Severe weather and climate related extremes across Europe have resulted in an estimated economic loss of 822 billion euros between 1980 and 2024. A quarter of those losses occurred between 2021 and 2024.
This is already having a major impact on farmers, with cocoa and coffee among the commodities most recently affected. The price of chocolate in the UK, for example, increased by 17.7% last year due, in part, to poor harvests in West Africa.
Frenzied consumer demand is also causing shortages in certain ingredients as TikTokers supercharge a churn of new, shiny ‘must-haves’. Meanwhile, geopolitical unrest, cyber hacking, and ‘Trumpism’ are layering on uncertainty and pushing tensions higher.
The sad truth is that none of this can be described as a flash in the pan, this is the new normal and the industry needs to accept that and start preparing.
This was the key message at Food Manufacture’s most recent Business Leaders’ Forum (BLF), held last month and chaired by technical leader and IFST president, Chris Gilbert-Wood.
This annual workshop-led event brings together industry stakeholders from a mixture of roles and categories across food and drink to talk over topical issues, which on this occasion focused on building in resilience.
To find out more about BLF and to register to become a member, click here.
What is resilience?
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Paris-based inter-governmental think tank for advanced economies, defines resilience in the context of food and agriculture as: “The ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt and transform in response to adverse events”.
In other words, resilience is not just a case of survival, it is about being prepared to deal with whatever cards come your way.
Why does the food sector have a resilience issue?
Historically, the food and drink industry has operated on a very reactive model. This was encouraged by decades of efficiency chasing in a post-war era that demanded productivity, scale and cost reduction.
Our relentless focus to remove ‘redundancy’ (for example domestic storage etc) has left little slack in the system.
Professor Tim Lang’s ‘Just in Case Report’, which was put together for the National Preparedness Commission in 2025, highlighted a glaring gap in the UK’s readiness in the face of national emergencies. While successive governments have developed rather sophisticated resilience frameworks, food has been neglected from plans.
Lang, who spoke at the recent BLF Forum, pointed delegates to this report as he underscored the importance of moving away from a non-diverse, inward-looking system. As he puts it in said report: “Resilience comes from having more, not less surplus capacity and flexibility and diversity in production, distribution and labour force.”
Recent events have lent weight to Lang’s argument, with the pandemic showing just how ill-equipped we are and incidences since then adding to the bank of evidence.
During Covid, citizens were faced with food shortages and empty shelves due to stockpiling, triggered by a fear of needing to self-isolate. This in turn created a spike in demand, with figures from the British Retail Consortium showing around £1 billion of extra food was purchased in the last 2-3 weeks of March 2020.
While we weren’t wrong to make the decisions we did around efficiency all those years ago, these same attributes have now left us vulnerable. The UK’s ‘just-in-time’ supply chain was not set up for today’s volatile environment.
“For decades we’ve quite rightly driven out cost, stock, spare capacity and duplication. But look at those decisions through a resilience lens and some of what we called inefficiency starts to look like capability,” commented October Forum’s chair, Gilbert-Wood.
“The question isn’t whether efficiency was wrong, but whether we’ve pushed it too far.”
The key message from the day is that we must leave behind outdated methods and start building a food industry that reflects modern societal pressures.
To do this, the sector must break free from its traditional approach to resilience and instead come together to talk about the common good.
As Gilbert-Wood told Food Manufacture, “We can each make our own businesses more resilient, but that doesn’t necessarily make the food system resilient.”
Some of our biggest vulnerabilities are shared and to address them requires government to take a system-wide view. The problem is that no one in government really owns or champions food resilience as a whole.
Can the UK withstand multiple shocks?
The pandemic raised the alarm and now we really need to act. With a super El Niño likely to cause anarchy across farming and geopolitical unrest causing uncertainty across supply chains, if another Covid-like situation were to happen again on top of these, it could lead to an even bleaker outcome.
Recent cyber-related events targeting retailers have further exposed weaknesses in the system and highlighted just how quickly chaos can ensue. Those responsible for the European-wide attacks on commercial fridges in the last few weeks have yet to be identified, although some reports have speculated over possible foreign state involvement.
So yes, we are certainly dealing with multiple crises right now - but how much more can the UK take? Can we confidently say that the food system could deal with any further strain without snapping? Without drastic change?
Probably not.
Yet for delegates attending the Forum, ‘resilience to future shocks and disruptions’ was not among their top five concerns, with ‘consumer affordability and the cost of living’ emerging as a clear winner.
While factors such as skills and domestic food production certainly feed into resilience, perhaps this data shows that resilience needs to be pushed much higher up the agenda.
And interestingly, while similar, responses to what the UK is least prepared for differed, with ‘food security and domestic production’ leading the way.
What can we do to build in resilience?
While it may feel like much of this situation is out of our control, the purpose of October’s Forum was to highlight what could be controlled.
1. Understand your risks
For Kate Hancock, COO for Sphere Design, one of the companies supporting Business Leaders’ Forum, resilience comes from understanding where the critical vulnerabilities lie.
“When manufacturers face multiple crises, the immediate priority has to be keeping operations running,” she said. “But once the immediate issue is under control, the focus should shift from firefighting to prevention: identifying the underlying risks and taking a 5–10-year view of how they can be reduced or removed.”
Mark Perkins, business development director for UiPath, a fellow business supporting the event, agreed: “It’s important to distinguish between the risks they [manufacturers] can control, those they can influence and those they simply need to prepare for.
“The priority should be protecting operational continuity, customer service and profitability, while building the agility to respond quickly as circumstances change.”
2. Invest in technology but also cybersecurity
For Perkins, technology plays a critical role in achieving this – but cybersecurity must be a crucial part of the digital transformation process.
“AI and automation can help manufacturers anticipate disruption, evaluate different scenarios and take proactive action rather than simply reacting to problems,” he said.
“However, as businesses become increasingly connected and reliant on technology, cybersecurity must be treated as a fundamental part of operational resilience. Robust security, clear governance and effective recovery plans are essential to ensuring that digital transformation strengthens resilience rather than introducing new vulnerabilities.”
3. Shore up your relationships with suppliers
Another action manufacturers can take is to review and bolster relationships with suppliers.
This not only assures a more robust supply chain in the long-term, but as delegates heard, it’s fast becoming a trading imperative. Retailers are increasingly posing questions like ‘what’s your contingency plan?’ and ‘what happens when something fails?’.
Manufacturers must ensure they have a dependable ‘next step’ and that when things do go wrong, they are communicated clearly and with transparency and honesty.
“Having spent many years on the retail side of the table, I can tell you that the strongest supplier relationships aren’t necessarily the ones where everything goes smoothly,” said Paul Geary, director for PSG commercial advisory Ltd and Morrisons Former trading director.
Geary, who spoke at the Forum, believes the most solid relationships are the ones where, when something does go awry, both sides can have an honest conversation and work through it together.
“Retailers need suppliers who understand their business, anticipate problems and bring solutions rather than surprises. That requires trust, transparency and a willingness to look beyond the next price negotiation.”
He continued: “We’ve spent years driving efficiency and taking cost out of food supply chains, often with good reason. But resilience comes at a cost too, and we need to recognise that. It’s difficult to ask a supplier to invest in additional capacity, alternative sourcing or contingency plans if the commercial relationship is focused entirely on securing the lowest possible price.
“Genuine resilience needs to be built into the commercial relationship, not simply demanded when something goes wrong.”
4. Lose the ageing infrastructure
Meanwhile for Hancock, manufacturers are missing a big trick when it comes to facilities – an oversight which can also threaten customer relationships. She pointed to the risk of ageing infrastructure, fabrication and building services as an area that requires much more attention.
She elaborated: “Site teams are rightly focused on producing great food and maintaining day-to-day operations, but without longer-term planning, failures can quickly put customer service and reputation at risk.”
In other words, manufacturers need to act before those assets reach their end of life – and when looking to move or set up a new factory, it’s worth considering whether brownfield sites are the best choice.
5. Collaboration is key
Echoing Lang and Gilbert-Wood’s sentiments, Hancock also stressed the need for the industry to be less insular: “The food industry is highly competitive, but there are many non-competitive areas where sharing resources, expertise and infrastructure can reduce risk for everyone.
“SmartParc in Derby demonstrates this approach. Its central heating and cooling infrastructure removes the need for individual manufacturers to operate their own refrigeration and boiler systems. These services are maintained and operated centrally under SLAs, reducing the need for specialist teams at each facility and removing a potential area of operational risk.”
Time for change
The sector has long been rewarded for stripping out costs, duplication and spare capacity, but today’s world is very different – and our systems need to reflect that.
“The last few years have shown how good the food industry is at crisis management,” said Gilbert-Wood. “But we shouldn’t confuse being brilliant at firefighting with being resilient.
“We should not continue to rely on exceptional people to keep rescuing the system every time something goes wrong; we need to prepare more to mitigate the underlying vulnerability.”
And while building in diversity could mean complete reinvention and higher costs, that may be price of keeping the UK’s food system running.