Food security is a growing concern in the UK, with the latest government report into the issue confirming a “notable decrease” in the number of “food secure households” since the onset of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
That observation might come as a surprise to some, given the UK is a developed country, but the nation’s food supply chains are being pressured by several stressors, as detailed in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra’s) United Kingdom food security report 2024.
From 2021 to 2024, food supplies were affected by the “continuing societal response” to Covid-19, the UK’s decision to extricate itself from the European Union (EU) via Brexit, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the ongoing unrest in the Middle East, according to Defra.
This timeframe has also seen the UK experience a series of extreme weather events, which have exacerbated the unpredictability the country’s domestic food production processes are subject to.
“The events of the last three years show a trend of high volatility or weakened stability, exposing more clearly the interconnected nature of risks, with both the acute and chronic impacts triggering and compounding each other in unexpected ways,” the Defra report states.
“The impact of geopolitical and climate events has been to drive up prices of inputs to food production, such as energy and fertiliser, and food itself.”
As the report acknowledges, climate change – coupled with biodiversity loss and water insecurity – poses “significant risks” to the ability of global food production to meet demands long term.
In response, the UK government has been actively championing the idea of using precision breeding techniques to create animals, plants and vegetables that are hardier – in terms of drought tolerance and disease resistance, for example – to increase food yields.
What is precision breeding?
Precision breeding involves altering an organism’s genetic material using gene editing technologies and techniques to create beneficial traits that the government claims would take decades to achieve using traditional breeding techniques.
What that legislation sought to do is clarify the distinction between precision-bred foods and genetically modified (GM) ones, by legally defining how they differ from one another.
On that point, the genetic changes made in precision breeding are alterations that could naturally occur over time through traditional breeding techniques. GM foods, meanwhile, typically involve introducing genetic material from an unrelated species that changes the DNA of the organism in a way that could not occur naturally.
Secondary legislation in support of the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act is expected to come into force in the autumn and will provide a regulatory framework that technology firms and food manufacturers can follow to pave the way for precision-bred products to eventually reach supermarket shelves.
AI-boosted crops
Among the parties counting down until that day is UK-based biotechnology company Phytoform Labs, which is on a mission to improve crop yields using artificial intelligence (AI)-backed precision breeding methods in a time- and cost-efficient way.
The company has been trialling the creation of precision-bred tomato and potato varieties, which is work that has ramped up since the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act became law, says the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) Nicolas Kral.
“The passing of the Genetic Technology bill enabled the trials of precision-bred organisms, and we have multiple trials going on in the UK that are developed with this technology, but we are not allowed to sell it yet,” he says. “The secondary legislation will allow us to do that on our home soil, which will be really exciting.”
“The passing of the Genetic Technology bill enabled the trials of precision-bred organisms, and we have multiple trials going on in the UK that are developed with this technology, but we are not allowed to sell it yet. The secondary legislation will allow us to do that on our home soil, which will be really exciting”
The initiative is billed by AWS as a “first of its kind” programme that funds proof of concepts from companies that “think big, innovatively use advanced cloud computing, and enable the world to more quickly address the climate crisis.”
With AWS’s help, the company has moved to improve the accuracy of its AI-pipeline tool, dubbed CRE.AI.TIVE, which enables Phytoform to more accurately predict what genetic sequences are responsible for particular functions in plants.
This information can then be used to gather new insights about plant genomics and pinpoint characteristics that might be useful to genetically alter for food waste mitigation reasons, says Kral.
“We have a unique model that’s predicting sequence to function relationships for plant gene activity … so we can model these relationships without really spending any money in the wet lab, and we can create better plants,” he says.
The end product is a “wet lab-validated” patent that the company sells to seed producers and supply chain owners, which effectively use it as a blueprint to produce seeds to grow plants with precision-bred qualities, says Kral.
“Let’s say, as an example, you have a specific consumer product that wants a type of tomato to make a better ketchup or a potato to make a better type of crisps … they command the whole supply chain for that product, so we can leverage their ownership of the supply chain to deliver our improvements into their products.”
He then goes on to share an example of a type of tomato variety the company has created to address the post-Brexit shortage of fruit pickers in the UK.
“We’ve made a variety of tomato that’s very short, and the plan is to commercialise it in the UK … because a major component for why we don’t grow tomatoes in the UK is the labour cost [and] especially with Brexit, it got very hard to import labour and British people don’t want to be picking tomatoes,” he says.
“By shrinking the plant, you’re removing a lot of the care obligation that usually comes with growing tomatoes, and you grow it a lot more like salad, which is planted and harvested [as one plant], and can be an automated process.”
Another of the firm’s creations is a potato variety that, in Kral’s words, “effectively doesn’t oxidise” after being peeled. “It stays fresh for at least two to three days longer without browning at all, which opens up a lot of consumer-facing possibilities.”
For farmers, this could reduce the amount of potatoes that go to waste for not passing the spot checks that buyers may subject them to.
“The processors that supply the retailers [with potatoes] are very picky about what type of potato goes into their factory, and they have quotas [about the percentage of brown potatoes] they will accept. And that might be five or 10% and if it goes over that, they will not accept the product,” says Kral.
“You could have two tons [of potatoes] on a truck with nowhere to go. It can go to animal feed, or sometimes they just bury them back in the ground, but so much will have been spent on water and fertiliser, and it just gets thrown away.”
Partnering for climate change
However, the promise of increased food yields and less waste is not always enough for some firms to sign up to Phytoform, which is where its past work with AWS helps.
“A lot of the companies in healthcare and the agricultural space are quite conservative, and you really need a proof [point] for them [because] AI insights are not enough,” he says.
“For a massive company to commit their research budget into pursuing the leads or the hits that we are providing them, they need to have a high level of confidence in that.”
And one way it achieves that is by ensuring the datasets it relies on come from reputable and highly credible sources, which it can easily access because they are stored on AWS.
As an example, the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides open access to researchers to some of its datasets stored within the cloud-based AWS S3 storage service.
“There are S3 transfer tools that allow you to take that data and use it, which is incredibly helpful for us, because it just stays within the system,” says Kral.
“And, for sure, having a badge on our pitch deck [naming us as a participant] in the AWS Compute for Climate Fellowship helps with [winning over] customers.”
But it’s not just a badge on the bonnet of what Phytoform does where AWS’s presence is felt. The public cloud giant’s technologies are also powering the science that allows it to potentially bring to market new plant varieties.
One AWS offering that Kral calls out for being fundamental to how Phytoform works is Amazon Omics, which is a purpose-built service that allows the firm’s healthcare and life sciences customers to store, query and analyse genomic and biological data at scale.
Tomatoes never really had any biotechnology in them before, because it was just too expensive ... this precision breeding is enabling much wider adoption and is lowering the cost of development – and that is for everyone
Nicolas Kral, Phytoform Labs
“That is an amazing service that we have managed to break a couple of times,” he laughs. “Most of the users are pharmaceutical companies and people working in healthcare, and it seems like no one had ever tried to run a wheat genome through AWS Omics until we did.”
He continues: “It’s honestly a great service, and it helps us prepare the data to be AI actionable.”
Without AI, the work Phytoform is trying to do would be impossible and far more costly, says Kral.
“Tomatoes, for example, never really had any biotechnology in them before, because it was just too expensive to make a more nutritious tomato or one with more yield, and the market for [tomatoes] is not big enough to justify the cost of genetic modification,” he says. “And now this precision breeding is enabling much wider adoption and is lowering the cost of development – and that is for everyone.”
Also, without AI giving its scientists a steer on what genetic material might be worth their while to alter, the work it is doing would be akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack.
“Think of it like this – in a stretch of 1,000 DNA base pairs of DNA – there are 1,000 letters and for every letter you have four options, right? And there are too many options there, and without some sort of guidance system, it’s very unlikely that you would even commit the research dollars in trying to fix what we’re focusing on.”
He continues: “This is also part of the reason why we are able to start signing partnerships with large agricultural companies, because even though they are spending a lot on research and development, they still can’t really tackle this [DNA] combinatorial problem for disease resistance and drought tolerance. It’s basically impossible without this AI guidance system. You’re not going to get there without it.”
And with the Secondary Legislation for the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act mere months away, Kral and his team are already working on even more ways to shore up the UK’s food-based supply chains.
“The UK imports 85% of its fresh tomatoes, and they all come from Spain, Morocco and The Netherlands. Occasionally, you experience the situation where you go to the supermarket and the fresh vegetable section is empty,” he says.
“If that can be grown in the UK, because you’ve adapted a variety to maybe have less of a labour burden, so it can be mechanically harvested, and can grow better in the weather we have here in the UK, you’re removing a risk [to food security] and creating a new supply chain.”
