Food Matters Live Podcast

Scientific publishing on ultra-processed food jumped by 450% between 2021 and 2025, and few terms in food are as charged right now. The evidence linking high UPF consumption with poor health keeps growing, but so does the argument over whether the label itself is a meaningful category or a blunt tool that lumps wholegrain bread and a fortified plant-based burger in with the foods people are really worried about. In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded live at our London event, four panellists from very different corners of the industry take the question head on. We hear what the evidence does and doesn’t show, a call for policy to target fat, salt and sugar specifically rather than processing itself, and a view that the industry shouldn’t wait for perfect evidence before removing ingredients it doesn’t need.It is a lively debate, with plenty of questions from the audience, on one of the hottest topics the food industry is facing.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

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.