evoke^AG. 2019 Revisited: Where Are We Now?

In February 2019, I stood on stage at evoke^AG. in Melbourne and laid out several provocations about where food was headed. I predicted that food would become a primary vehicle for identity expression; that consumer demands for transparency would move mainstream; that plant-based meat would reshape protein markets; and that regenerative agriculture would move from the fringe to the boardroom.

Some were observations about emerging patterns. Others were prescriptions for where the industry needed to go.

Six years later, this essay checks in on those ideas, tracking what actually unfolded and why the same forces produced radically different outcomes in different places.

Food’s future isn’t singular. It is a collection of parallel realities shaped by local culture, economics, and the specific choices of people building companies in specific markets.

Food as Identity

In 2019, I described food becoming a central vehicle for identity expression, choices serving as affiliations that would fragment the industry. This happened, but the mechanism caught me off guard. Food hasn’t just become an identity expression; in some markets, it has fused completely with political identity.

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The American MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement exemplifies this perfectly. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. effectively turned seed oils into a political litmus test. Despite scientific consensus supporting seed oils as healthier than saturated fats, MAHA rhetoric framed them as poison. Your stance on canola oil became a proxy for your entire worldview.

But this fragmentation isn’t just political; it’s commercial. In 2019, “Brand” meant a logo and a corporate legacy. In 2025, “Brand” means a person. The explosion of creator-led products,from MrBeast’s chocolates to Logan Paul’s Prime,confirms that trust has shifted from faceless institutions to para-social relationships. We are seeing the rise of the ‘Creator-CPG’ economy, where the flavor of the drink often matters less than the fandom of the founder. This is the commercial twin of the MAHA movement: both are symptoms of a public that has lost faith in traditional gatekeepers, whether they are the FDA or PepsiCo.

When trust in institutions erodes and people feel politically voiceless, food becomes an easy target for populist narratives. You can’t easily change housing prices or immigration policy, but you can control what oil you cook with. Food offers the illusion of agency in a system that feels rigged.

Australia shows signs of these same conditions. Political fragmentation is accelerating: in the 2025 federal landscape, support for minor parties and independents surged to record highs, continuing a long-term drift away from the major parties. The underlying forces, distrust of institutions and economic anxiety, exist here just as they do in America. The question isn’t whether Australia will experience its own version of food-as-political-identity, but when.

Transparency

I also argued that “the process is the product” and that people wouldn’t just buy the thing on the plate, they’d buy the chain of decisions that produced it.

That shift has largely occurred. Provenance stories, origin call-outs, and a swarm of certifications are now table stakes. We have successfully walked away from the “sugary-cereal era” of the 1970s where food was wrapped in pure fiction.

However, the toolset for transparency has evolved faster than our ability to digest it. In 2019, we talked about blockchain as a trust machine. In 2025, Artificial Intelligence has entered the supply chain, capable of modeling impacts with terrifying precision. Yet, this flood of data often leads to paralysis rather than empowerment. When every apple comes with a localized climate impact report, the consumer simply shuts down.

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Furthermore, the limits of transparency are being tested by economics. While consumers claim they are willing to pay more for sustainability, inflation has widened the gap between intent and action. The “ESG cooling” we are seeing isn’t because transparency was a fad; it’s because transparency is expensive. For many, the desire to know everything collides with the need to afford it. Right now, the process is part of the product, but it remains a premium feature, not a universal right.

Plant-Based Meat

In 2019, I saw protein’s future as a “three-legged stool”: animal, plant-based, and lab-grown. Six years later, lab-grown remains stuck at pilot scale, but the story of plant-based meat has split into two starkly different geographic realities.

In the US, the category has faced a reckoning. Beyond Meat’s stock has cratered over 90% from its peaks, and US retail volumes dropped nearly 27% in mid-2025. The novelty wore off before the taste justified the price.

RELATED: What’s next for Australia’s plant-based meat market? Four predictions from Food Frontier’s State of the Industry report

Australia’s trajectory completely diverged. Sales grew strongly between 2020 and 2023. But the mechanism is what matters: while Australian retail sales stagnated, the wholesale and foodservice channel exploded.

The insight here is profound. In America, plant-based tried to win the grocery cart and failed. In Australia, it quietly won the menu. When a chef integrates a plant-based option into a café brekkie, it isn’t a political statement; it’s just lunch.

Regenerative Agriculture

I predicted regenerative agriculture would move from fringe panels to boardroom priorities. This has played out at scale: ADM alone reported engaging 5 million acres in regenerative programs, hitting their 2025 targets a year early.

However, there is a danger in the metric-obsessed corporate adoption of these practices. We are seeing a case of “Carbon Tunnel Vision,” where soil health is reduced to a single tradable commodity: CO2. This reductionism threatens to undermine the holistic benefits of regenerative systems, which are about water retention, biodiversity, and resilience, not just carbon sequestration. If we turn farmers into carbon traders first and food producers second, we risk repeating the same monoculture mistakes of the 20th century, just with different KPIs.

At the consumer level, it still feels like 2019. While awareness is rising (nearly 69% of “values-based” shoppers have heard the term) actual understanding remains low. The field is fragmenting into an “alphabet soup” of certifications, risking a greenwashing backlash. Australian farmers are right to warn that trying to freeze a dynamic, context-specific system into a universal checklist is a fool’s errand.

The Biological Wildcard

One variable I missed entirely in 2019 was the pharmaceutical disruption of appetite. We spent decades arguing about how to reformulate food to fight obesity, lower sugar, cleaner labels, smaller packs. We didn’t predict that chemistry would simply turn off the hunger switch.

The rise of GLP-1 agonists (like Ozempic and Wegovy) has introduced a terrifying variable for the food industry: volume destruction. For a century, the business model of Big Food relied on a biological imperative, people need to eat and often, they eat too much. What happens when retailers report a pullback in basket size from patients on these drugs?

This creates a market bifurcation. For the “Ozempic Economy,” food becomes purely functional; high nutrient density, low volume. For everyone else, the demand for hyper-palatable indulgence might actually increase as a reaction. The “middle” of the grocery store—the mindless snacking aisles now under siege from biology itself. This forces a reckoning: companies can no longer rely on addiction to drive volume; they must rely on genuine nutrition or transcendent pleasure.

The Prescription: Hedonistic Sustainability

“Hedonistic sustainability” wasn’t a trend in 2019, and it isn’t one in 2025. It is the only strategy that works.

The principle is simple: people choose food emotionally, not rationally. The climate facts don’t matter if the vegetables taste like cardboard. This biological reality checks the “tech-will-save-us” narrative. We cannot engineer our way out of our evolutionary programming with unappealing efficiency. The “soylent” dream of effortless, tasteless nutrition failed because it ignored the soul of eating. Even in a world of GLP-1s, the bite you do take matters more, not less. When calories are scarce by choice, flavor becomes the only metric that counts.

Row 7 Seeds remains the gold standard for this approach. Dan Barber’s company breeds vegetables for flavor firstcreating naturally sweet squash and creamy potatoes. Since I first mentioned them, they haven’t just survived; they have scaled. In late 2024, Row 7 expanded nationwide into major retailers like Whole Foods and Sprouts, proving that proprietary, high-flavor genetics can scale beyond the farmer’s market.

Their ‘Sugarcone’ cabbage isn’t winning shelf space because it captures carbon. It’s winning because it tastes phenomenal. The sustainability is a bonus, not the sales pitch.

What This Reveals

The last six years have taught us that food’s future isn’t inevitable; it is contextual. Plant-based options failed in US grocery aisles but thrived in Australian cafes, while regenerative agriculture conquered corporate acreage but baffled consumers. Perhaps most strikingly, food identity morphed from personal expression into political warfare, reflecting local context more than global inevitability.

RELATED: Accelerating sustainable global food systems

The real work is being done by those who ignore the “global trends” to solve local problems; the breeder in New York, the cafe owner in Melbourne, the farmer in Western Australia. They don’t have the luxury of theory. They have payroll, inventory, and customers. The next six years won’t be written by people standing on stages predicting the future. It will be written by the people building it.