Cargill VP: Scaling innovation essential to future-proof global food systems

Pressure is mounting on the F&B industry to reinvent supply chains for improved sustainability, equity, and resilience. Geert Maesmans, vice president of R&D for Health and Nutrition at Cargill Food & Bio, argues that the central hurdle to achieving these demands is bringing new innovations beyond pilot phases to real-world scalability.

Speaking at Reuters Transform Food & Agriculture Europe 2025 in Amsterdam, Netherlands (June 3-4), Maesmans tells Food Ingredients First how building “trust, profitability, and end-to-end collaboration” is key to delivering impact at scale. 

The event gathered representatives from across the value chain — from farmers and cooperatives to policymakers, start-ups, and multinationals — to debate transformation pathways for food systems. 

Maesmans describes the event as a “food system dialogue” and notes its relatively rare end-to-end approach as crucial in a time of accelerating change.

“If we don’t evolve the sector at the scale we need to, we’ll be too late,” he says. “We’re feeding 500 million people in Europe with one to three kilos of food daily. That’s a billion kilos daily. If innovation doesn’t reach that scale, it won’t have the societal impact we need.”

Achieving incremental change

Unlike the automotive or energy sectors, food systems cannot sustain abrupt disruption, Maesmans emphasizes. “Food is inherently evolutionary. We eat today, we want to eat tomorrow — there’s no room for a radical break.”

Instead, he calls for steady improvements in nutrition, sustainability, and resilience, built on scalable innovations. This includes integrating technology in formulation, farming, and processing while acknowledging consumer demand for clean label and minimally processed products.

“It’s a polarity,” he explains. “Consumers want both tech-enabled nutrition and organic simplicity. The mistake is choosing one over the other — we have to do both.”

Bridging affordability and health

For Maesmans, achieving health for all means balancing affordability and accessibility with personalization. While scientific advances now allow near-individualized nutritional solutions, there remains a simultaneous need to provide essential, cost-effective food to more than a billion undernourished people globally — including rising numbers in urban Europe.

AI is helping create connections in food chains that were previously invisible.“Do we know how to make food healthier and more affordable? Yes. The challenge is delivering the right solution to the right audience, at scale,” he says.

This includes leveraging biotechnology, AI, and novel ingredients while acknowledging that “the food industry is still wired for mass efficiency, not individualized nutrition.”

Scaling requires trust and profit

The core bottleneck to scaling sustainable solutions, Maesmans asserts, is not technical — it’s systemic. Building viable new food chains demands deep collaboration and mutual trust among all players, from growers to processors to retailers.

“Collaboration only works if there’s trust and profitability. Farmers need to believe they’ll be paid fairly for regenerative practices. Consumers need to feel they’re paying a fair price. Without that, the system collapses,” he says.

That trust–profitability loop, he adds, is essential in a context where time is short. “Climate change doesn’t wait. We must build new collaborations faster than we ever have.”

The role of regulation and policy

Maesmans highlights recent regulatory dialogue at the event as positive, particularly discussions around implementing deforestation regulations and harmonizing measurement standards.

“These frameworks are needed to weed out negative system impacts — like child labor or over-fertilization — and ensure a fair and open playing field,” he notes. “The challenge is moving fast enough.”

He sees the current policy environment in Europe as increasingly aware of food’s role in societal and industrial competitiveness, though still slow to integrate truly systemic thinking.

Profit and purpose are not mutually exclusive

Regenerative agriculture investments will safeguard the future of the industry and secure long-term profits, Maesmans says,Asked whether major corporations like Cargill are prepared to prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term profit, Maesmans says that the choice is already being made.

“We’re investing in regenerative agriculture in over 15 countries, even though only a small portion of our customers co-invest today,” he explains. “We’re developing solutions to reduce sugar, salt, and saturated fats — because we know that if we don’t, we won’t have an industry tomorrow.”

Maesmans frames Cargill’s position across supply chain and ingredient production as a natural pressure point: “If we don’t have a farmer who wants to supply us, or a consumer who trusts our food, we won’t have a business.”

AI as an accelerator — not a replacement

Artificial intelligence, he says, is proving a critical accelerator in decoding complex interdependencies within food systems.

“We have data from farm to table, but food systems aren’t linear — they’re complex. AI helps us see correlations and impacts we can’t see ourselves,” he says. “It’s a tool that accelerates decision-making in formulation, processing, and sourcing — but human judgment is still essential.”

He cautions that AI’s role must be framed realistically: “It’s not about replacing expertise; it’s about speeding up the right actions — and we desperately need that speed.”

Making the system viable for tomorrow

Ultimately, Maesmans sees scalability as the defining challenge of food system transformation. Innovations that improve health, sustainability, and efficiency exist — but they must become widespread, trusted, and economically viable.

“We’ve proven we can grow specialty crops with precision. We can develop personalized nutrition. But if we can’t scale those breakthroughs to benefit billions — equitably and profitably — we’re not solving the real problem.”