In this talk Paul Matteucci outlines three possible trajectories for the global food system. The first, a "supply‑crash" future, imagines depleted oceans and soils leading to war, pestilence and famine. The second, a reductionist future, is exemplified by companies like Soylent and speculative ideas such as photosynthetic clothing or engineered human cells that would turn people into solar panels; Matteucci argues that while such solutions can provide nutrition, they ignore food’s cultural, social and emotional roles. The third scenario, which he calls Food System 6.0, is a sustainable, scalable, economically rational system built from many entrepreneurial experiments and compatible with existing Food 5.0 components. He then maps the ecosystem of change agents—food‑movement activists, governments, NGOs, big‑ag supply chains (Cargill, Monsanto, DuPont, Tyson), big‑ag demand (Walmart, Kroger, McDonald’s), healthcare/insurers, and entrepreneurs—highlighting their incentives, constraints, and the high switching costs that make big‑ag supply a major barrier. Finally, Matteucci discusses market opportunities for entrepreneurs, noting sub‑markets worth $1‑$2 billion or more, the importance of fitting new technologies into existing adoption pathways, and the strategic advantage of partnering with established players such as Purina.
Chapters
So if you take the don't do anything future to its logical extreme, you end up with a supply crash. Eventually, the oceans are depleted, the soil can— resources have been depleted, and you get what I call the supply crash future. May or may not happen. I like to call this war, pestilence, and famine. A friend of mine said I should change the P to a T and call it that. T, pestilence, and famine. Second possible future. There's a company called Soylent. Anybody know Soylent out here? Okay, so their idea is that food is fuel and we ought to figure out just how to drink 3 glasses of something a day that provides all of our nourishment and then get on with the other stuff in our lives. OK. There's a famous guy, investor named David Robinson. He says, I regard food as fuel. I am not a brunch person. I am a brunch person. So one of the ideas, you take this to its logical extreme, just like the logical extreme of doing nothing was lack of productivity of the planet. You take this to its logical extreme, and I call it eliminate the middleman. I was at MIT, and a guy had an idea. If we can just figure out a way to do photosynthetic clothing, And we can figure out how to plug that right into the human energy system, we wouldn't need food at all. We would just stand out in the sun. I kind of like the idea because I look good in green. But the problem is that you end up— sometime it's autumn, and God forbid winter comes around because it's hard to photosynthesize when there's no leaves or one leaf. Somebody at MIT said, well, if we're going to do that, why don't we just modify cells, human cells, so that they can photosynthesize? I mean, you really have to look good in green to make this work for you, I think. So what do I think about the reductionist, the Soylent Future, the reductionist, reducing what we eat to 3 glasses of this a day? I think that we're forgetting that we do other things besides nourish ourselves with food. We use food for private pleasure. We like to taste. We use food to reinforce culture, to cement social relationships with families and friends, to mark time. It's amazing how we use it to mark time. Oh, I'll do it after lunch. I'll do it before dinner. I'll do it right after dinner. To take a break, whatever. But I do believe that these solutions will be part of Food System 6.0. In any given week, I think we all have several food as fuel meals. where we just want to grab something on the go or whatever, get over it. So I think that Soylent has a place. It also might be an essential part of alleviating global malnutrition, because if you don't have food but somebody gives you the drink that keeps you going, you might just drink it. But I think it's subject to reductionist imperfections. That is, when you begin to try to reduce something to its absolute, the minimum you need to make it work, you find out that you're missing something. Like, we all thought that, oh gee, all you needed in the soil is potassium, Nitrogen and K is potassium, right? What's P? What's phosphorus? Phosphate. Phosphate, sorry. So, but we found out that we didn't get everything right. There's all kinds of micronutrients, all kinds of minerals and little things that do things like help us prevent cancer and help us maintain the balance of our weight, et cetera. So it's hard to get things right and it will not replace the cultural, social, emotional variety. aesthetic and entertainment aspects of food. So, third possibility is what I call the sustainable food system. Solves the 3 big problems piece by piece, has massive scale, it's economically rational. That means results of many, many experiments by entrepreneurs. High tolerance of failure while rewarding success. I heard your mantra at the beginning. Clearly you guys understand this. Compatible with existing parts of 5.0 that work. And the thing is, is as we move from 5.0 to 6.0, day to day it'll be very hardly noticeable that things have changed. But if you look at it 20 years hence, you'll realize that everything has changed. That's what happened to me is my dad was a butcher. And back in the 1970s when I worked with him, we would take an animal in, a dead animal, in at the beginning of the week and we would butcher it and we would feed a neighborhood. for a week and then we get a new one in on Monday and do the same thing. And it would come locally, it would come from the slaughterhouse in San Francisco. Today, butchers never see an animal. They see pieces of an animal that is probably shipped to them by one of 5 places where the animals are processed. A company called Cargill, do anybody know Cargill? One of the biggest private companies in the world. They employ 120,000 butchers. in 5 locations. That's where we get our meat today. So I said, oh my God, I feel like I'm eating about the same kind of stuff I was eating in 1975, but everything has changed about the way that I get it. Well, it'll be the same with Food System 6.0. Who are the change agents? Food movement activists. They have a good side. I have them yellow here, red, yellow, green. Yellow here because they're really good at changing the way we behave by talking to us and convincing us we should eat differently, but they also can be polarizing, and that prevents them from getting That is, if you don't somehow be able to— aren't able to get big ag to go along with the gag, it's going to be hard to scale to global proportions. The government, I've given up. Hopelessly conflicted problem solving versus supporting entrenched agricultural interests. I don't think this problem gets solved top down. I think it gets solved by people in the room. People like you who have ideas that go into the marketplace and win. NGOs and nonprofits, I think they're actually very good at persuading people and putting programs together where they're— particularly where there's no food, so there's nobody arguing about how we should eat and what we should eat. The issue there is they need something to eat. Can we get it to them? Big ag supplies, supply chain, Cargill, Monsanto, DuPont, Tyson, the people that own that supply chain, they are probably the biggest obstacle. And the reason is because they have high switching costs. That is, if you look at big ag demand, by demand I mean Walmart, Kroger, Safeway, if they want to change 20% of their vegetables to organic, they just make the shelf space and buy the vegetables and put them on there. They don't have to change much else. And if it doesn't work, what do they do? They shrink it back up and they have very low switching costs. Cargill has to change an entire supply chain that they've invested billions of dollars in in order to produce more organic beef or more grass-fed beef or whatever. So it's very difficult. So big ag supply, I think, is not likely to be a strong change agent here. Big ag demand, people like Walmart, people like McDonald's even today, are beginning to change their tune. Healthcare providers and insurance, because they have a strong— and insurers have a strong motivation to be change agents here. And then entrepreneurs. I think this is as good as it gets for entrepreneurs. Feeding 10 billion is a big problem that will resolve, will either We'll do it or we won't. It will resolve. It has a possibility to end well with birth rates declining. Huge market. Huge markets. I'll talk a little bit about the markets. Big players there to acquire great companies, investor interests, and affirmative social benefit. When you look at things to do as an entrepreneur, it just doesn't get better than this. Hitting the bullseye is alignment to those big problems that I talked about. in a submarket that has tremendous impact, I would say $1 to $2 billion or more, where you have a great idea, where the team can execute it, where there's a propensity to adopt. And this has always been a problem in food and ag, right? How do you get a farmer to look at a new technology? It's very difficult. So hitting the bullseye is an idea that fits into the way people adopt technology already. It just makes it easier. And then matching to existing channels and methods. It's really hard to have to go all the way from planting the seed to building an entire distribution channel to get it to the end user. It's very difficult. It's much easier to say, oh gee, if I can figure out a new way to feed farmed fish that is more sustainable, I can just sell it to Purina.
