Food Matters Live Podcast

The gut microbiome is one of the most exciting fields in nutrition, but it is also one of the hardest to commercialise. 

Regulation hasn’t kept pace with the research, the most promising next-generation microbes can’t be put into food, and consumers get most of their information from the loudest voice rather than the best evidence.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, three researchers take questions from the floor on moving gut science from the lab to the consumer. 

They start with a randomised controlled trial now recruiting perimenopausal and postmenopausal women, testing whether a probiotic can improve acne through the gut-skin axis. 

They go on to a candid account of why probiotic regulation is, in one panellist’s words, “a complete and utter mess”, and why they doubt it will change soon.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

What happens to the parts of a vegetable that never make it onto the plate? And could the answer be hiding in one of the oldest food technologies in the world?

The UK produces around ten million tonnes of food waste every year, and a third of the food made for human consumption is wasted. Most of the innovation in this space has focused on shiny new technology. Rebecca Ghim’s answer is far older: fermentation. She rescues the cauliflower leaves and broccoli stalks that restaurants, caterers and veg prep manufacturers throw away, and turns them into kimchi and pickles.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, Rebecca, co-founder of The Ferm, tells the story of building an upcycling business with no background in food or hospitality.

She explains how she found her suppliers at running and cycling clubs, and why broccoli stalks, once peeled, make a near-perfect canvas for fermentation.

In the Q&A she gives a surprisingly generous definition of what counts as kimchi, explains why upcycling is held back more by missing specification sheets than by missing waste, and covers the early research (so far in mice only) suggesting a strain found in kimchi may help the body clear microplastics.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

What will we be eating in the future? And what does that mean for the brands, manufacturers and developers trying to build products for a consumer whose relationship with food is changing faster than at any point in living memory?

Bompas & Parr have been making predictions about the future of food for nearly two decades, not through data models but through what Sam Bompas calls a zeitgeist approach: trust your gut, write the future you want to step into, and go back and check whether you were right. Mostly, they are. And if their latest six predictions are even half accurate, the implications for the food industry are significant.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, Sam Bompas and Pablo Britton from Bompas & Parr take the audience through their latest Future of Food report.

TV dinners: the argument that the television is becoming a cultural campfire again, and that the time is right for a properly designed food-to-match-the-show experience at home. 

Gastro void: the risk that as biohackers treat food as a problem to be solved, we optimise the meaning, friction and communal experience out of eating entirely.

And boomer drinkers: why the most exciting innovation opportunity in drinks may be with older consumers whose palates have genuinely changed and whose relationship to sophisticated flavour is under-appreciated. 

All that and more features in this high-energy episode!

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

If you handed a consumer two products - one with 18 ingredients and one with 6 - they already know which one they’d choose. But here’s the more interesting question: what if the product with fewer ingredients didn’t just look better, but performed better?

That’s the argument at the heart of this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded live at our event in London's Olympia.

Clean label has largely been framed as a removal exercise, but often that leads to having to add something else in. Daniel Jones, Head of Food and Beverage at Blue Sky Botanicsis argues it makes more sense to choose better ingredients in the first place, ones that bring flavour, function and fibre simultaneously, without the downstream cascade of additions.

In this context, we learn about the baobab, a fibre-rich African superfruit that also delivers mouthfeel, viscosity and system stability. 

Daniel also makes the case for elderflower as a masterclass in what gets lost when you isolate compounds: there are 148 identifiable flavour compounds in an elderflower, and extracting each individually produces wildly different results. But if you extract the whole plant naturally, it tastes of elderflower.

Seven out of ten women say they want to improve their nutrition. The problem isn't knowledge or even willingness, it's time, mental bandwidth and a food system that makes consistently hitting nutritional targets genuinely difficult.

And for women, that target is moving all the time. Nutritional requirements shift across the monthly cycle, through pregnancy, perimenopause and beyond, meaning the standard one-size nutritional recommendation built largely on male data is, at best, a starting point. At worst, it's masking a persistent micronutrient gap that shows up as fatigue, brain fog, poor concentration or even just feeling cold, and gets dismissed as a lifestyle problem when it's actually a nutritional one.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, made in partnership with Arborea, three experts from the company make the case that microalgae could be a quiet but significant part of the answer. 

We learn about the biochemistry of why minerals such as iron and magnesium and vitamins such as D and B so critical for women specifically, why nutrition is not just what's on the label but what survives processing and can actually be absorbed by your cells, and why uniquely cultivated microalgae may be what it actually takes to get these micronutrients in a bioavailable form into foods that people want to eat.

The Arborea team bring the science to life and into the real world, explaining how their technology can be used to produce clean microalgae at scale.

Guests:

Karen Stetter, Senior Research and Development Programme Manager, Arborea

Ulliana Sampaio, Senior Product Development Scientist, Arborea

Estelle Alexandre, Business Development team, Arborea

Arborea

Arborea uses its patented Biosolar Leaf™ technology to capture and convert carbon dioxide into controlled, highly nutritious, natural food ingredients. It uses sunlight for the industrial photosynthesis and extraction of microalgaeon barren, non-fertile land and thus with zero deforestation and no loss of biodiversity. 

The consistent micro-environment in this contained process ensures uniquely controlled taste and nutritional content. The process is easily scalable, without requiring expensive fermentation tanks, open ponds, internal photobioreactors, pressurised gases, and without risk of any cross-contamination from heavy metals or organic toxins.

Example products include :

GLP-1 medications are not a silver bullet. That's not a controversial statement, but it is one that tends to get lost in a media narrative that swings between miracle cure and moral panic. 

The more interesting question for the food industry might be: what actually happens to people's diets when they're on these drugs, and what do they need from food, from support services, and from manufacturers, both during treatment and when they come off?

The honest answer, for now, is that the data is thin. People are eating less, but whether they're doing that through smaller portions, skipped meals, or a shift in macronutrient preference is largely uncharted territory.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, three specialists bring different lenses to the GLP-1 debate.

They cover dietary deficiencies, dietary support alongside the drugs, and how consumers’ tastes are changing as a result of taking GLP-1 medication.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

In the UK, around a third of the soft drinks market reformulated before the sugar levy even came into force. Most of the change happened in anticipation of the law, not in response to it. So does that prove mandatory regulation works?

The answer, according to the panellists in this session, recorded at the Food Matters Live event at London’s Olympia, is more nuanced than it first appears. 

Mandatory policies level the playing field and remove the competitive anxiety of going first. But our panelists all agree they only work if they're well designed, broadly applied, and given enough lead time for industry to respond. 

In this episode four specialists debate the policy landscape in the food industry right now and what it means in practice. 

They discuss nutrient profiling, GLP-1, new claims challenges, sugar levies and portion size reduction.

We also hear the case for the food industry to engage with regulators much earlier in the development process.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

Twenty years ago, roughly eight scientific papers a year were being published on the gut microbiome. Scientists barely knew it existed. Today it is one of the most actively researched areas in all of human biology, and what it's revealing is that this community of trillions of microbes living in your lower intestine is not just relevant to digestion. 

It's connected to your immune system, your brain, your metabolism, your mood, your response to stress, and your long-term risk of many major diseases.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, two scientists approach the gut microbiome from very different angles. 

Dr Emily Leeming, microbiome scientist, registered dietitian and author of Genius Gut and Fibre Power, opens with a compelling and accessible masterclass on what the gut microbiome is, why it matters, and what we can actually do about it. 

Dr Umar Jan, President of European Operations at Sabinsa, then presents the science behind two of Sabinsa's biotics. His presentation addresses a question that sits at the heart of the postbiotic category: when you inactivate a probiotic, what exactly are you left with, and can you prove it's doing something useful?

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

Neil Rankin applied for a job at Pret after the 2008 financial crisis closed his sandwich business. He didn't get it. What followed was seven years in professional kitchens, a Michelin-level career built around fire and meat, and then slowly, a growing conviction that the most important thing he could do with everything he'd learned was to stop cooking meat altogether.

Symplicity started in a home kitchen during Covid, hand-making sausages and shaping burgers with an ice cream tub lid. Its first customers were Soho House, Dishoom and Gordon Ramsay. It is now in Waitrose and 3,000 restaurants across the UK and every product is still made by hand, using wild lacto-fermentation, everyday vegetables, miso, flaxseed and flour. 

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, Neil sits down for an extended conversation about the journey that brought him here and what he's learned along the way. 

He explains why he thinks everything truly delicious in the world has been fermented and why he believes the plant-based industry's fatal mistake was starting with bitter proteins and working backwards. 

He opens up about the genuine tension of being a meat eater building a meat alternative and why retail remains the hardest frontier of all.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

Most food manufacturers are running their product development on spreadsheets. Nutritional values in one file, allergen data in another, recipes in a shared drive, submission forms being manually rekeyed the night before a customer deadline. 

But the pace of change facing food manufacturers right now is unlike anything in recent memory. HFSS reformulations, UPF scrutiny, carbon labelling, gut health claims, retailer-specific submission formats that change without warning, and behind every single one of those challenges, a development process that in most businesses still runs on fragile, disconnected data. 

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our event at London’s Olympia, the case is made that a significant portion of the pressure that technical and NPD teams are feeling isn't coming from the market or from regulation, but from out-dated background systems.

Could it be that in a decade where AI will increasingly depend on the quality of the data underneath it, the manufacturers who treat product data as a strategic asset rather than an administrative byproduct will be the ones who pull ahead?

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com