Inside Big Foods’ Bet On Regen Ag And The Evolving Nutrition Story

Regional processing expansion, renewed acreage transition commitments, impact updates and nutrient density testing. The transition to regenerative agriculture is a slow-rolling movement – and relies on participation from a variety of stakeholders from farmers to ingredient processors and brands – but in the past few weeks there seems to have been an acceleration in scale-up efforts across the value chain.

First, what’s the point? A recent report from Boston Consulting Group makes a compelling case for the often multi-year, resource- and education-intensive transition process, finding that “farmers could see a profit increase of up to 60% through better soil health, reduced input costs, and higher yield resilience.”

While the work to support the regenerative agriculture movement happens on the farm, it must also manifest itself within the CPG industry to sustain long term, BCG emphasized. Here’s a look at the latest industry updates spurring the switch:

• PepsiCo and Unilever built upon existing regen support efforts with the launch of STEP up for Ag – a peer learning initiative designed to bring PepsiCo to its goal of supporting the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices across 10 million acres by 2030.
• Danone, Ahold Delhaize and The Nature Conservancy unveiled a new pilot initiative to enhance farm and supply chain resilience and reduce Scope 3 emissions from dairy production, resulting in yogurts made from the low-emissions inputs and sold by Ahold Delhaize USA retailers in the next five years.
• Kellanova and ADM shared that their two-year collaboration to support regenerative practices on 180 farms (120,000 acres) across Alabama, Florida and Georgia led to an estimated 16,000 mega-ton (MT) reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 alone, with its models showing 42,000 MT of carbon was sequestered in the soil during that time.

“That is equivalent to removing more than 13,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year. Farmers also scored 85% on the program’s habitat potential index, demonstrating that farms almost maximized opportunities for biodiversity,” Kellanova and ADM said in a press release.

But the sustainability story is only one chapter of the regenerative agriculture transition and the Regenerative Organic Alliance, alongside food tech company Edacious, are working to turn the page to nutrition.

• This week, the duo entered into a new four-year long project to test and track the nutritional quality of over 200 Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) products.
• The partnership will establish a new “collaborative framework” to understand the relationship between ROC products and human health.

By testing hundreds of ROC products for nutrition quality and toxicity compared to conventional, organic and regenerative, non-organic products, the companies hope to bring measurable nutrient data to the conversations around the movement to transition to regenerative agriculture.