Episode Details

By 2050, it should be hard to make a bad decision in the grocery store. That’s the goal. What happened in this room was a step toward making it real.

This week at Food Health LIVE, our Innovation Lab brought together over 50 cross-sector industry leaders representing the full chain of soil to cell. Farmers, seed geneticists, food banks, clinicians, ingredients companies, advanced diagnostics, CPG founders, health insurers, community food organizers, measurement technologists and many others, and asked them to do something rooms like this don’t attempt often. We asked them to build the system in real time, with real people, in the room.

We threaded the needle from soil to cell and here are a few things I took away.

P.s. keep an eye out for a soon to come list of exclusive discounts from the companies delivering System C for paid subscribers.

The Pieces Exist. The Loop Doesn’t.

One of the most important things that happened in that room wasn’t just a single conversation, it was the accumulation of all of them.

At the end of the 3 hours, you could trace a line from the farmer who knows exactly how his growing practices affect the glucosinolate content of his broccoli, through the ingredient company that’s spent a decade developing a fiber profile that heals the gut, through the CPG brand whose products show a 21-point cholesterol reduction in clinical data, through the insurer who’s already covering food as medicine and showing a 3-to-1 return on investment, through the technologist who’s figured out how to measure metabolic health in under two minutes simply using an ultrasound and another innovator who is doing the same via cellphone.

Every node in that chain was in the room but the loop doesn’t close here. Not yet.

The Market Signal Is the Whole Game

People miss this when they assume the problem is supply. Better seeds, cleaner ingredients, more regenerative farms. Yes. All of that matters but supply is not the real constraint.

Consumer demand is the trigger that matters.

Right now, food is priced on features – grams of fiber, sugar content, organic certification – not on outcomes. A farmer who grows broccoli with twice the glucosinolate content gets paid the same as the farmer who doesn’t, because no one downstream is asking for it. In large part because consumers can get that information. A CPG company that can demonstrate that its product reduces inflammation in a measurable, personalized way can’t communicate that without going through a pharmaceutical-grade FDA claims process it can’t afford. Yet the technology to measure human outcomes at the individual level is collapsing in cost with $80 blood panels, CGMs on instant order, and AI-powered metabolic imaging, but that data isn’t connected to the supply chain. Not yet.

When a consumer can measure what a food does to their body, share it, and have that data feed backward through retail into CPG into ingredient sourcing into seed genetics, that’s the market signal that rewrites the economics of the entire food system. That’s the flywheel. The diagnostic infrastructure is the crank.

The room saw this unfold over the course of the morning. The question then became how quickly and with what combination of existing measurement tools can this infrastructure to deliver the missing that outcome layer.

Reimbursement Is Not the Solution

A lot of the work happening in food as medicine right now is focused on reimbursement. Getting medically tailored meals covered. Getting produce prescriptions into Medicaid. Getting food written into value-based care contracts. All of it matters and is important. All of that cost burden is downstream once disease is already established. It operates in System B (as B+). We need to expand this upstream so it isn’t reliant of downstream funding which is fundamental to System C.

Downstream reimbursement as an intervention is System B+. It’s the best versio