Amsterdam, 25–26 February 2026

After the Women in Food and Agriculture conference earlier that week set the tone around leadership and inclusion, Agri-Food Europe 2026 brought a holistic macroeconomic perspective into the room. Two days of debate among industry leaders, policymakers, and sustainability practitioners left a clear impression: the operating environment for food and agriculture has fundamentally shifted, and the organisations that will endure are those building resilience as a strategic discipline - not a crisis response.

A Regime Shift in Global Trade

The conference opened with a frank assessment of the international trade landscape. The broad consensus was that 2025 marked a genuine inflection point: a move away from rules-based multilateral trade toward what several speakers bluntly described as brute-force bilateralism. The most visible expression of this has been the Trump administration's tariff policy, but the underlying dynamic is broader - a world in which economic coercion has become a normalised instrument of foreign policy.

Agricultural commodities are disproportionately exposed to this environment. Their inherent transparency - standardised grades, public pricing, globally traded benchmarks - makes them highly visible targets in trade disputes, and therefore subject to extreme price unpredictability. Combined with early signals of a potential global recession and growing concern about the fragility of an over-financialised food system, the mood among delegates was one of sober alertness rather than panic. The message was clear: uncertainty is not a temporary condition to be weathered. It is the new structural reality that’s here to stay.

The Value Chain as a Strategic Asset

Against this backdrop, the most consistent theme from industry leaders was a sharpened focus on value chain visibility and control. The precise language varied - diversification, transparency, sustainability, trust, resilience - but the underlying intent was the same across every conversation: organisations are working to know their supply chains better, and to build relationships within them that can withstand external shocks.

Two practical dimensions of this stood out. First, the nationality of supply chain partners is becoming an increasingly relevant risk variable - not primarily for cultural reasons, but for political and economic stability. Sourcing from a country whose government or currency is unstable introduces systemic fragility that many organisations are only now beginning to price properly into their procurement decisions.

Second, commodity price volatility is being reframed by some leaders as an opportunity rather than a pure threat. Rising input costs create a legitimate business case for deeper supplier analysis - pushing organisations to look harder at where genuine value lies within their supply base, and to build the kind of long-term relationships that deliver more than transactional price efficiency.

Vion Group offered a compelling illustration of this logic in practice. By carrying out life cycle assessments (LCAs) directly with their farmers, they have been able to make the sustainability-efficiency connection tangible and data-driven. Their framing - that sustainability is fundamentally about efficiency, and that data is the tool to demonstrate opportunities to capitalize on - is one we would encourage any organisation still treating sustainability as a cost centre to internalize.

Regulation as a Forcing Function

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) featured prominently in conversations about compliance and competitive positioning. Both represent significant operational challenges, particularly for companies with complex or geographically diffused supply chains. What was encouraging was the degree to which industry leaders are treating these not as bureaucratic burdens to be minimised, but as catalysts for the kind of supply chain scrutiny that delivers business value beyond compliance. Regulation, in this reading, is a forcing function - accelerating necessary work that commercially minded organisations should arguably be doing anyway.

The Conscious Consumer - Constrained but Committed

On the demand side, the picture is nuanced. Conscious and healthy eating is growing in importance across demographic groups, with Gen Z in particular treating it as a baseline expectation rather than a lifestyle choice. This is a meaningful signal for product development, sourcing strategy, and brand positioning. However, this trend is meeting a powerful counterforce in the cost of living crisis. Consumers who want to eat sustainably and healthily are increasingly unable to afford to do so. This tension is showing up directly in retail data: private label products among major grocers are delivering outstanding growth and profitability, as shoppers trade down without necessarily abandoning quality expectations. For food brands, this is both a warning and a design challenge.

Personal Reflections

Agri-Food Europe 2026 reinforced something we see regularly in our line of work: the organisations best equipped to navigate disruption are those that have done the unglamorous work of understanding their supply chains in depth, building genuine supplier relationships, and grounding sustainability commitments in operational data rather than narrative. The macro headwinds are real. But so is the strategic opportunity for those who approach them with clarity and rigour. That’s why we believe in the importance of making sustainable development an integral part of business strategy.