The Coming Food Industry Revolution: You can have your cake with wine and eat it!

Balancing food supply and demand in a manner that has a positive environmental impact and ensures a healthier life for humankind is one of the most important challenges facing the global food industry. The authors discuss in this article the lessons we can learn from the wine industry's sustainable choices and practices, and how it is possible to enjoy healthy and high quality food whilst reducing the negative impact on the environment.

Some twenty years ago in an ordinary courtroom in Oklahoma, the US National Association of Attorneys General worked out and finalised an agreement with the humbled tobacco industry which was to lead over the next 25 years to payments of USD 206 billion by the industry to settle the outstanding lawsuits for health damages caused. The staggering payment was to recover health related care costs throughout the USA. To put this number into its historical perspective – in 1998, USD 206 billion was the equivalent of 70 times the entire value of Apple Computer Inc.; only two firms in the world had a market capitalisation exceeding this amount and the operating profits for the US tobacco industry in the previous year was a mere USD 8 billion. It was the largest settlement of a civil lawsuit in the United States history and implied that a quarter of a century of future operating profits would have to be paid for health related misconduct of the past. Health activists cheered, tobacco CEOs grit their teeth and European investors stared in disbelieve.

Since the ordeal of the tobacco giants, similar developments have followed in the car industry through diesel-gate, the pharmaceutical industry through the opioid crises and probably soon the gun