De-risking the food supply chain
Security is back on the world’s agenda. But as nations race to secure borders, rare earths, and chip fabs, we risk overlooking the foundation beneath them all: food.
The past few years have laid bare how fragile our interconnected systems really are. The Suez Canal blockage, Covid-19, and the war in Ukraine revealed how quickly trade chaos ripples through supply chains. Now, the same geopolitical fragmentation collides with a mounting ecological crisis — soil degradation, water scarcity, biodiversity loss — creating a new kind of vulnerability.
The nature crisis becomes a food security crisis. Volatile weather and disrupted trade are converging into a system-wide shock, threatening not just food availability but access to it. Price spikes are no longer anomalies, they’re early signals of a deeper structural shift.
Here we dive into the trends shaping today’s complex, super-connected and increasingly vulnerable food systems, and explain why our recent investment Mondra’s technology will play a pivotal role in securing them.
From Farm to Fork to Fallout
Our food systems are breaking. Not just from war or trade disruptions, but from ecological overshoot. We are undermining the living systems that feed us.
Senior executives from the UK food industry, in a rare and candid April 2025 memo, warned of “a food security crisis hidden in plain sight.” The data backs them up (BCG 2025).
In many parts of the world yield reductions due to climate variability have caused a decline in agricultural output, leading to food shortages and worsening hunger and malnutrition across the region. Aggregate cereal yields in 2024 in southern Africa were 16% below the five-year average, and in the case of Zambia and Zimbabwe 43% and 50%, respectively (WHO 2025; Springer Nature 2025).
Meanwhile, large parts of Europe experienced their driest spring in over a century this year (source), and floods in Spain wiped out key crops critical to Northern European supply last year. Overall European agricultural output volatility is rising, particularly in the south and centre (EC 2022).
Around 700 million people faced hunger in 2024, while 2.3 billion people faced food insecurity — with another 1.5 billion people to feed by 2050 (WFP 2025). While these numbers were on the decline over the last decades, they have been rising since 2020 due to the pandemic, conflicts, inflation, and extreme weather events.
Food systems are deeply vulnerable to climatic variables, including rainfall patterns, temperature changes, pollinator health, sunlight exposure, and soil quality. A 2025 Nature study projects that by 2050, climate change alone will drag global crop yields down by 8%, regardless of emissions scenarios. The World Economic Forum and BCG estimate that the number of regions suited to growing coffee will fall by 50% by 2050. NASA research shows that under current warming trajectories, yields of maize could drop by 24% and soybeans by 2% by the late century.
The Paradox
The relationship between food and climate is inherently paradoxical.
The global food value chain contributes roughly one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, uses 70% of freshwater, and occupies half of all habitable land, driving 60–80% of global biodiversity loss (Crippa et al., 2021; Khatri, 2024; WRAP, 2024).
Yet these very impacts are what destabilise food production itself.
What’s new is not the vulnerability — it’s the frequency, simultaneity, and systemic scope of these disruptions. We are entering an era where:
Predictable growing seasons can no longer be taken for granted due to extreme weather events and changing climate patterns.
Critical inputs like water, and healthy soils are degrading faster than we can regenerate them.
Global trade systems built on “import substitution” falter when everywhere is in trouble at once. Case in point: In 2022, unexpected extreme weather compounded Ukraine war disruptions in major wheat-producing countries like France, Argentina, and India that were supposed to substitute imports, cutting global supply and driving prices up by 110% in 18 months (WEF 2025).
When harvests fail and supply chains strain, the tremors are clearly felt in prices.
Price Volatility as a Signal
After extreme weather hit cocoa farms in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, cocoa prices surged by 400% (WEF 2025). The world’s largest cocoa processor lowered its outlook three times in a row, citing “unprecedented disruption caused by wild swings in cocoa prices” (FT 2025). World coffee prices rose 40% year-on-year in 2024 (FAO 2025).
These aren’t isolated events. They’re stress signals from a global system stretched beyond resilience. “We are eating the Earth” — consuming soil, water, and biodiversity faster than nature can replenish them.
Yet when the crisis is systemic, visibility becomes power.
Today, the food industry still lacks the ability to see — in real time — how ingredients move through ecosystems and supply chains, how emissions accumulate, and where interventions could actually bend the curve.
More than 90% of a food retailers’ emissions lie hidden in its supply chain, where data is fragmented across thousands of suppliers and opaque standards.
Supply Chain Intelligence for Food System Resilience
Enter Mondra: groundbreaking product-level AI that helps the world’s leading food companies de-risk and decarbonise global supply chains. Based in the UK, Mondra’s digital twin technology is already trusted by retail giants including Tesco, Coop, Lidl and Aldi who see Mondra not as another reporting tool, but as infrastructure for the next phase of sustainable food production.
Its technology has been hailed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as “game-changing”, and we have to agree.
Mondra’s digital twin technology maps complex, previously untraceable supply chains, creating a foundational framework for managing product-level performance from farm to fork. From carbon and broader environmental impacts to climate-related supply chain risks and price volatility, Mondra provides live tracking across dynamic supply networks, integrating this intelligence directly into the systems and tools used by major retailers, food companies, and their suppliers.
This enables food companies to analyse the environmental impact of every product they sell, understand revenue at risk from climate disruption, generate audit-ready data for ESG compliance, model sourcing risks and alternatives, and engage suppliers with credible insights and tools.
With this intelligence, companies can prioritise actions to cut emissions, protect margins, and build resilient sourcing strategies.
Mondra’s unique innovation is the ability to generate high-resolution digital twins of product supply chains, creating living, data-rich maps that update dynamically as inputs change. Companies can run “what-if” scenarios — swapping ingredients, redesigning packaging, or changing sourcing regions — and instantly see how those decisions reshape their environmental performance.
The platform combines several breakthrough capabilities:
- Automated LCA: Generates granular, product-specific footprints across carbon, water, and resource use.
- Data Quality Scoring (DQS): Rates and refines data accuracy across suppliers, building trust into every number.
- Scenario Modelling: Tests new product designs or sourcing strategies before implementation.
- Supplier Collaboration: Invites suppliers directly into the platform, turning sustainability into a shared, data-driven process.
- AI-Driven Prediction: Fills data gaps through pattern-based inference, ensuring continuity even where reporting is incomplete.
Mondra’s integrations with existing ERP and compliance systems — and partnerships with the likes of Oracle and Kynetec — anchor it in the real data infrastructure of the food economy. The result is unprecedented visibility: a transparent, verifiable picture of how food moves through both nature and markets.
Jason Barrett, CEO and founder of Mondra is an incredible leader who has assembled a world-class team that goes way back. What impressed us was the team’s blend of scientific rigour and practical execution combining deep experience in data science, retail systems, and sustainability policy.
We believe it perfectly positions him and the team to solve the challenge of an opaque and inefficient global food system. At Mondra, Jason is building the data intelligence foundation that will help make the industry more resilient, more sustainable, and more competitive in a changing world.
From sourcing lower-impact ingredients to designing circular packaging and resilient supply chains, Mondra turns sustainability from a reporting burden into a competitive advantage. It gives the world’s leading food companies the insight to cut emissions, protect margins, and build anti-fragile sourcing strategies. Product-level data, planet-scale impact.
Looking Ahead
If the 20th century was about maximising yield, the 21st must be about restoring balance.
If you’re innovating in Agri Biotech; Novel farming systems; Regenerative agriculture; Food Supply Chain Tech; Precision farming; Digital Agri platforms, we want to hear from you.
Author: Lena Thiede
