How to drive adoption of ancient grains with billions, not millions

By Ian Dull & Mads Holme

Bill Gates’ recent Note on ancient grains makes a compelling argument: if more of the world invested in ancient grains – millets like fonio and teff, and many more crop families – food tech investors, agriculture and food ingredients companies, and philanthropists (to name a few) would be looking at a more nutritious, secure, and climate-adaptable food system.

As Bill Gates writes, the core challenge ancient grains face is adoption: the modern agriculture and food industries aren’t set up to cultivate or process them at any kind of scale – let alone the vast quantities needed to have the kinds of food security and climate-readiness impact the world so badly needs.

This compelling supply problem points to clear areas for food and agricultural technologies to fix. Yet it’s only one side of the story. In more than ten years studying food, tech and agriculture – across successive waves of organic foods, superfoods, ancient grains, and many more – we’ve seen that the crucial blocker is often demand.

While incentives and investment do make changes up and down the supply chain, making new food systems around ancient grains sustainable long-term requires building demand, and designing supply chains that can adapt to it. To have huge impacts, food investors, companies, and philanthropists will need to work hard to convince people around the world to change their behaviours and begin eating ancient grains. Successful past food movements – like organics or meat alternatives – have managed to build demand by tapping into changing aspirations or fitting into existing behaviours. Being smart with building demand is how ancient grains can become a sustainable business and a stable food source for billions, not millions.  

Driving demand means thinking about ancient grains – and food more generally – as a cultural phenomenon, not just as a source of nutrition. Cooking and eating practices will need to be changed; old recipes will need to be updated with new ingredients; rituals and cosmologies connected to ancient plants in one part of the world may be challenged; and it will need to fit within different ideas of health, sourcing, and sustainability around the world.

Across our work, we have identified four challenges – from consumption to production – that will be important to solve to create a sustainable food system:

Bridge the taste & recipe gap:

Variety is the spice of life. Around the world, we have observed people who are eager to add new foods into their diets that match their aspiration – whether that’s richer foods like meats and sweets or organic options. While some of those stick – like fast food – others are much less likely to work their way into diets. We have seen ancient grains in particular struggle to become staples: millet or spelt may drive intrigue, but people quickly lose interest when they realise they aren’t familiar with recipes for them, require adjustments from cooking familiar grains, or just can’t get the taste quite right. Picking grains for taste profile, optimising processes for easy cooking methods familiar from other grains, and promoting substitution in familiar recipes are all ways to keep ancient grains from ageing on supermarket shelves.

Adding value naturally:

Integrating foods into varied cuisines and dietary habits usually means processing them into different forms – flours, oils, puffed grains – that makes them more acceptable to consumers, and more lucrative to food businesses looking to capture demand. Whereas fifteen years ago, derivative ingredients, flours and oils from grains were widely accepted, consumers have increasingly turned to ‘clean label’ foods that minimise their use and new processing techniques like ‘cold-pressed’ oils – also accompanied by public health pressure to reduce reliance on heavily-processed foods. Our work has shown how much of these preferences come down to how much of the ‘original’ raw material remains: processes that appear to more subtly modify the raw material in ways that retain something of the original form – milling, pressing, puffing, popping – are almost always more accepted and perceived to be healthier. Investing in these kinds of processing techniques can ensure ancient grains fulfil their more robust value proposition in the market.

Predicting & keeping up with demand:

Food and quality demands are constantly evolving: there is always a new frontier in taste, naturalness, sustainability, fairness, etc. Getting producers, processors, and retailers ready for these demands means picking the strongest crops to bet on as well as making supply chains more flexible to changes in demand: are farming techniques effective for a range of crops? Is there washing, processing, and refining technology that can work for any grain? Especially when it comes to large capital investments and/or major transformations of food systems, long-term sustainability means designing new systems and technologies with the flexibility to adapt to changes in demand over time.

Volume & consistency at scale:

Demand for new foods is fickle, and can quickly soften if new foods are not available in the volume, consistent quality, and price that existing businesses require. Large-scale food producers or distributors, for example, struggled in the move to organic because they were not able to consistently access organic fresh foods in meaningful amounts year-round, as customers expected; even niche producers struggled with inconsistent quality, like that of organic flour, to deliver artisanal products truly worth their higher prices. Conversely, food producers early in the value chain struggle to justify capital investments – like planting new crops, changing agricultural processes, investing in new harvesting, processing, or testing technologies – if they are wary about demand. Building a sustainable ecosystem for these new foods will require a careful strategy that balances supply and demand to maintain consumer interest while ensuring confidence from producers.

There are many more challenges to resolve to make ancient grains a modern staple – from agricultural transitions to certification and processing. Yet solving these challenges will be moot if there is no demand for the product itself, and the risks – both financial risks of lost capital investments, and human and societal risks of changing our food systems – will be higher if supply chains are not set up to serve the expectations of consumers today.

These challenges are by no means trivial, but we have developed a proven approach to getting the demand side right. By deeply understanding the ecosystem of consumers worldwide and the businesses that serve them, we can identify the key gaps that need solving to create new, long-term and thriving food systems.

Image by Sindy Süßengut on Unsplash