Ask Mike Faers where the food and drink industry is heading and he does not start with food. He starts with the world.
“The impact of geopolitical instability on our industry is significant and real,” he says. “Hospitality, multiple retail, manufacturing, farming and agriculture. Change is inevitable, and fast-paced change is coming over the next five years. Overlay technology on that, at a consumer level and a manufacturing level, and those are the things that will fall out into the consumer.”
These are five year challenges. But as Mike puts it, they need to be addressed now. Here is where he believes attention should go.
1. Supply chains consumers can accept
Global instability is pushing down into every part of the industry, and the pressure lands first on the supply chain. The question Mike poses is not just whether a supply chain is resilient or cost-effective. It is a consumer question: what is an acceptable supply chain in the eyes of the people who buy the product?
Provenance, sourcing, farming practices and the technologies used along the way are all becoming part of how consumers judge what they eat and drink. Businesses that understand where those acceptability lines sit, and how they are moving, will make better sourcing and reformulation decisions than those that find out after launch. The acceptability question is not static either. What a consumer tolerates this year they may reject the next, which makes tracking the movement as important as knowing the current position.
2. Cheap and good enough
To explain the competitive pressure coming, Mike reaches outside the industry. Chinese carmakers are climbing the UK charts. In March 2026, the Jaecoo 7 was the best-selling car in the country, part of an upward trend as more Chinese manufacturers enter the UK market and sell well. “Why? Because it is cheap and because it is good enough. And that has forced the established players to up their game and drop their prices. Is that a bad thing? I am not so sure.”
The lesson for food and drink is uncomfortable but useful. The world is becoming more competitive, more technically led and more globally driven. Heritage and incumbency protect no one if a challenger arrives that is good enough at a lower price. The defence is to know precisely what consumers value, what they will trade away, and where good enough stops being good enough. That is a question you can answer with evidence rather than instinct.
3. Technology, trust and the lesson of GM
Technology in food goes far beyond AI. Agrochemicals, drone crop-spraying, precision agriculture: a wave of tools is arriving that could change yields, taste, cost and nutrition. Whether it lands well depends on something the industry has fumbled before.
Mike points to genetically modified foods. The technology promised higher yields, better-tasting produce and healthier diets. Public confidence collapsed anyway, because the argument was lost to fear rather than won with evidence. “We have to be very careful in our industry that what we talk about is fact-based and real,” he says. “Working with academia and science will become more and more important to what we do.”
The next generation of food technology will face the same scrutiny. Companies that invest early in understanding how consumers form views on new technology, and that communicate with evidence, will earn permission that others lose.
4. The changing shop
“How is that going to impact how we shop? Are we all going to be online? What does that shopping experience look like, and how do you understand a customer’s experience of it?”
Mike’s point is blunt: understanding shopper behaviour is no longer about standing at the fixture in a supermarket. As the path to purchase fragments across stores, platforms and delivery models, the methods used to observe and measure it have to fragment with it. Businesses need research designed around how consumers actually shop now, not how they shopped a decade ago. The companies that win here will rebuild how they listen, not just where they sell, and they will do it before the next format becomes the default.
5. From calorie counting to positive nutrition
The biggest consumer shift of all may be pharmacological. GLP-1 medications are here to stay, and millions of people in the UK and globally now manage their weight with them.
“This is something the food industry needs to get behind and understand,” Mike says. “Health used to be calorie counting. Now it is going to be about positive nutrition: how you maintain nutrition, how you build in high protein, how you stay in shape and healthy while eating less.”
For food and drink companies this rewrites portion sizes, formats, fortification and the role of protein across the range. It also changes household economics, because the medication itself is now a meaningful part of the monthly budget for many families. FIS Group has been researching exactly this: our GLP-1 study examines how these consumers shop, eat and choose, and what that means for the categories they buy into.
Navigating it: how FIS Group helps
None of these forces arrives politely, one at a time. They compound. A supply chain decision is also a trust decision; a reformulation for GLP-1 users is also a value-for-money decision in a more competitive market.
This is the work FIS Group was built for. We blend innovation insight, market knowledge and consumer insight into one answer, then validate it with robust research so the recommendation stands on evidence rather than opinion. We have lived in the food and drink industry for decades, and we genuinely love it, which is why we start with your challenge, not our methods.
If one of these five forces is already on your board agenda, talk to us. We will tell you straight what we think, and we will show you the numbers behind it.