Food Systems, Planetary Boundaries, and Product Strategy

In October 2025, the EAT-Lancet Commission released its updated report, a major scientific assessment of what it will take to feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 while staying within environmental limits and ensuring fair access to healthy food.

The report brings together over 100 researchers and uses ten global food system models to assess different pathways forward. It defines three interconnected goals: the Planetary Health Diet (PHD) to support human health, food system boundaries to protect environmental stability, and social foundations to ensure everyone can access adequate nutrition and decent livelihoods. The central conclusion is that transforming food systems to meet all three goals simultaneously is both necessary and achievable, but only through coordinated action across diet, production practices, and food waste reduction.

For F&B manufacturers, it offers both a reality check and a roadmap. Here's what matters most for product development and portfolio strategy.

The Core Framework: Health, Environment, and Justice

The Commission updates its 2019 framework with new evidence on dietary health, expanded environmental analysis covering all nine planetary boundaries, and, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of justice and equity within food systems.

The modelling is more sophisticated than before. By running scenarios across multiple models, the researchers show what happens under different combinations of dietary shifts, productivity improvements, and waste reduction. The finding that matters most: achieving healthy diets for all, produced within planetary boundaries, requires all three levers working together. Dietary change alone, for example, could reduce agricultural emissions by 15%. Combined with productivity gains and halving food waste, that figure reaches 20% - and keeps us closer to safe limits for water, nitrogen and phosphorus use.

Building a Resilient Product Portfolio

Plant-Forward Is Becoming Mainstream

The Planetary Health Diet (PHD) centres on whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes, with smaller amounts of fish, dairy and meat. It's not prescriptive about being vegetarian or vegan, it's about rebalancing proportions. Globally, average diets show substantial underconsumption of whole grains, fruits, nuts and vegetables.

The report shows that under a PHD scenario, global production of vegetables, fruits and nuts would need to increase by 63% compared with 2020 levels, while ruminant meat production would decline by 33%.

This aligns with what we're already seeing in consumer behaviour. Plant-based food sales grew 6.6% in the US in 2022, and flexitarian eating continues to gain ground, 42% of UK consumers now actively reduce their meat consumption. These aren't fringe consumers. They're looking for products that make plant-forward eating convenient, tasty, and satisfying.

The opportunity for manufacturers is to lead this transition with products that deliver on nutrition and taste, not just novelty. That means focusing on whole food ingredients, optimising for nutrient density, and creating formats that fit how people actually eat.

Ultra-Processing Under Scrutiny

The Commission concludes that most foods should be consumed whole, unprocessed, or minimally processed, citing evidence linking ultra-processed foods to 32 adverse health outcomes spanning mortality, cancer, and metabolic health.

Consumer awareness is following the same trajectory. Sales of products positioned as "clean label" or minimally processed continue to grow. In Europe, sales of “minimally processed” snacks like cereals and breakfast bars grew by 6% in 2024, reflecting rising interest in cleaner, simpler products. 

The manufacturers doing this well aren’t just removing additives. They’re rethinking product design from the ground up: reformulating for shelf life without synthetic preservatives, sourcing ingredients that require less intervention, and being transparent about what processing does (and doesn’t) achieve. As scrutiny around food processing grows, this kind of reformulation meets demand for products that are not only lower impact, but also more recognisable and trusted.

Measure Impact Across Multiple Dimensions

For the first time, the Commission quantifies the food system's contribution to all nine planetary boundaries. The findings are stark: food systems drive five of the six breached boundaries, including land system change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), and freshwater change. Food accounts for the near totality of nitrogen and phosphorus boundary transgression.

Carbon is critical, but it's not the whole story. A product with a low carbon footprint could still be contributing to water stress, nutrient pollution, or biodiversity loss depending on where and how it's produced. The report shows that even with ambitious transformations, dietary shifts, improved productivity, reduced food waste, the world would still transgress nitrogen and phosphorus boundaries without additional interventions.

Carbon footprinting is important, but it's incomplete. For product development teams, this means taking a wider view. Where are ingredients sourced? What's happening to water and soil in those regions? Are pesticides creating pollution risk? These questions need to inform decisions about formulation and supplier selection, not just for compliance, but because system-level impacts will increasingly become market and reputational risks.

Waste Reduction Is a High-Impact Win

The modelling shows that halving food loss and waste contributes meaningfully to reducing pressure on all five environmental boundaries assessed, including a 53% reduction in phosphorus use in the DIA-GIO model under the EAT-Lancet scenario.

Globally, around 775 kcal per capita per day is lost or wasted, representing approximately 20% of agricultural land use. In high-income contexts, consumer-level waste is the main contributor.

For manufacturers, this creates a clear focus: extend shelf life without compromising nutrition, design packaging that actually preserves product quality, and consider portion sizes that reduce household waste. It also means being realistic about date labels, "best before" versus "use by", and giving consumers better information about storage and use.

The Economics of Food System Transformation

The Commission estimates that food systems transformation will require $200–500 billion per year, but the economic benefits could reach $5 trillion annually. The cost of inaction, in health care, environmental degradation, and lost productivity, far exceeds the investment required.

Modelling results suggest that, compared with a business-as-usual scenario, transforming food systems by 2050 could lead to an 8% reduction in average agricultural producer prices. In other words, a less resource-intensive food system could also be a more economically efficient one.

On policy, the picture is mixed. Many countries now have food‑system transformation plans, and major regions are adopting new supply‑chain rules. For example, the EU’s Regulation on Deforestation‑Free Products (EUDR) will require operators placing certain commodities on the EU market to demonstrate their goods do not come from recently deforested land. 

In public procurement, there are growing expectations: a manifesto for EU public canteens recommends at least 20% of food procured be certified organic.

At the same time, recent shifts in political leadership, particularly in the US, have raised questions about the pace and consistency of regulatory action on sustainability and climate. Some jurisdictions are pulling back on environmental protections, while others are accelerating them. The trajectory isn't uniform.

What is clear is that leading companies aren't waiting for mandates. They're moving because their customers are asking for it, because investors are pricing in transition risk, and because early movers gain advantages in supply chain relationships, innovation, and brand positioning.

How Market Leaders Are Moving Faster

The companies that will be best positioned in this transition are treating sustainability as a product design challenge, not just a reporting exercise. That means:

• Embedding impact assessment in NPD processes, where 80% of a product's environmental footprint is determined
• Tracking multiple environmental indicators,  not just carbon, to avoid shifting problems from one boundary to another
• Designing for nutrient density and minimal processing, staying ahead of regulatory and consumer scrutiny of ultra-processed foods
• Optimising for shelf life and waste reduction, recognising their system-level importance and commercial value

Progress happens incrementally. It's about making better decisions product by product, reformulation by reformulation, with the right data at the right time. Small improvements add up when they're embedded in how teams actually work, not when they're separate sustainability initiatives that sit outside the core business.

How Sustained Helps

At Sustained, we help F&B manufacturers put these insights into practice. Our platform provides product-level environmental data across 16 categories including climate, water and land use so teams can compare scenarios, identify hotspots, and design lower-impact products from day one.

We work with brands to integrate impact data into existing NPD workflows, making it straightforward for product developers, R&D teams, and buyers to understand the environmental consequences of their decisions as they're making them. The most effective sustainability strategy is the one that's woven into how products are actually developed, not added on afterward.

The tools, data, and frameworks exist. Now it's about execution.

Want to explore how product-level impact data could support your NPD and reformulation work? Let's talk.