🍋 15 countries feed the world

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Read time today: 1:54 min

Hi friend,

It’s Friday morning. You are reading VITAMIN C 🍋.

Welcome to the 36 new readers who signed up in the last two weeks. You are in good company.

As always I hunted down five insights about food business and food innovation that deserve your attention.

Here they are:

I spend a lot of time with food data. But some numbers still stop me.

15 countries produce 70% of the world's food. 11 of those are also the main exporters. One serious disruption and the whole system shakes.

Economist Impact, supported by Cargill, just published a first-of-its-kind index covering 60 countries across four pillars: affordability, availability, quality and safety, and climate risk responsiveness.

Key findings:

↳ Climate preparedness is the weakest link globally

↳ Healthy diets still cost 2/3 of income for poorer households. That leaves almost nothing for rent, transport, clothing, or anything else.

↳ Only 1/3 countries is well-prepared for pest and disease outbreaks .

Portugal ranks first overall. The UK ranks third, which surprised me given recent reports calling its food system extremely fragile.

Cheap food is not the same as good food. Policy makers often keep confusing the two.

Read the full index report here.

Finally Foods, an Israeli startup, is growing casein, the main protein in dairy, responsible for how cheese melts and stretches, inside…drumroll….potatoes.

What makes this technically interesting: Casein has four sub-units. Finally Foods claims to be the first to express all four in a single organism. They chose potatoes because they have high yields and efficient protein extraction.

US regulatory filings with USDA and FDA are planned for 2027. Europe will most likely take longer.

I might be a real foodtech nerd but it’s this kind of innovation that genuinely keeps me hopeful for the industry.

Check out the full story here.

This comparison shows how millennials will write descriptive copy, while Gen Z's will just give 3-word endorsement

Both work, but for different audiences.

A good reminder to ask ourselves: who do I actually want to reach?

I love a business that makes you look at something ordinary completely differently.

Richard Boccato was a bartender in New York. He noticed that craft cocktails were getting serious attention but the ice was still an afterthought. Cloudy, fast-melting, flavour-diluting ice.

So he built a company around it.

Hundredweight Ice now delivers to Michelin-starred restaurants across New York, cuts 15,000 cubes a day, and is projected to hit $3.5M in revenue in 2026. Zero advertising. 37% annual growth.

Ice cubes are not going to solve the big problems our food system is facing. But they're a good reminder that every mature category still has an overlooked corner worth building in

Check them out here.

Copywriting done right 😂

Stay awesome,
Lia

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