2025 marked the Moore Foundation’s 25th anniversary. To commemorate this milestone, we launched a symposium series exploring topics related to the foundation’s mission. These events offer a chance to reflect on the progress of the past 25 years — and, as importantly, to envision the opportunities that lie ahead.
For more than a century, food systems have delivered extraordinary progress, feeding billions through gains in productivity, safety, and availability. However, the forces and objectives that shaped today’s system are now colliding with new realities and the global food system stands at a crossroads. Climate stress, ecological degradation, technological acceleration, shifting health needs, and geopolitical fragmentation are interacting in ways that challenge long-held assumptions and demand a different kind of leadership in how food is produced, traded, and consumed.
In January 2026, the Conservation and Markets Initiative team partnered with Systemiq and Brunswick Group to convene senior leaders from public, private and civil society sectors in Zurich, Switzerland to discuss fresh insights into the future of food.
“Transforming food systems is critical for the future of the planet and the prosperity of the people who live here,” said Aileen Lee, President of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “This requires bold ideas, not incremental change. Bringing together different viewpoints is essential to understanding not just where our food system is today, but where it might be heading, what dynamics will define it, and what the highest potential solutions could look like.”
Learning from one another
The symposium brought together leaders from business, finance, philanthropy, science, civil society, and public policy to think together about what the next 25 years could hold – and what is most promising and pressing to advance over the next five-to ten-years. Over the two-day event, participants explored plausible futures and tested ideas against uncertainty. Conversations sought to spur collective thinking about the most promising areas of action.
Participants used historical analysis and futures thinking to stimulate discussion of the most important emerging drivers of change. Four different scenarios hypothesizing what the food system might look like in 2050 offered a shared starting point. The goal was not to predict the future or describe an ideal one, but to spark a dialogue on what is possible.
The scenarios included:
- The invisible hand that wrote the menu, where markets and megafirms re-engineer food through AI, renewable energy, and capital.
- Roots of resilience, where communities rebuild food systems where states and markets retreat.
- Fortress farms, where nations turn inward as trade fractures and trust collapses.
- The longest supper, where crisis forces cooperation after repeated global food shocks.
Each scenario laid out a different governance logic – market-led vs. grassroots-led, fragmented vs. coordinated government intervention – and how this might interact with emerging forces to reshape innovation pathways, resource allocations, and food system outcomes.
Looking to the future
The discussions underscored that the future of food is not predetermined but will change based on the choices we make moving forward. A consistent thread was the need for shared analytical foundations that allow companies, investors, and governments to make sense of the transition together, rather than in isolation.
“Today, food production is by far the biggest driver of deforestation and ecosystem degradation,” said Sabine Miltner, Program Director for the Conservation and Markets Initiative at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “But we can shape a better future. "Durable change requires that we imagine new pathways to break the link between food production and degradation, while raising productivity and farmer incomes, and strengthening food security.”
The future of food will be shaped not by any single actor or solution, but by the choices we make, individually and collectively. The Moore Foundation will help build the coalitions required to move from isolated advances to system-wide progress.
A detailed report builds on the discussions at the symposium and what the future of food might look like – capturing the shared priorities, emerging themes and high confidence bets for transformation.
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