Future of food

India is a consumption-driven country. All our projections say India will be a $7-trillion economy by 2030. So we are creating another India in another seven years. An economy doubling in seven years means a huge change will take place in society, systems, everything. The pace of change will be so rapid that we would not have experienced anything like that in the past

Fortunately for a country like ours, digital is becoming a much more important play. Even if you look at the agri perspective, the kind of investment taking place in digital agriculture has not been seen so far in India. While we talk about the disadvantages of Indian farming due to the small size of holdings, the Digital and AI theme could help mitigate some of those supply chain problems.

What digital can do is to give the farmer the right information on the weather, forecast of soil health, or the corrections to be done. In many parts of India, digital is moving so fast that Uber equivalents of farming are happening, eliminating wastage, and infrastructure in terms of cold storage and warehouses is being created. Organised trade is also becoming stronger. 

In the next seven years’ time, we should have a great growth trajectory in India that should triple our size in the country (currently India revenues are reportedly just 2 per cent of the global food major’s turnover). While we do that, the whole ecosystem needs to be built up, which will involve investments, plants, supply chain capabilities, working with Indian stakeholders, and a lot more. We had our chairman here recently and we laid the foundation stone for the animal nutrition plant in Bhatinda. We also launched a refreshed chocolate portfolio to enter India in that space. As we grow our edible oil, starches and sweeteners, cocoa and chocolate businesses in India, we are bringing our global knowledge here. Our idea is to connect knowledge available across the world, whether from our US lab in Minneapolis, our Europe lab or Shanghai facility, and bring it to our workplace in India, to solve an Indian problem.

For instance, you could have a molecule developed in the Brazil lab. But how do we bring that molecule here to India and apply it in a product to enhance taste, mouth feel, creating volume ...  

There are three kinds of innovation we are driving - 1) Health and wellness. 2) Sustainability driven and 3) Transformation Innovation. Our focus if you look at Transformation Innovation is to solve for the population needs. If you look at the world at large, we have a population of around 8 billion, it will be 8.5 billion by 2030 and 10 billion by 2050. This means you need 50 per cent more food. A country like India, our average household per capita consumption is around $2,500. The per capita consumption will become $4000 by 2030. But more than the figure, the pattern of consumption of people will change. One, they can afford better quality food. But more than that, the kind of food the future generations will eat may not be the same as today. Third, the nutritional requirements of different countries could shift. While we address all these, we also need 50 per cent more volume of food. But there will be a shortage of soil, water, and so many other resources – so how do we do it?

There will be a couple of things. One is using the process of fermentation, as a key driver in many of our inventions. Today, when we create a Stevia in the US, the kind of technology we have developed, you can eliminate 70 per cent of the land used. You are saving resources and keeping that for the future. The technology of using fermentation is also bringing in a sweetener that is close to sugar. This is an invention that is nearly complete. We are trying to get global regulatory approval.

In the same wave, in health and wellness, for example, we have created post-biotic products called Epicor. It has been launched in the US. This helps in digestion, gut health. Now we are getting regulatory approval for that in India. Once we get that, we will enter the market. For instance, if you can put this into a biscuit, it will be in an everyday product.

All these are cultural changes. For us, our work is about consumer insight. Finding out what the consumer looking at and then creating an innovation pipeline. Then we go to ABC company and tell them. We have a trend tracker, an internal tool. So we study key trends in Asia and in India. We curate our innovations and in some cases co-create.

Two things we do in our oils, one is we have a clear programme for reducing oil absorption. We have been working with a fast-food chain for the last 10 ten years, to progressively reduce oil absorption that happens in its fried product every year.

Second, we are now much more into Indian domestic oils. In line with the government’s intention. India imported 15 million tonnes of cooking oil last year. With population growth and per capita going up, it could reach 20 million tonnes. At Cargill we are actively working on domestic oils - cotton seed oil, mustard oil, coconut oil, groundnut oil. We are slowly trying to change our mix to more domestic oil