A New Blueprint for Big Food

Stop fighting the profit motive. Redirect it.

In March 2021, two activist hedge funds, Bluebell Capital and Artisan Partners, forced out Danone CEO Emmanuel Faber. He had spent nearly a decade trying to turn the $30 billion food company into an entreprise à mission, with carbon-adjusted earnings and a binding social charter. Within weeks, the board sided with the activists. The line that came out of that fight, from someone close to him, was that you “couldn’t sell yogurts and save the planet at the same time.”

The activists were right about Danone’s share price. Faber was right about almost everything else. Both being true is the trap.

Faber wasn’t an outlier. Annie’s, Stonyfield, Honest Tea, Ben & Jerry’s: each a purpose-driven brand acquired, watered down, or sued into compromise once the public markets got hold of them. The pattern has held for forty years because the financial system doesn’t yet reward what these companies were trying to do. As long as that’s true, the most determined CEO in the world can’t outrun the spreadsheet.

The change I’m interested in is what happens when the incentives shift. When the most profitable thing a food company can do also happens to build soil, treat its workers fairly, and improve the people eating its food. In that world, no one has to be lectured and no CEO has to be brave. Regenerative agriculture stops being a moral case and becomes a financial one, and the activist investor ends up pushing for the same outcome the sustainability advocate has been pushing for all along.

What follows is a sketch of that vision. How to actually build it is a conversation I want to have next.

What Gets Counted

It’s hard to argue people out of pursuing profit. Profit is the proxy modern humans use for what food and shelter once were: security, comfort, the freedom to spend a Saturday morning however you choose. Try to talk someone out of pursuing it and you’re working against survival logic itself. It’s the most reliable engine for getting humans to do hard, coordinated work over long time horizons.

The food system we have today is what happens when that engine is pointed at calorie maximization, shelf stability, and quarterly earnings. The food system we want is what would happen if it were pointed at different inputs.

In 1970, Milton Friedman wrote in the New York Times that the only social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits. The line shaped a generation of MBA programs and the food companies they staffed. Friedman’s mistake wasn’t the profit motive itself but the assumption that the inputs to the calculation were complete. They weren’t. Soil health, water, public health, and the welfare of farm workers were rounded to zero on every spreadsheet because nobody had figured out how to put a price on them. The companies that grew fastest were the ones best at exploiting that rounding error.

Policy can correct some of this. Disclosure rules will eventually put nature on the balance sheet, crop insurance reform may price soil health into farm economics, and federal procurement could favor better suppliers. These fights matter. But policy is slow, contested, and reversible at the next election. The faster, more durable change happens when the financial logic itself shifts. When a CFO at a Big Food company runs the numbers and concludes that buying from regenerative farms is the more profitable choice. That isn’t a moral discovery; it’s an accounting one.

The regenerative agriculture movement, the sustainable food advocates, the chefs and farmers rebuilding soil one season at a time, are doing important work, and the system has moved in the right direction because of them. I want that work to keep going.

But I also want to train my eye on a question their work doesn’t fully answer: how do we reach the much larger group of people who have never heard of regenerative agriculture, who don’t track sustainability or public health debates the way we do in the industry, who just want dinner to be cheap and good? That group is most of the market, and they won’t be moved by another values pitch. The lever that reaches them is price and pleasure: food that tastes better and costs about the same.

The Science We Need

Changing what gets rewarded means changing what gets measured. Soil health, nutrient density, flavor, worker welfare, water quality, the true downstream cost of cheap food: these things can’t drive financial decisions until they’re measurable, defensible, and pricable. Until they are, regenerative agriculture stays a story for people who already care.

This isn’t research that’s going to come from inside Big Food. Most corporate food R&D is reformulation work: less sugar, fewer additives, cleaner labels. The kind of fundamental work I’m describing is too slow, too speculative, and too disconnected from quarterly earnings to fit inside a CPG company. It happens at universities, in nonprofits, in philanthropic labs, in chefs’ research kitchens, and in academic-industry partnerships, and it needs the kind of patience those settings can offer.

The most important place to put that energy is on the connection between how food is grown and how it tastes. Eaters don’t consistently pay a premium for sustainability, sadly. They will sometimes pay a small premium for health. They consistently pay a premium for flavor.

Flavor is the thing eaters actively chase: the heirloom tomato, the small-batch ice cream, the better cup of coffee. Flavor moves money. If regenerative farming reliably produces more flavorful food, then sustainability has a path to revenue that runs straight through people’s mouths to their wallets.

The hypothesis, well-supported in wine and slowly being tested in produce, is that healthier soils produce more flavorful, more nutrient-dense food. Plants under mild stress in living soil make more secondary metabolites, the compounds responsible for color, aroma, and many of the antioxidants our bodies use.

Plants flooded with synthetic nitrogen in depleted soil get bigger, blander, and less nutritious. We need studies that establish this with the statistical confidence we apply to drugs, and we need tools that bring the measurements out of the lab and into the produce aisle. The endgame is a handheld spectrometer at the grocery store that lets a shopper scan a carrot and read its nutrient density on the spot. Whether that device exists yet is beside the point. What matters is the underlying science, which turns regenerative agriculture from a story into a measurable input that can be priced.

The other large area is pricing what currently has no price. Conventional food is artificially cheap because the costs of producing it, the soil degradation, the polluted water, the healthcare costs from diet-related disease, the exploited farm labor, show up on someone’s balance sheet, just not the food company’s.

There’s serious academic and policy work, sometimes called true cost accounting, that’s been trying to put dollar values on these externalities. The Rockefeller Foundation’s True Cost of American Food report estimated that the real price of conventional food is roughly three times the supermarket price once those externalities are tallied. Get those numbers into financial accounting standards, into climate disclosures, into supply contracts and supplier scorecards, and the cheap commodity ingredient stops being cheap. The CFO sourcing from regenerative farms today is paying a premium against an unfairly low conventional price. Make conventional food show its real cost, and the regenerative premium narrows or vanishes.

There’s also breeding for flavor, smaller in scale than the other two but worth mentioning. For seventy years, fruits and vegetables have been bred for yield, shelf life, and shipping tolerance, and flavor wasn’t a selection pressure. The Honeycrisp apple is the proof that breeding for taste at scale is possible. Run that playbook across more crops and the flavor gap closes between fresh produce and engineered snack food. A bag of Doritos isn’t naturally more delicious than a carrot. We just spent more on the chip.

This is the connection the food system has been missing: sustainability and health on one side, pleasure and hedonism on the other, with no scientifically established bridge between them. Build the bridge and the rest follows.

What This Looks Like When It Works

Pull these threads together and the food system reorganizes around itself.

The most profitable carrot is the most flavorful one, grown in living soil. Procurement officers buy it because the data says it sells, and the farmer who builds soil makes more money than the farmer who depletes it. Nobody had to be lectured; the economics reorganized.

Picture a normal-looking cracker, sold at Target and Costco, made from a four-crop rotation: winter wheat, a nitrogen-fixing legume, a deep-rooted oilseed, and a cover crop. The bill of materials is the rotation plan. Scale that to a $10 billion brand, and the more crackers sold, the more rotation acres demanded. Growth becomes good for the soil because growth is the rotation. Patagonia Provisions has shown a glimpse of this with Kernza, the perennial grain whose ten-foot roots build soil while it grows. Long Root Ale is small. The principle is enormous at scale.

In that world, the activist investor pushing a food company for 20% growth is, by accident, pushing for more rotation acres, more nitrogen-fixing legumes, more nutritious produce on shelves, more fairly paid farm workers. They’re pushing for everything the regenerative movement has been pushing for through volunteer effort. Regenerative agriculture, formerly a moral cause, becomes a P&L line item that goes up and to the right.

This is the structural difference, and it’s what makes this approach more durable than ESG. Today, when a Big Food company has a sustainability program, that program lives next to the profit-generating part of the business as a kind of supplement: nice when times are good, expendable when they’re not.

The first programs cut in a tough quarter are always the ones that aren’t producing revenue. In the world I’m describing, sustainability isn’t a cost center living next to the engine. It is the engine. Cutting it doesn’t trim costs; it kills the business. Companies are built to seek and defend profit, and they can be relied on to fight for whatever activity is producing it. Make profit run through soil health, worker welfare, and nutrient density, and those things become things companies will fight to protect.

When a hedge fund analyst looks at a company built this way, they don’t see soft margins to cut. They see compounding moats: soil that produces better food at lower long-term input cost, consumer trust earned through measurable nutrient density, pricing power that holds up against private label. Cutting the regenerative supply chain destroys the moat. The defense isn’t a charter document. It’s the economics.

The Wager

The food companies I want to exist aren’t the ones that make a moral case for better food. The case for moral food has been made for a hundred years. Some of it has won. Most of it has been bought, watered down, or replaced with cornstarch.

The food companies I want to exist make better food because the economics are on their side. Their soil produces more, their flavor is measurably better, and their unit economics improve as they scale. Their CEOs don’t have to give speeches at Davos about purpose; they show up at earnings calls and post strong numbers.

This is what the profit motive looks like pointed at people, planet, and palate: not a moral revolution but a redirection of energy that already exists, applied to inputs that have always been there but were rounded to zero on the spreadsheet.

It’s a radical vision, and I won’t pretend otherwise. It depends on research that hasn’t been done, on accounting standards that don’t exist yet, on a kind of food company that isn’t currently being built. But every other approach the food movement has tried for the past forty years has hit a similar wall. The mission-driven CEO runs into the activist investor. The certification label runs into commodity-priced competition. The boycott runs into a generation of consumers who don’t remember what they were boycotting. That friction isn’t accidental. It comes from trying to insert mission into a system whose underlying incentives are pulling the other way.

The vision in this essay is an attempt to remove the friction by routing mission and profit through the same activity, so the system stops fighting itself. Whether it can actually be built at scale, I don’t know. But the alternatives have been slow, contested, and reversible, and the climate, the soil, and the diseases of the modern diet aren’t waiting for slow approaches to slowly succeed.

Radical change requires radical ideas. This is one. The work now is to pressure-test it, fund the science it depends on, and start building.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.