Good versus cheap food

You don’t need to be an economist to understand that there’s something not right about how food is priced. In addition to concessions on the environment, animal welfare and fair trade, corners are often cut in terms of quality too.

A food manufacturer will often start out with a good product made from a careful balance of pure ingredients. The product tastes good and hasn’t been meddled with much. But customers pressurise the manufacturer to reduce the cost, so the product is increasingly pared down. Relatively expensive ingredients are replaced by cheaper ‘fillers’, such as water or air. As a result, the product has to be tinkered with using stabilisers and other additives to keep the product acceptable. This happens very gradually so that the consumer hardly notices.

And yet there are ways of making products more affordable without compromising on quality, such as scaling up and/or automating the manufacturing process. Those methods work for both manufactured and ‘natural’ products. For example, the ‘Pluckr’ is a grape destemmer which can remove up to 600kg of grapes from their stems per hour (in comparison: a skilled worker can achieve max. 25kg per hour). This can substantially reduce the price of grapes without affecting their quality.

Although it is possible for food manufacturers to reduce prices, such as by improving their efficiency through automation, I personally believe that we – the consumers – should change our spending habits so that the focus shifts away from cheaper food. That would be better for everyone in the chain. I advocate fair pricing: all the way from the farm to the healthy and tasty meal on your plate.

Dennis Favier is a professional Food Designer and Creative Director at innovation company TOP BV and translates technological innovations into interesting applications.