Our modern centralised food systems have only existed for around 80 years, dawning with the advent of the Green Revolution and the Bretton Woods global economic order in the wake of WWII.

Prior to this the food system was a self organised and decentralised open market that endured for over 10,000 years.

For the first 60 years, our centralised food systems flourished with unprecedented yields and caloric abundance with promise of an eternal cornucopia. However, the artificial means of production and the centralised means of distribution have taken a massive toll on nature and society, slowly degrading their capacity.

In the last 20 years we've seen two major disruptions which have tested the limits of this centralised model.

The first was in 2008 with the Global Financial Crisis. During this time large volume, long haul food trade almost ground to a halt as access to credit dried up and international exchange rates spiked making trade unviable for global transactions. Fortunately levers were able to be pulled to stabilise the crisis and food trade resumed before acute shortages were felt.

The second was even more severe only 12 years later in 2020 with the pandemic lockdowns causing operational blackouts, threatening food access for billions of people. Food was stuck rotting at ports while small-scale regional food producers rallied to try filling the enormous gap. With massive financial injections and emergency interventions we were able to once again steady the ship, but at the cost of spiralling food price inflation.

Fortunately the two previous shocks gave us clues about where the redundancies are.

Both times we saw the market turn toward independent and small-scale food producers. As food security concerns mounted, so too did the demand for alternative supply. As an example, sales of local veg box schemes and regional food hubs spiked up to 4 times usual volumes during the lockdowns with customers being turned away due to overwhelmed supply and operating capacity.

However, this network for farms and artisans would have had ample capacity to serve many times more customers if the demand wasn't so instant. Small-scale producers form a vast, distributed productive base but much of their capacity remains economically constrained, not agronomically limited. The bottleneck is coordination and market access as opposed to land or skill.

Effectively, it was the otherwise marginalised long tail of food producers that formed the beginnings of a safety net.

Here lie the the untapped food system reserves that currently sit underutilised and ready to provide high quality, differentiated offerings to a growing demand for nutrient rich, high trust food.