If people won’t change their diet to save their lives, why would they change it to save the planet?

For years, much of the food sustainability debate has rested on an uncomfortable assumption: that consumers will change first.

• Eat differently.

• Buy differently.

• Pay more.

• Care more.

Sometimes they do. Often, they don’t. And that’s not because people are ignorant or indifferent - it’s because food choices are made inside real constraints.

When there is too much month left at the end of the pay cheque, sustainability becomes a luxury. When time, money, and familiarity matter, people default to what works. That reality doesn’t make consumers the problem. It makes the system the problem.

At UPP, we don’t judge consumer behaviour - because judging behaviour doesn’t change outcomes. Designing systems that work within reality does.

Behaviour change is a weak lever - system change is a power enabler.

Public health has already taught us this lesson: If people won’t reliably change their diets to improve their own health, it is unrealistic to expect them to overhaul their food choices to reduce carbon emissions - especially when the alternatives are unfamiliar, more expensive, or harder to trust.

The food system cannot decarbonise by asking millions of households to behave differently every day. It can decarbonise by changing what goes into food: quietly, upstream, and at scale.

That is where leverage actually sits.

Waste is not a moral failure - it’s a design failure

Across UK and European agriculture, vast volumes of nutritious vegetables are grown every year and never enter the food system.

• Not because they are unsafe.

• Not because they lack nutritional value.

• But because harvesting them is labour-intensive, uneconomic, or poorly integrated with downstream demand.

Those crops are left in fields or diverted to low-value uses, while food manufacturers import ingredients from halfway around the world to perform the same functions.

That isn’t a consumer choice problem.

It’s a systems design problem.

UPP exists to fix that. Using what already exists - before growing more. Our approach starts with a simple question: “What if we used the food we already grow — but don’t currently use - to replace ingredients that travel thousands of miles?”

UPP works with wasted and under-utilised vegetables: grown in the UK where possible, and in Spain during winter when domestic supply isn’t viable

• We don’t compete with fresh markets.

• We don’t displace food from plates.

• We work with plants that would otherwise be left to rot.

From those crops, we produce protein and fibre ingredients that:

• displace globally sourced inputs

• deliver lower CO₂ even if grown for purpose

• and do so at a cost that works for real food systems

This is not about niche substitution. It’s about mainstream replacement. Sustainability that pays for itself scales faster. One of the reasons sustainability efforts stall is simple: they cost money. UPP’s model flips that logic. Because our ingredients are derived from side-streams and under-utilised crops:

• farmers gain a new income stream from material that previously had little or no value

• producers gain lower-cost ingredients that integrate into existing processes

• retailers gain credible Scope 3 reductions tied to operational change

• consumers get nutritious food at lower or equivalent prices

Margins improve instead of eroding. That matters - because the changes that last are the ones that make commercial sense. Technology is the enabler - not the point.

Yes, this is technology-enabled.

Yes, it’s patent-protected.

Yes, it involves automation, processing innovation, and system integration.

But technology is not the goal. We are not developing technology for its own sake. We are developing technology to achieve an outcome. Every decision is anchored to a single question:

Does this make the system work better - economically and environmentally — without asking people to behave differently?

If the answer is no, it doesn’t scale.

Quiet change beats loud disruption

UPP’s ingredients don’t ask consumers to learn new words, adopt new diets, or pay a premium for virtue. They sit behind the scenes - improving food by changing how it is made, not how it is marketed. That is why this approach works:

• familiar crops

• familiar foods

• familiar buying behaviour

But with lower waste, lower emissions, and better economics embedded upstream.

Better for everyone — by design

This is systems-thinking applied to food:

Better for planters (farmers): new revenue, less waste, more resilient economics

Better for producers: lower costs, lower risk, low-friction reformulation

Better for people: nutritious, affordable food without behavioural trade-offs

Better for the planet: emissions reduced at source, not offset after the fact

But

No judgement.

No guilt.

No unrealistic assumptions about how people “should” behave.

Just a better system — designed to work in the real world.

Because the fastest way to change what people buy is not to ask them to change at all - it’s to change the system behind the shelf.

Read more here.