Future Food Solutions | helping farmers and food companies reduce their carbon footprint

Future Food Solutions is a sustainable agriculture and supply chain consultancy that helps farmers and major food companies adopt new farming techniques designed to improve efficiency and combat climate change.   

We spoke to Paul Rhodes, director at Future Food Solutions, about its sustainable farming techniques and how being based in the UK has helped it introduce its services to major multinational food companies.  

What does your company do? 

My business partner [Steve Cann] and I had been working with supply chains for much of 20 years and saw this opportunity to improve the resilience in supply chains for food businesses. So, ten years ago, we set up Future Food Solutions. It very quickly turned into a sustainable business model. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with several significant brands such as Coca Cola, Heineken and Intersnack to develop more sustainable, low carbon supply chains.  

A lot of what we do revolves around soil quality. We’ve looked at ways of improving the soil structure and improving soil fertility and much of that has led to improving the amount of organic matter in soil. Since the 1940s, farmland in the UK and around the world has lost about half of its organic matter - or its soil carbon - due to the farming techniques we used. And all that has gone up into the atmosphere. 

We’ve developed a team of plants with complementary leaf and root structure that we've nicknamed ‘pop up rainforests’. These grow in between crops of food. As soon as harvest is done, these ‘pop up rainforests’ grow incredibly quickly and then draw carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back in the soil.  

Working with the soil, we are able to improve soil fertility, yields and crop efficiency while capturing carbon and reducing the emissions that farms produce. 

What role will new technology solutions play in this? 

The technologies that we've developed in the UK we are looking to roll out to other parts of the world. We work closely in partnership with Proagrica who are one of the world's leading farm management and electronic farm records businesses. So some of the technologies and knowledge that we've developed here in the UK we can export and have quite a big global impact. 

We've been able to collect a lot of data on the use of these ‘pop up rainforests’ and their ability to sequestrate carbon which is then being used to inform farmers on the best ways of doing things.  

Going forwards, brands and food businesses can use carbon sequestrated within their own supply chain to offset their group emissions. So, having the facility to measure and certify carbon sequestrated in the supply chain, brings a great opportunity for those brands to manage their carbon emissions as we move towards 2030 and beyond.

How can the voluntary carbon market help to promote action on climate change?

Voluntary carbon markets, or VCMs, are mechanisms for organisations and individuals to voluntarily offset their carbon emissions through purchasing carbon credits from verified carbon reduction or removal projects. These projects can include a wide range of activities, such as reforestation, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and carbon capture and storage.

As a voluntary market, demand for carbon credits is not generated by mandatory regulations or compliance requirements. Instead, companies choosing to participate in voluntary carbon markets often do so as part of their sustainability and corporate social responsibility strategies or as they seek to improve their reputation and brand image. However, since September 2022 and the launch of the new Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) globally, many businesses are exploring how they can use carbon credits for carbon sequestration derived from their own supply chain. This would enable businesses to reduce their carbon footprint by insetting – where companies finance climate protection projects – thereby removing carbon from the atmosphere and helping to reduce global warming.

Tell us about your UK and global operations.  

We're based in Yorkshire [in the north of England]. We have quite a small team of about ten people in total. We have a lot of associates. We very much work collaboratively, and we have a number of collaborating farmers. We have a very good soil scientist, a guy called Neil Fuller. He's been a renowned soil scientist for 40 years and he has helped us develop much of the stuff around the soil and the statistics around measurement.

Importantly, we got backed by some of the brands here in the UK, like Heineken and Coca Cola well before sustainability was an issue. Having a UK presence has been pivotal because we've been able to talk to these companies here in the UK… many of these multinationals are now looking to export what they’ve learned across their global supply chains.

What are the main benefits to being based in the UK? 

Importantly, we got backed by some of the brands here in the UK, like Heineken and Coca Cola well before sustainability was an issue. Having a UK presence has been pivotal because we've been able to talk to these companies here in the UK and they've been interested in what we're doing and had the foresight to give us the opportunity to develop the stuff that we have done. Having worked with major brands out of the UK, many of these multinationals are now looking to export what they’ve learned across their global supply chains. 

We've got some excellent, innovative farmers in the UK too. The farmers in the UK have been really innovative and have just gone on and done stuff which is probably quite ahead of academia. UK farmers are quite technical, they're quite well capitalized, they're a decent scale and they're interested. And that's key. The farmers, particularly the guys that we're working with, seem to be very quick to pick up new technologies, new techniques and really push things forwards.  

We do work with Leeds University, Hull University, York and Newcastle Universities, who have been great at giving us some of the academic robustness that we've needed. We are a highly collaborative business and I think that’s how we've been able to move so quickly. 

There are enormous opportunities for the food and farming sector to work with brands and work with some of the big City bodies, such as the City of London Corporation, to actually make a real impact on the climate crisis. We've got many of the tools already in place and many of the pieces of the jigsaw are there. We're just putting them together. And I think if everybody gets with it and works together, then we can really crack on and help solve the climate crisis.

We do work with Leeds University, Hull University, York and Newcastle Universities, who have been great at giving us some of the academic robustness that we've needed. We are a highly collaborative business and I think that’s how we've been able to move so quickly. 

Tell us about your company's growth ambitions. 

We've been working with an American university called Rice University in Houston, Texas, and they host the Baker Institute, which is one of the American environmental think tanks. We started working with them about three years ago and they have established a not for profit business called BCarbon which has set itself up as a certification body [for carbon credits]. So, because we've been collecting a lot of data over eight years, we've been able to show and prove the carbon capture capabilities of soil through the scientific robustness of our data and they've certified and issued us certified carbon credits, which we've been able to sell and then pay the farmer for doing this. We're currently recruiting more farmers to match the sort of demand that we have. 

Some of the farms we have worked with have increased soil organic matter by up to 3% in around eight years. If we could potentially increase the soil organic matter by just 1% across all the farmland in the world, then it would draw enough carbon out of the atmosphere to take carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back to pre-industrial levels. Farming has this enormous opportunity to be able to draw down literally billions of tons of carbon and take that back out of the atmosphere and put it in back into the soil. That's the size of the prize.