Tag: consumer behavior

Sherry Hess – Hijacked Flavour: reclaiming taste from the food industry

14th April 2026 antonellatotaro Diet Change, Nutrient Dense Food, Nutrient Density in Food, Regenerative Agriculture 0 Comments

Your tongue might be the most underused tool we have for understanding food quality — and for moving consumer buying power toward regenerative farming. Sherry Hess, culinary professional, nutritionist, and founder of Legendary Spice, makes the case that taste is not a nice-to-have. It is a powerful biological signal, and the food processing industry has understood this far longer than we have.
We go deep on the five tastes — salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami — and on why ultra-processed food has been so effective at training us toward intense sweetness while stripping out complexity. Sherry argues that bitterness isn’t a flaw to engineer out; it’s the missing piece tied to polyphenols, antioxidants, detoxification, glucose metabolism, and satiety. The good news: chefs already know how to balance bitter with umami, fat, protein, and spice. We don’t all need to go to culinary school — we just need to borrow a few of their moves.
We also take apart the “chocolate steak syndrome”: the fitness industry has built an entire pipeline of protein products with steak-level nutrition engineered to taste like chocolate and in doing so, trained a generation to completely ignore what flavour is actually telling them. For investors and brand builders, Sherry has a practical provocation: if a product claiming to be regenerative needs five or six flavourings on the label, it’s almost certainly masking the low quality of what’s underneath

Ethan Soloviev – AI, good food at Davos, food as medicine and regen taking off

8th April 2025 koenvanseijen Farmers First Tech, Landscape Design 2.0, Nutrient Dense Food, Regenerative Agriculture, Role of corporations 0 Comments

A check- in conversation with Ethan Soloviev, Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood, about how regenerative agriculture is truly taking off, its position within large food and agriculture companies, and whether we risk watering it down or falling into greenwashing (Spoiler: Surprisingly, we’re doing a lot about it!). We also get an update on HowGood—they’re doing well and focusing more on nutrient density-, plus, we talk about Regen House, which is revolutionizing the way good food fosters meaningful conversations at major events like COPs, climate summits, and Davos, t bringing farmers, indigenous community members, and global executives together around regenerative food experiences. By centering conversations on actual good food rather than panels and PowerPoints, these gatherings forge authentic connections that move regeneration forward.

And, of course, no conversation with Ethan would be complete without diving into AI—what currently does and what it could do for regeneration—not just through efficiency gains, but through innovative applications like predicting deforestation before it happens. The real breakthrough will come when we develop “large ecological models” trained on nature’s patterns rather than just human texts, enabling truly regenerative landscape design.

As Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood, Ethan offers a glimpse into how sustainability data is transforming food systems. Their database tracks environmental and social impacts for 33,000 ingredients and nearly 4 million products globally, enabling everything from carbon footprinting to supplier engagement. What’s particularly encouraging is how this data influences consumer behavior—when sustainability information is presented clearly at the point of purchase, sales of sustainable products consistently increase across diverse markets.