and gave us a platform for action.” Clare Hill, Planton Farms 

“Today has been a reminder about the importance of planning for future generations. Helen Browning planting oak trees that she will never see mature. The Forum for the Future team planning food systems that will be vital for the survival of future generations.” Nick Weir, Open Food Network