Buckwheat and Legumes Make the List
Whole Foods Market has released their Top 10 Food Trends for 2024, which includes legumes and buckwheat as up-and-coming ingredients.
As this thoughtful essay from the Vittles blog explores, assessing the impact of ultra-processed foods (UPF) in modern diets is complicated. Whole Foods’ new list of leading trends in 2024 reflects the confusion between consumer demands for convenience, sustainability, and nutrition.
Linking sustainability and regenerative claims with up-and-coming food trends requires an understanding of the parallel moving parts contributing to the overall value chain economy. First, let’s make an end-to-end analysis of the physical ingredient supply chain for these crops.
Environmental Advantages of Legumes and Buckwheat
Legumes are nitrogen-fixing plants that also feed nutrients to neighboring plants during the growing season through their roots. This makes them especially beneficial in mixed-grain intercrops, as well as in relay cropping and cover cropping field management systems, directly reducing the amount of nitrogen fertilizer that a producer would otherwise have to purchase and apply to the non-legume crop.
Buckwheat offers a long list of soil health benefits too, according to the University of Maryland’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE), including as scavenger of phosphorous, leading to further reductions in chemical fertilizer applications on the field. In addition, buckwheat has health benefits unique to the family of pseudocereals that it belongs to, which are superior to wheat and other modern grain-based processed foods.
Turning Them Into CPG’s
Underpinning the market analysis that identified these product ingredients as ‘trending’ is a bigger conversation underway about food processing and simplified, cleaner diets. Green peas and green lentils, for example, are consumed in a relatively unprocessed form, and in smaller volumes, than ‘yellow legumes’ like field peas, chickpeas and red lentils.
Food Business News (FBN) reports that “the trend forecasters noted an evolution within the plant-based category toward shorter and simpler ingredient lists… Mushrooms, walnuts, tempeh and legumes are seen replacing complex meat alternatives, according to Whole Foods Market. Examples on its shelves include Actual Veggies burgers made with a medley of greens, beans, seeds and grains; Meati carne asada steaks formulated with mycelium, the muscular root structure of fungi; and Atlantic Sea Farms vegetable burgers featuring kelp, green chickpeas and pea protein.”
Herein lies an opportunity to build up the missing middle, which has been gaining more investor attention in recent months despite the flow out of venture capital into safer higher interest-bearing assets. For example, located in the right place, a physical collection facility for farm-dressed buckwheat together with production contracts and regenerative agronomic support could quickly generate a consistent supply of the ingredients, and create an opening to monetize the regenerative outcomes on the fields.
Here’s how the math works in a farm manager’s mind:
Buckwheat is currently worth $18-19/bu to a Canadian farmer, compared to about $10/bu for milling-grade spring wheat.
Buckwheat yields less grain, and needs to be de-hulled before milling, but on the other hand its carbon intensity score is much smaller, and seed costs can be reimbursed by government programs for cover cropping.
Relative returns between the two crops will depend on the specific context of every individual and farm, but in most cases buckwheat production margins have gained considerably compared to spring wheat in recent years.
There’s just no buyers around to liquidate the crop once it’s harvested, which essentially annihilates any consideration of the above.
What About Pea Protein?
Pea protein is a complicated ingredient, mentioned on the list, but likely with less promise of future growth. The packaged foods that use it are ultimately more highly-processed than most foods made from buckwheat and green legumes, which only need to be cleaned or minimally milled to become ready-to-eat packaged foods.
Fractionation is complicated in and of itself, and the quality of the end products varies with weather and soil conditions, just like they do with wheat milled into flour. Relatively speaking though, the pea fractioning supply chain is very young and also very long, and the products are brand new in the market… making it a challenge to understand and manage field-driven variations in the quality of ingredients.
Manufacturers and producers in the markets for pea protein must be vigilant in preventing unapproved applications of pesticides on the crop too. Like red lentils and chickpeas, protein composites and isolates made from the fractionation of yellow field peas can carry undetected levels of glyphosate residue from pre-harvest desiccation of the crop into the supply chain.
Validating Field-Level Claims
The FBN article goes on to describe buckwheat as “a sustainable seed containing protein and fiber….” Given its many soil health benefits outlined by SARE, this is a relatively safe claim but it also begs the question of how consumers can validate it.
Monday’s report covering the new Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) platform ‘Regenerating Together’ program generated a few questions about how this group intends to assess and report on regenerative practice adoption. There are mentions in the report of measuring outcomes using verified tools and validated criteria, sampling and auditing over time, the onboarding and reporting steps in the process, but it’s relatively loosely-stated compared to leading regenerative agriculture protocols like Land to Market, ROC, Regenefied and Farmed Smart.
Summary
When it comes to linking together sustainability and regenerative claims with up-and-coming food trends, the parallel moving parts contributing to the overall value chain economy include:
Producing heritage grain and legume crops like buckwheat and green lentils, in cover cropping, intercropping, and grazing systems, creates natural capital for the soil that can be communicated to CPG customers on food labels.
Actual consumer willingness-to-pay for regenerative-related claims can be quantified with new precision forecasting tools like 6Seeds’ Tastewise.
Commercially-viable volumes produced and validated in regional supply sheds, creates the potential for grain handling and processing businesses to offer third-party logistics transformation of audited ingredient supply streams to new brands, and/or
New greenfield handling and processing facilities will create a economic value add for venture capital investors and nearby farmland managers to tap into the growth in new food trends.