Part Two: Q&A with Antony Yousefian, General Partner at The First Thirty
In this second half of a two-part interview with Antony Yousefian, we’re taking a deeper dive into the disruption of the industrial food system.
Specifically, how multiple converging technologies are set to accelerate a shift away from ultra-processed food (UPF) and the incumbents that dominate the market toward a more biology-informed, whole-food supply chain.
Below is the second part of our Q&A with Antony, lightly edited for brevity. You can read part one here.
Q: What are the biggest threats facing the food system in the coming years?
The big incumbents and supermarkets have such a grip on the system that they don’t feel they need to change. But the market is sending them every signal:
Share prices aren't rising
Revenue is slowly declining
Supply chain disruptions are hitting them harder
Historically, they’ve always been able to pass costs on to consumers. But now they’re meeting a consumer who is more informed than ever. And that is dangerous for them. It’s not easy to shift at their size.
In the 1980s, when the low-fat movement emerged, all they had to do was reformulate their products. But what's happening now is that people are rejecting ultra-processed food altogether and choosing whole foods instead.
These companies don't do whole food. If you get even a five or ten per cent volume shift – and they've built entire business models on five per cent growth – combined with the debt they're carrying, that becomes serious.
And there are new ways to get food that are direct-to-door and increasingly easy. If an algorithm is optimising my food sourcing for my health, it doesn't know which established brand I am. A newer, cheaper equivalent could appear in the food world that directly matches consumer demand with farm supply. All those middle players who currently extract value start losing their position.
“It was here that I really began to understand the issue of our food system. It wasn’t the “feed the world” narrative that we all talk about; it was a question of quantity and volume.”
Q: Where are the strongest factors driving this shift?
Technology is the enabler, but the real story is that multiple forces are rejecting the current system simultaneously.
Start with biology. The cost of understanding it has collapsed. Genetic sequencing that cost a million pounds a decade ago is now around $200. You can deploy sensors in a field and get real-time biological data. Computing costs have fallen so far that you can run complexity cheaply with AI. Robotics has gone from mechanical arms to intelligent systems that understand the biology they interact with.
But the shift isn't just supply-side. Consumer behaviour is changing structurally. People are not reformulating their diets – they're rejecting ultra-processed food altogether and moving to whole food. That's a fundamentally different demand signal from what the incumbents are built for.
Then there's policy. Governments are indebted. In the UK, most taxpayer money goes to the NHS, and ninety per cent of those costs relate to chronic disease linked to diet. We're spending £250 billion a year on the NHS and £2.5 billion – just one per cent – subsidising farmers.
The maths are absurd.
There's a straightforward intervention available. We could expand the soft drinks levy model to ultra-processed food, use that revenue to subsidise whole food and farmers doing it better, and use NHS procurement to buy from healthy soils. The problem is there's currently no joined-up budget in government. Treasury and the Department of Health don't talk to each other.
What makes this movement different is that these forces are converging simultaneously. Biology is being understood, consumers are acting on it, and the fiscal pressure on governments is making inaction harder to justify. I don’t think we’ve seen that combination before.
Q: What kinds of companies are you investing in?
We focus on what I call the digital infrastructure for understanding biology: the biological stack of soil, plants, and animals. These are the technologies that measure and understand those systems, helping people make better decisions.
One example is Mapana, a sensor you deploy in the field to measure fertiliser and mineral intake, providing real-time insights into your crop health and yield predictions, as well as input recommendations and soil health tracking. Traditionally, you'd send the sample to a lab and wait for results.
With Mapana, a farmer can do it on the day and as many times as they want. Major food companies focused on coffee, potatoes, and tomatoes are using it across their supply chains to gain visibility into potato quality.
And they're not selling primarily to farmers. They're selling to the food industry. Fortune 500 companies are using it across their supply farms to gain visibility into potato quality.
The founders I look for have genuine domain expertise, systems-level thinking, and the ambition to change the market – not just serve it. They have ambitions to create a platform and can leverage existing channels while holding a bigger vision. That combination is rare to find, and it's precisely what we look for.
“Technology is the enabler, but the real story is that multiple forces are rejecting the current system simultaneously.”
Q: Is there a risk that this becomes a system only for those who can afford it?
It's a real tension. The current structure is an hourglass: five hundred million fragmented farmers squeezed between concentrated input suppliers at the top and concentrated offtakers at the bottom. That's where the value is extracted.
If we're right about the shift towards precision biology and precision health, that concentration fragments. And even if incumbents acquire the new players, their optimisation metric changes because you've given them the tooling to see that improving biology is where the value is. It pulls revenue from the healthcare sector.
Monsanto-Bayer could theoretically become the most health-positive company on the planet. That sounds absurd, but follow the logic: if the market reprices food based on measurable health outcomes rather than volume, every player in the system – including those we currently distrust – optimises toward biology. You don’t need them to change their values. You need to change what the data rewards. Once health data is exposed and priced, the incentive structure does the work.
The entry point is the health consumer. Higher income, yes. But people who go deep into that journey always end up at first principles: the cheapest and most effective thing I can do is eat whole food from better sources. Once enough people move that way, the demand signal changes supply chain economics for everyone.
Q: Is this, in some ways, a return to how we ate a hundred years ago?
Yes. Technology counterintuitively accelerates that return. A lot of what occupies human life today is optimising for time: convenience, speed, and the endless effort to generate income. As automation takes more of that burden, we get time back. And with that time, I think people will value human connection more, their relationship with food more, and where it comes from.
Planetary health is our health. The microbiome of the land and the microbiome of our bodies are linked. That awakening is already happening. And once you have the measurement tools in place and the data is exposed, it becomes very hard to lie.
The system corrects toward what is actually good.
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