Growth at the Speed of Hungry What our food system needs from its boardrooms right now

What Three Rooms in New Zealand and Australia's Biggest Grocery Conference Told Me About Boards, Boldness and the Competitive Growth We Are Leaving Behind

I heard something at E Tipu in Christchurch last week that I have not been able to put down.

A senior leader from one of the most significant food companies in the Southern Hemisphere made this observation about the boardroom: the board that only governs what it can measure will always underinvest in what it cannot see yet.

I have sat across many board tables. I have watched that sentence play out more times than I would like to admit. I am increasingly convinced it is the most important governance problem facing our food system right now. Not regulation. Not technology. Not supply chain disruption. The decision architecture at the top.

The past week confirmed for me across three very different conversations: executives are rarely the primary constraint on bold innovation. Boards often are.

Last week I spoke at three back-to-back engagements in New Zealand. At the New Zealand Institute of Company Directors, I convened a conversation with board directors about what it means to take an innovation mindset to net zero. At Tech Week, I joined a panel at Deloitte on bio-innovation and what genuine sovereign commercial capability looks like when global supply lines are no longer reliable. And at E Tipu 26 in Christchurch, I gave a keynote to a room running the full length of the food and fibre chain, from farm to board table.

Three different rooms. Three different sectors. One conversation underneath all of it.

At IoD NZ I asked the directors in the room a direct question. If climate constraint is the brief, what does your board allow your executive team to do with it? Not in the strategy document. In practice. Risk appetite on paper and risk appetite in the room when a bold proposal lands on the table are often two very different things. Boards that treat net zero as a compliance obligation will manage their way to the minimum. Boards that treat it as a commercial design brief will build the advantage that others are still waiting for policy certainty to find.

At Tech Week the bio-innovation pipeline in New Zealand is genuinely impressive. But scientific depth does not become sovereign capability until a board is willing to fund the commercial bridge from lab to market before the return is certain. That is not an executive decision. It is a governance decision. And many boards in this space are still asking for proof of market before they will commit the resources needed to reach it. The causality runs the wrong way.

At E Tipu I asked the room one question: if an opportunity appeared in your market tomorrow, who in your organisation can say yes before your competitor does? If the answer is a committee, you are already behind. That question landed. But the honest answer is that most committees exist because boards have not yet made explicit what their executives are permitted to decide without escalation. Speed to market is not a cultural problem. It is a governance design problem.

I came home to read the recap from Food and Grocery Australia 2026 in Brisbane. The themes were identical and delivered in sharper commercial language.

Bernie Brookes AM, AFGC AusFoodGrocery Chair, told 500 FMCG leaders that consumers do not currently believe that industry is on their side. His next sentence is the one that matters: that is not a marketing problem. It is a strategic problem. I would extend that. Consumer trust is rebuilt through consistent commercial decisions made over time. The willingness to accept short-term margin pressure in exchange for long-term trust is a risk decision. Risk decisions belong to the board.

Paul Eastwood put a $22 billion figure on the locked opportunity inside ANZ supply chains identified the constraint: not technology, but how work flows between functions and between trading partners. Operating model redesign at that scale requires board mandate. Executives cannot restructure the architecture of their own organisations without a clear directive from above.

The AI finding was the starkest. Ninety-five per cent of AI investment across the sector is delivering zero return. The five per cent that is working is returning three to one with a four-month payback. The difference is not budget. It is not talent. It is whether the board has been clear enough about what problem the organisation is trying to solve. Deployed without strategic direction, AI becomes expensive activity. Deployed against a board-sanctioned commercial objective, it pays back in months.

Leah Weckert from Coles Group told the room she expects 30 per cent of online sales to be agent-led within five years. She acknowledged the number is contested. Whether it lands at 10, 20 or 30 per cent, the direction is not. What matters for this argument is what that forecast demands of a board right now. An organisation cannot build for agentic commerce at speed if the board has not yet decided it is real. The executive team cannot move faster than the governance mandate allows.

Across all four rooms (caveat I was not in the FGA 2026 room), one pattern held. The constraint on bold innovation is almost never the idea. It is rarely the executive team. It is the decision architecture sitting above them.

Boards that are willing to govern what they cannot yet measure, fund the commercial bridge before the proof exists, set explicit permission for fast decisions at the executive level, and align on the commercial reality ahead of the market. Those boards give their organisations a genuine competitive chance.

I raise this not as an indictment but as an invitation. Every board I have seen create genuine competitive advantage in uncertain times made one decision in common. They chose to govern the future before it was measurable. That choice is available to every board in every room right now.

The food system is not short of good ideas or capable executives. It is short of boards that have decided, explicitly and in advance, that bold is the direction.

That is the conversation we more of. Not what executives should do differently. What boards should permit, fund and demand.

Courageous governance is different from courageous management. It starts in a different room. And right now, it matters more.