Sustainability will be as key to food tech as outcomes

Significance

Food tech -- using technology to improve how food is grown, produced, distributed and consumed -- is critical to meeting consumption needs, and to reducing if not reversing the adverse effects of the current food system.

Impacts

• To speed up the retail market entry of items such as lab grown meat, regulators will modernise their reviews to account for tech advances.
• Food tech focuses on output and distribution but wastage needs more attention; food now wasted could feed over 1 billion people per year.
• Fertiliser and feed shortages will spark R&D in areas such as processed animal proteins (eg, insects in animal feed); Europe allows this.
• Effective communication, education and mitigating misinformation will be crucial to broadening the adoption of food tech innovations.