Does healthy food have to cost more than unhealthy food?
Why Affordable Nutrition Requires Rethinking Our Food Supply Chain from Seed to Shelf
Yellow Dye…
Do you know why the golden-yellow color of the cornflakes you eat each morning is because of Yellow 5?
The story begins with George Carter, who developed the first successful hybrid corn in 1922. Carter's innovations significantly boosted crop yields, pest resistance, and environmental adaptability, fundamentally transforming agriculture. These new hybrid varieties unintentionally lost much of the vibrant carotenoids—like lutein and zeaxanthin—that initially gave corn its distinctively rich, yellow hue. Modern processing methods further degrade these natural pigments, leaving cornflakes pale and less appealing. To meet consumer expectations for bright, appetizing color, manufacturers turned to artificial dyes such as Yellow 5 (Tartrazine).
This subtle but impactful shift in processed food highlights a deeper issue: agricultural advancements prioritizing efficiency and yield sometimes diminish the natural nutritional qualities of food.
Affordable Nutrition
Since 1922, our food system has been optimized to deliver cheap calories. We engineered changes in processing, genetics, ingredients, and retail to lower costs and increase availability globally. Over time, farmers, mills, ingredients companies, and consumer packaged goods each focused on their part of the system, optimizing to improve process. Cheap food, but more diabetes.
Which raises the question….
Does healthy food have to cost more than unhealthy food?
Since 1922, we shifted behavior from less available healthy food to widely available cheap food. If we lower the price of quality nutrition, behavior can change again.
On $100/week (the average cost of food per person), we overeat and drive obesity. With satiety from quality nutrition, how much less volume would we eat?
In $100 of groceries, $7 is the cost of raw agricultural products. Can we trade some cost in the $93 and pay more to agricultural nutrition?
The fresh food supply chain loses as much as 40% of its output through spoilage. How much would the cost of affordable nutrition decline if that was 5%?
Households spend 13% of their budget on food and, 6%-13% on healthcare. What are the savings if consumers see “Food is Health”, increasing food spending to 15% and reducing healthcare to 2%-4%?
Automobiles in the 70s were unreliable and expensive. With proper engineering, the cars since the 90s are affordable and last more than a decade.
A Systems View to Better Food
While we have spent the time since 1922 engineering a horizontally integrated supply chain, with each layer driving down cost, can we vertically integrate to improve nutrition? Fairlife took a Co-op dairy and transformed it into a billion-dollar brand by optimizing animal care, processing, ingredients, and marketing.
Pick an example - School lunch….
The school lunch program represents a large concentrated buyer that needs affordable nutrition. School lunch wants an affordable, nutrient-rich meal, easy to produce, easy to cook, and still a low cost.
Imagine you gather a CPG, ingredient company, processor, seed companies, and some regenerative farmers in a room to develop a new school lunch meal. Pick something like pasta, an easy form factor for a meal. What if you breed the wheat to boost fiber to 15g per serving? Closer to the recommended daily allowance and added satiety to reduce hunger. Then, work with the CPGs to offer several variations of sauces to appeal to children’s cultural differences. Partner with a smaller processor that can identity preserve the wheat in the supply chain. Team with a set of growers in North Dakota to use regenerative practices and durum wheat to boost protein and fiber with improved genetics.
Would it cost more?
When we focus everyone in the supply chain on yield, we get affordable yield. We will get affordable nutrition when we focus the supply chain on nutrition.
It requires a system view.
A Disconnect…
To achieve affordable nutrition and reduce the healthcare cost of poor nutrition, we need to connect farms, processors, ingredients, CPG, retail, and healthcare. They need to understand the system and tweak different parts of the supply chain to get it right.
We are not there. The disconnects are at every part of the value chain:
A leading healthcare conference with 300+ exhibitors talking about AI, and not a word about chronic disease.
1,500 larger farmers at a conference who did not realize GLP-1 might alter agriculture demand.
A major GLP-1 provider wondering if they should partner with a nutrition solution but does not know who or how.
A CPG product manager trying to convince their boss to offer a nutrient rich solution, only to be told by their boss (who is clearly on Ozempic) that obesity measures are a fad.
A progressive ingredients company developing novel fortification and nutrients rebuffed by CPGs worried they might undermine core products.
A seed genetics company producing novel protein undercut by waste soy meal dumped from renewable diesel markets.
A health care market perfected at managing the evolving cost of chronic disease, but no way to prevent chronic disease from starting.
A bread company seeking a regenerative label for their packaging pays a premium for cover crops when the farmers know it makes more sense to use integrated livestock.
A Path to a System Solution
The disconnect between agricultural practices, processing, retail, and healthcare is resolved with a systems approach. By shifting from fragmented supply chains toward vertical integration, we prioritize nutritional quality alongside yield and efficiency. This integration creates opportunities for economic growth, improved environmental sustainability, healthier communities, and investment returns. Policy reforms and innovative technologies increase transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement in nutritional quality. Educating consumers about the interconnectedness of food systems and health drives demand for nutritious products, enabling market-driven systemic change. We create an affordable, nutritious, and sustainable food system by aligning incentives and stakeholders across the supply chain.
Remember the adage? “You are what you eat”? Well today, “You are what the animal you eat, has eaten”, would be more accurate. What do you think is of more importance to Trump Republicans? The health and very lives of America’s Children or their top 1% tax breaks? Not only is food costing more with upcoming tariffs it will become more & more toxic as love of money Musk & company deregulate more agencies!