Big Food climate resilience: overview
- 54% of food and beverage leaders view climate resilience as important, but only 6% have embedded it into corporate strategy
- Regulatory uncertainty, particularly around sustainability reporting, is slowing investment in resilience initiatives
- Climate resilience remains siloed, with supply chain teams driving action while leadership and R&D lag behind
- Short-term financial expectations make it difficult for long-term resilience projects to secure funding
- Companies may be overestimating the role of AI and robotics, while underinvesting in critical areas such as water technologies
As crops are destroyed by natural disasters, supply chains are disrupted and raw material prices spike, the time to invest in climate resilience is now.
But despite the urgency, a new report from Lumina Intelligence finds while that 54% of food and beverage leaders say climate resilience is important or very important, a mere 6% have fully embedded it into corporate strategy.
An extraordinary €822bn is the estimated economic loss caused by weather and climate-related extremes between 1980 and 2024. A quarter of that was lost between 2021 and 2024.
To assess how the food industry plans to secure itself, the Climate-Smart Resilience report sought the views of 250 senior leaders and operational decision-makers in food, drink, and ingredient manufacturing across the US, China, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Here are five key takeaways...
The bureaucratic burden is hindering progress
Regulatory compliance is an ever-increasing pressure, and the uncertainty surrounding it is cited as a barrier to investing in resilience. This was felt especially strongly by those operating in Europe (outside of the UK).
Within the web of compliance, sustainability reporting came out top as an area that creates the most uncertainty at 73.6%. While regulation is necessary and designed to achieve the ultimate goal of reducing the environmental impact of the industry, regulators should attempt to balance enforcement with certainty so that it doesn’t hinder climate investment.
There’s a disconnect within companies
Joining up all parts of a business to achieve the common goal of climate resilience will be necessary for companies to succeed. The report showed that frontline teams such as supply chain and procurement have by far the most influence on climate resilience at 53.2%, with R&D at the other end of the spectrum at 16.4%. Commercial and executive leadership were also far removed. ‘Their problem’ needs to become ‘our problem’, says the report.
Companies are also guilty of detaching even further by viewing climate risks as an external issue, expecting the broader value chain or customers to foot the bill. The problem lies in climate spend being treated as ‘an offloaded expense’ rather than an ‘internal value driver’.
It’s a long game but that’s not how it’s being played
The report found that if a project can’t prove how much it saves or protects within 12-24 months, it struggles to get signed off. This highlights the need for making climate resilience more measurable.
Until then, ‘it won’t become embedded into corporate strategy’, says the report. Cost savings were the largest measure of success at 56% while regulatory compliance sat at the bottom at 8.4%.
Access to better data will enable decision-makers to make smarter decisions, says the report, turning uncertain climate spend into well-structured, high-performing investments.
This needs to happen at pace – the findings indicate a sector caught between mounting climate threats and a persistent focus on short-term financial returns.
True climate-smart tech doesn’t lie in robotics and AI
When asked which technologies or innovations will have the greatest impact on improving climate resilience, standard operation tech came out top. Robotics topped the chart at 51%.
And yet, points out the report, true climate resilience happens much further upstream in areas such as water technologies and crop breeding. These came much lower down at 22.4% and 11.4%, respectively. ‘Climate-specific technology must be elevated from fringe R&D to an organisation’s core IT budget,’ says the report.
Resilience needs to become a strategy, not an ambition
Climate risk was universally acknowledged but manifests as inertia. No one factor came out significantly higher than others for explaining this inertia, which ‘suggests that companies are paralysed and unsure of how and where to deploy capital for maximum impact’.
When decision makers were asked to select three areas where they saw the most opportunity for climate resilience, such as accelerating adoption of regenerative agriculture or stronger collaboration across the value chain, the results came out fairly evenly across areas. ‘From an optimistic perspective,’ concludes the report, ‘this suggests that there will be multiple opportunities for those willing to calculated risks.’
