Healthy Living and Agriculture Review 2025 – A focus on AgriFood Systems

Transforming the food system

To mark the launch of our Healthy Living and Agriculture Review we’re sharing a series of themed insights exploring the UK-wide impact of business-led innovation across our four core areas: AgriFood Systems, Healthy Lives, Health Tech, and Future Medicines.

Feeding a growing global population in a way that is both sustainable and resilient is a pressing challenge. The agrifood sector faces mounting pressure to reduce its environmental impact, while also ensuring long-term food security and system resilience in the face of climate change, supply chain disruption, and global economic uncertainty.

These challenges demand a bold and accelerated shift, not just in what we produce, but in how we produce, distribute, and consume food.

Through our AgriFood Systems programmes, Innovate UK is supporting the UK’s most innovative businesses to develop, test and scale new technologies and approaches that can transform the food system.

We are funding and supporting commercial innovation in areas such as agri-tech, engineering biology, alternative proteins, and food manufacturing.

By focusing on business-led innovation, we are accelerating the development of solutions that can be adopted at scale, creating real-world impact.

Driving innovations that enhance the productivity, sustainability, and resilience of agriculture

Through our partnership with Defra, we are leading the delivery of the Farming Innovation Programme (FIP) to accelerate the development, commercialisation, and adoption of technologies that help create a more sustainable and efficient farming sector.

RootWave is one such example. They are using electricity to eliminate weeds and replace chemical herbicides and through their FIP-funded project have demonstrated the commercial and ROI benefits to potential users, recently raising over $15m in equity funding to accelerate regional and international roll-out.

Accelerating the development of alternative protein sources

Our strategic partnership with BBSRC enables UK businesses to collaborate with the UK’s world-leading research base to tackle global challenges like food security and sustainability while driving economic growth.

We’ve co-invested £15m in the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC) which brings together over 100 industry and over 40 research partners to drive research and innovation in the UK’s alternative proteins sector.

Improving the nutritional content of food and drink

We’re driving the development of solutions that enable more efficient, sustainable, and resilient UK food production to provide more nutritious, more affordable, and tastier products with a longer shelf life.

Addressing the challenge of Vitamin D deficiency which affects around 1 billion people globally, Xampla has used funding and support from Innovate UK to develop an innovative microencapsulation technology using plant proteins that allows drinks to be more widely fortified with Vitamin D.

Creating more sustainable, resilient, and efficient food supply chains

Innovate UK supports cross supply chain innovation, bringing different parts of the supply chain together to have a more significant impact than they could do alone.

Grant funding has supported Dunbia, one of the UK’s leading beef and lamb processors, to develop, test, and grow the adoption of an innovative technology platform to improve the monitoring of livestock performance, giving farmers valuable insights to enhance meat quality, boost livestock performance, and reduce emissions.

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Discover how business-led innovation is delivering real impact in AgriFood Systems and explore the full story behind these case studies.

Explore our other perspectives on Healthy Lives, Health Tech, and Future Medicines.

If you think Innovate UK Business Connect can help you, or if you have any feedback on this review, please get in touch.