Food Science Allowing For More Ingredient Flexibility

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Changes to the food system can sometimes start on the farm, in other cases they can start closer to the consumer. For example, Voyage Foods is using food science technology to replace ingredients that are expensive of not always available. Founder Adam Maxwell says they have found more reliable ways to source ingredients that can be suitable replacements for processed food containing peanuts, coffee and other ingredients.

Maxwell… “Everything we use really has global availability, and that's been really important to us. So, you know, you're lying to yourself if you're saying we're decoupling food from its source material, and then you're tied to this one specific thing that's grown in this one specific place. Like you're lying to yourselves, you're lying to the investment market, and you're lying to your customers. But we have high degrees of flexibility in source material, you know, on the oilseed byproducts on the, you know, fruit juice and wine byproducts. But, you know, in the wine space, Argentina, Spain, Australia, California, South Africa, all huge wine production France also, right. We can source globally and that's always been very important to us of being able to have flexibility there because if you want to make a real impact at scale, you need ingredients that are at that scale, right? You need ingredients that have flexibility. So if there happens to be a really terrible season in one part of the world, you can source from somewhere else.”

This emphasizes the fact that demand isn’t guaranteed for any crop in today’s modern food system.