"I believe I can visually see a decline in the fruit quality on offer. And the only reasoning that I can attribute to that is human intervention and technology."

Apple grower Mark Trzaskoma's observation that fruit quality has declined even as the technology around it has become more sophisticated really resonated with me, as a plant scientist, as a foodie, and as an investor.

As a plant scientist, I want to acknowledge the huge contributions modern plant breeding has made to crop yields and food security. But we have also bred for uniformity, shelf life, and global shipping rather than nutrition or flavour. For example, North America once had thousands of apple varieties, available locally and seasonally, but this has largely collapsed into the handful now available in supermarkets that survive the cold chain and travel well. Every time I eat a Cox's Orange Pippin apple, it's a joyous reminder of how complex and unique an otherwise familiar fruit can taste.

As a foodie, this loss of quality and diversity makes me sad, too. And it isn't just a question of personal preference. Many of our grain, fruit, and vegetable crops show an apparent long-term decline in nutrient density due to the adoption of new varieties and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. We talk a lot about producing enough bulk calories while overlooking nutrient density and the very real impacts of micronutrient deficiency around the world (something I wrote about back in 2022).

Mark's observation also connects to a pattern that food writer and futurist Mike Lee describes in his recent piece on the enshittification of Big Food. Lee argues that packaged food has been running the same substitution logic for a century, replacing real ingredients with cheaper functional equivalents. This continues until the worse version of the product becomes the reference point and people forget or lose the taste for what they're missing. The mechanism is different in fresh produce, but the underlying incentive is identical. Nutrition and flavour are not part of the financial spreadsheet, so they don't count. As an investor, I get it. But I also think we can do better, and that's the opportunity.

A compelling vision with hard questions attached

Which is why I was curious to read Lee's companion piece, A New Blueprint for Big Food. Lee makes the case that this quality decline can be reversed, not through moral arguments, but by making the outcomes of regenerative food systems measurable and priceable. If soil health, nutrient density, and flavour can be quantified and built into financial decisions, the argument goes, then the activist investor and the sustainability advocate end up pushing for the same outcome. It's a compelling vision, and one that connects naturally to our work at Tenacious.

But the path there is harder than it might seem. The science linking soil health to nutrition, and nutrition to flavour, is still emerging rather than definitive. And flavour is more subjective than it sounds; some key nutrients in plants taste bitter rather than universally delicious.

"Regenerative agriculture" is also much easier to say than to define. It's locally adapted by nature, and harder to fit into a universal scorecard or a balance sheet. Once a metric becomes a target, it tends to stop measuring the thing it was designed to track. Carrots bred for a spectrometer reading aren't necessarily more nourishing, they're just better at looking that way. 

And information alone isn’t enough to shift behaviour. We’ve seen traceability tools and QR codes get built but we haven’t seen consumers change their spending patterns in response.

Lee’s flavour-revenue path will also struggle against a background where fresh produce is not universally affordable or accessible and where, even in high income countries, most of the population is not eating enough fruit and vegetables to begin with. Expanding who this reaches is the harder and more important commercial challenge. Selling better carrots to people who already buy organic will also be less impactful on human health and the environment than shifting the bulk of consumers towards regeneratively-grown produce. 

Lee's other example, a cracker made from crops grown in rotation, raises its own questions: while there's strong evidence for the benefit of diverse rotations for yields and soil health, processed products add complexity when weighing any potential improvements in the nutrient density of individual ingredients.

Of course, Lee’s article isn’t meant to be comprehensive or prescriptive. Instead, it’s a welcome and timely invitation to explore how we can create a world where “the most profitable carrot is the most flavorful one, grown in living soil.”

What would actually need to change

So what actually needs to happen? A few things, probably in parallel. The science needs to be done rigorously, not because a journal paper moves a procurement decision, but because robust evidence is what enables the measurement tools and pricing mechanisms that eventually do. Agtech has a real role here, particularly in MRV: we need tools that make soil health and nutrient density legible along the supply chain in ways that are rigorous enough to trust and cheap enough to scale.

The commercial challenges are real too. Even if we knew which crops and practices produced measurably better soils and food, capturing that value is hard. Breeding takes time and investment, and new varieties need a market to justify them. Growers adopt new practices and varieties for various reasons; at a minimum, yield benefits, reduced input costs, and/or price premiums are needed. Diversity is good for our diets and for our agricultural systems, but that same diversity can be limited by current commercial realities. 

Which brings it back to the fundamental question: do people actually pay more for food that tastes better or that demonstrably improves their health? The preliminary answer is yes, in certain contexts, although studies of ‘willingness to pay’ don’t always translate well to actual buying behaviour. But even if the answer is “yes” only partially or only in specific circumstances, then there is a case for regenerative food systems that doesn’t just rely on values or labels, but rather demand.

As consumers and investors alike, we need to ask better questions. We can’t simply ask "is this labelled regenerative?" We need to ask "what does that actually mean here, in this soil, in this system, for this food?" And, “who is actually better off?”

These are questions we'll be exploring in an upcoming episode of AgTech…So What? with Mike Lee himself. We'd love to hear your thoughts as we prepare to record: what would shift how you think about the food you buy, or the companies you back?