Why Tech Alone Can’t Fix Broken Food Systems

A fundamental mismatch in agtech financing

According to Darryn Keiller, Founder and Chief Executive of New Zealand’s WayBeyond, the capital hyper-focused on protecting highly perishable crops does not alter the underlying network’s fragility. He maintains that engineering micro-climates or accelerating isolated shipping times fails to address the structural and systemic bottlenecks that remain embedded across the wider market.

“This hyper-targeted investment behavior is a symptom of commercial risk isolation, rather than a fix for a broken system,” said Keiller. “Distribution issues directly affect the money makers, so they put more effort into reducing commercial risk, which means working to diminish losses.

Keiller points out that this isn’t a uniform standard globally, and the global East and global South need a lot of help in better distribution. Production remains beset by so many challenges that no sooner do you edge ahead on solving one than another overtakes it.

This imbalance has triggered a massive correction in how innovation capital is deployed across the wider sector. Keiller notes that if you look at the last three years of investment outside these high-margin niches, a stark pattern emerges.

“Most venture capital closed their doors and walked away from the sector when they realized it would take decades of sustained support, not simply years,” said Keiller. “In turn, the majority of start-ups folded, leading to the loss of innovative science and technology. It doesn’t need to be this way, and a concerted effort by smart players is needed.”

Keiller says the systemic bottleneck is not a lack of viable technology but rather a strategic failure in its application. “Outside corporate logistics networks, the return road from the farm gate to the consumer is plagued by poor storage, transport inefficiencies, and compounding margins that result in systemic volume loss,” he added.

The hidden penalties of the post-harvest middle mile

The industry’s investment thesis assumes that food supply volatility is an engineering or farm-gate problem and that the component optimization model collapses. But the real vulnerability and financial bleeding occur long after the harvest.

“People think food is expensive because of production costs, but by far the largest costs are related to processing, packaging, distribution, and waste,” said Maurice van der Knaap, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Local Dutch, an AgTech startup from the Netherlands. “Processing, packaging, and waste largely exist because of distribution.”

The company operates as a localized food infrastructure network, combining indoor automated cultivation with neighborhood storefronts. The company says they want to eliminate structural food access gaps, starting with a U.S. rollout in Pennsylvania, and to bypass traditional shipping lanes by matching harvest timelines directly to local buyer data.

In an email statement, the company said the forces have historically favored long, asset-heavy supply chains, which are beginning to work in reverse. Volatile freight costs, labor shortages, and fuel dependencies mean that every added mile between the farm gate and the neighborhood consumer introduces exponential cost, risk, and waste.

“The problem isn’t that fields are inefficient; it’s that traditional, long-haul logistics networks demand heavy packaging and massive transit times, which actively degrade freshness and drive consumer costs upward,” said Van der Knaap.

Predictability can’t be bought by throwing billions at isolated field tech or high-end crop facilities. The solution requires updating the network design to sync immediate production with local neighborhood demand data.

According to Van der Knaap, leveraging data connectivity enables operators to build a decentralized infrastructure that fully replaces traditional distribution layers.

“Digital twinning makes scaling localized food production much easier,” said Van der Knaap. “Managing data is becoming easier every day, which greatly improves the ability to align production with predicted demand.”

Returning farms to growers

True predictability requires a decentralized approach to community economics. Reversing decades of corporate consolidation means utilizing predictive demand technology to empower regional operators.

According to Keiller, while large corporations create greater production at scale using manufacturing mindsets, this aggregation removes the heart and soul from crop production, showing in the food that reaches the table. To stabilize the system, Keiller argues that the industry must adopt a localized “back to the future” approach to food economics.

This is the operational model that platforms like Local Dutch are scaling. By putting predictive data analytics directly into neighborhood storefront networks, communities bypass volatile corporate systems entirely, shifting away from asset-heavy logistics toward infrastructure built around quality, access, and efficiency.

Ultimately, solving the food crisis requires a complete pivot in network design. The solution isn’t to build a better field tool; it is to rewrite the system configuration.

“The biggest impact is not that it grows food locally, it’s that it reimagines the food system itself,” says Van der Knaap. “For decades, communities have accepted that the availability and cost of fresh food should be dictated by factors they cannot control.”

Van der Knaap says the future of food is not just about growing better produce; it’s about building better food infrastructure.