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

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 Alenxadre, 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 :

• BioSolar Spirulina™ bioactive nutrient concentrates rich in iron, magnesium and vitamins but without the ‘fishy’ or ‘earthy’ aftertaste of traditional microalgae production methods
• NOvo Protein™, a white, neutral tasting, water-soluble, multi-functional ingredient nutritious protein suitable for any easily incorporated into any food product
• Pure Blue™ spirulina extract food colouring.

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

Consumers say they want natural. But do they want it enough to accept a less vibrant colour, a shorter shelf life, or a higher price? And when regulation forces the change anyway, how do you bring consumers with you when they weren't asking for it in the first place?

Clean label means something very different to a Michelin-trained chef building a fermented meat alternative from scratch, to a bakery NPD manager reformulating existing lines away from artificial colours, to a global consumer science director at one of the world's largest confectionery companies navigating the cocoa crisis.

What all three have in common is the same uncomfortable truth: natural is harder, less stable, more expensive and less forgiving than artificial - and the consumer rarely gives you credit for it unless you tell them.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, our expert panel dives into the world of clean label, from the practical realities of moving from artificial to natural colours, allergen considerations, shelf life constraints, and why consumers may accept a dimmer colour once you explain the reason.

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