If food could talk
If food could talk, what would it say?
My friend Toby asked me that the other day. It’s a deceptively simple question.
I’m pretty sure food wouldn’t recite the facts on its label — no more than you would casually tell someone your blood type, current level of vitamins, and fat percentage. I don’t think it would tell the carefully constructed brand story, either.
A tomato might say: “I was picked too early. I’m still red, but I won’t taste right.”
A strawberry: “I travelled 2,000 miles to get here. Half my friends didn’t survive the journey.”
A bag of flour: “I was blended to hit a target. I’m not as pure as I was before.”
The Supply Chain of Decisions
Food is one of the most complex decision systems we run as a society. We’ve become much better in recent years at describing food and its journey. Modern systems can help us with tracing, labeling, analyzing, shipping, preserving, and marketing the food to the right consumers. Very frequently, we can tell you where it came from, what it contains, even how sustainable it claims to be — although that is still a challenge in some scenarios. But if you listen carefully, food isn’t really telling us its story. It’s pointing to something else. Behind every item is a chain of decisions:
What to produce
Where and how much
When to treat and harvest
How and where to move it
How to combine or process it
What price to sell at
How long to keep
Each decision is made under uncertainty. Each one affects the next. Small misjudgments compound into waste, cost, and missed opportunity.
Food asks the questions
If food could talk, I believe it wouldn’t be content to describe where it grew up, and what happened to it on the journey to the consumer (although that might be very interesting). I believe it would question things:
Why was I grown here?
Why was I treated this way?
Why was I harvested at this moment?
Why did I travel this far?
Why am I being thrown away?
At the root: who made those choices — and could they have been better?
Because the system isn’t just about food. It’s about people who make decisions on behalf of the food, the vendors, and the consumers: farmers deciding what to plant months in advance, buyers balancing price against risk, planners of all types making rapid calls with incomplete information.
Every step reflects human judgment under pressure, often with thin margins for error. There’s also something more fundamental: food lives in time. It ripens. It ages. It expires. Yet many of our systems treat it as static — rows in a spreadsheet, units in inventory — rather than something moving, changing, decaying.
Food doesn’t fail because it’s bad. It fails because it’s late. Or early. Or sent to the wrong place. Or because it spent too long in the warehouse, or in the supply chain. Occasionally, it fails because it was mistreated somewhere along the way.
What does food want technology to do?
Today, most of our supply chain technology is focused on generating better information: forecasts, dashboards, and reports. In companies with more mature technology we might also see insights. All useful. But none of these actually make decisions.
If food could talk, it wouldn’t ask for another dashboard. It would ask for better choices.
This is where the next wave of AI is different. Not better dashboards or reports. Better decisions. It doesn’t just describe what’s happening. It helps determine what should happen next. It takes the complexity, the uncertainty, constraints, and trade-offs, and turns them into clear, explainable recommendations.
Food might be nervous — as many humans are — that agentic AI will make all of the decisions itself. However, this is not about removing humans from the loop. Instead, it is giving them something far more valuable than ‘pure’ information: a way to make consistently better decisions, working in partnership with AI tools.
Agentic AI allows us to make better recommendations, and then (when the human-in-the-loop agrees) automatically execute those decisions.
Because in the end, the question isn’t:
“What does the data say?” or even “What does the food say?”
The critical questions are: “What should we do?” and “How quickly can we do it?”
Food that moves effectively through the supply chain reaches its destination faster, with less waste, in better health — and maintains a higher nutritional content.
If food could talk, it wouldn’t simply tell us its story. It would ask us to listen — and use what we learn to make better decisions.