Top Executives on the Future of Food

During our 19th annual Farm to Market | Chemicals Conference, we sat down with top executives in the industry to discuss the future of food, and global food and agriculture trends.

"One of the best things about this sector is we know it won’t be disrupted; we are going to keep needing food. The question is, how do we manufacture it? What is it that we make? And who is growing it where in the world, and through what modalities? That offers a wealth of opportunity to invest in different types of agriculture, as well as the rest of the food system.”

-- Joanna Reiss, Partner, Apollo --

“I run a vertical farm and basically a vertical farm is a plant factory that uses no Uh, no natural light. So it's all done with LED lighting. We really compress the grow time of our crops down by about two thirds versus open field farming. We found the intersection point between technology and traditional ag to really create something that’s innovative and needed for Canada’s food sovereignty.”

-- Barry Murchie, President and CEO, GoodLeaf Farms --

"I think one of the biggest things I'm most optimistic on is North America. And the reason being is that everything we've seen from 2020 forward, it really made you re-look at the supply chain and just country risk in general. And if I look back and I say, where am I going to invest my dollars today, you're looking at different things than you were looking at up until 2020. With that, at IOC, we're investing a lot of our money in de-bottlenecking our plant assets. We're also looking at other business and asset acquisitions as well.”

-- Elio Mazzella, President, Interoceanic Corporation --

“It's so interesting to watch technology and markets evolve in the world. And so, you know, Darling has created technology to create fuels for both road transportation, locomotives, ocean vessels, and airplanes now that are near zero emissions. And that came out of the livestock community of taking animal fats and waste fats that were destined for not a very good use and turn them into something special.”

-- Randall C. Stuewe, Chairman and CEO, Darling Ingredients --

“For our business, Novus, and for probably the wider ag community, it's going to be very important to have trusted advisors, good young talent to be able to dissect, disseminate all the complicated pieces of how to farm. The industry is embracing it, slowly, but they embrace it, But you've got to have really good people to be able to put it all together in a puzzle that farmers have to have.”

-- Tommy Warner, President and CEO, Novus Ag --