A conversation with Jacob Willems, food and agribusiness expert at Madison Partners.
The food industry is among the world’s oldest. Long before capital, code, or commodity markets, someone was tending a field and feeding a community. That has not changed. What has changed is the scale and complexity. And right now, the pressure is bearing down on the people who make it work.
Jacob Willems has spent his career inside that world. Not the world most people see, like the supermarket shelf, the brand on the packaging, the product that materialises on a shelf as if from nowhere, but the world behind it. The trading companies and commodity brokers. The ingredient processors and contract manufacturers. The different hands something passes through before it reaches a plate.
The system that makes all of this possible is so vast, so layered, so deeply embedded in the fabric of daily life that it has become, for most people, simply the way things are. Food appears. It has always appeared. The question of how, and at what cost, and under what pressure, rarely surfaces.
Jacob has learned to see what others walk past. What he sees is a system under pressure that most people only notice when it breaks.
"The Chain Between a Farmer and Your Plate Is One of the Most Complex Systems in the World."
Take chocolate. It begins with smallholder families in West Africa, plots of approximately one to five hectare, hand-harvested, sold to local collectors. From there, it passes through commodity traders, processing intermediaries, manufacturers, and distributors, until it becomes a bar on a Belgian supermarket shelf at a price that hasn't moved in months.
Between those two points lies a chain of extraordinary complexity. Dozens of decisions about quality, timing, pricing and routing. At every step, value either accumulates or disappears. Adjust one element and the consequences ripple in both directions. The chain bends, redistributes the pressure, and most of the time, holds.
"The consumer sees none of it. The shelf price holds. But somewhere in that chain, someone is bearing the weight."
In Belgium, that weight falls on an industry most people drive past without thinking twice. Close to 91,000 people work directly in the food industry, with another 141,000 jobs depending on it indirectly. In Flanders alone, 3,160 companies keep that chain moving, sustaining farming communities, anchoring towns built around processing plants, absorbing the volatility and delivering the product. Largely without recognition. And increasingly without margin.
"Every Time the Sector Absorbs One Blow, Another Follows."
A war disrupts grain flows. Energy prices spike, pulling fertiliser costs with them. A trade disruption on the other side of the world lands on a Flemish farmer's balance sheet within weeks. Each shock lands on a sector already weakened by the last one, and because the margins were already thin, there is less room every time.
Since 2019, operating margins in food manufacturing, globally and cross-segments, have fallen from ~7% to ~5%, and the room to absorb keeps shrinking.
"In Belgium we are very well protected as consumers. For the farmers and processors upstream, it is a completely different reality."
And what concerns Jacob most is not the pressure itself. It is how little of it is visible in the data that is supposed to help manage it.
"Walk With Me Through a Potato Factory."
Jacob thinks in factories, not figures. To understand where value leaks out of an operation, he makes it concrete.
A potato arrives from the farm. It gets washed, balancing hygiene, water use, and throughput. It gets peeled, and the thickness affects yield, quality and waste simultaneously. It gets sorted, and the routing decision, which quality goes to which line, strongly determines whether that batch adds value or creates costly rework.
"If you send a batch to the wrong line, it gets rejected, and reprocessed or downgraded. That costs time, energy, yield. It happens more than people think. The data connecting those decisions isn't visible in real time."
The knowledge exists in every factory. What often doesn't is the infrastructure to make it visible, to connect the data from one step to the next, to trace a quality issue three steps downstream back to a raw material decision two weeks earlier.
"That is what value leaking actually looks like. The compounding cost of data that exists but was never connected, of insights that were never produced because nobody thought to ask the question."
In farming, you reap what you sow. In food manufacturing, you reap what you measure, and most companies are still figuring out what they're measuring.
"Smart AI Needs Smart Data. And Most Companies Don't Have It Yet."
Anyone can open ChatGPT and ask for a list of AI use cases in food manufacturing. The list will be confident, plausible, and completely disconnected from the reality of your operation, because it has no idea what your data looks like, where your margin is leaking, or what your organisation is actually ready to act on.
"That will never work. You need someone who actually knows the industry, who has seen the same problems repeat across dozens of companies, and who can tell the difference between a use case that looks good on a slide and one that will actually reach the floor."
Most companies skipped a step. They moved from fragmented, often manual data directly to AI ambition, without first asking the most basic question: do we actually know what is happening in our own operations? The knowledge that matters most still lives in the heads of people who have been doing the same job for twenty years. Until that is captured, structured and connected, no tool will move the needle.
"You cannot automate clarity you don't have. You have to build the foundation first."
"We Don't Walk In With a Framework. We Walk In With a Question."
The approach Jacob and Madison Partners have built is a direct response to everything he has observed.
It does not start from a use case catalogue, an AI strategy, or a transformation roadmap. It starts from the operational pain the company already feels, the yield problem nobody can quantify, the energy cost that keeps climbing, the efficiency gap everyone acknowledges and nobody owns. The first job is to find exactly where value is leaking, put a number on it, and build the case for doing something about it.
"Most arrive with a framework and say: here is how we are going to do it. We arrive with a question: where does the shoe pinch? And then we go find the answer in your data."
A focused six-week sprint. No new systems. No transformation program. The data the company already has, one sharp question, and the discipline to follow it all the way to a decision, a number, a cause, a clear next step.
"We know this industry. We know where the problems tend to hide. And we know what it takes to make the insight reach the floor, not just the dashboard."
"The Companies Still Standing in 2040 Will Be the Ones That Built the Foundation First."
Jacob came to food manufacturing almost by accident, a student’s interest in nutrition that gradually pulled him deeper into the supply chains behind it, and he never let go. What kept him there was the complexity. The way a single commodity touches so many lives before it reaches a plate. The way a decision made in a trading room in Europe ripples through to a farming family in West Africa or a processing plant in Roeselare.
AI, he believes, will change a great deal of this, but not in the way most people expect.
"Important decisions will never be taken by AI alone. There will always be a need for humans who understand what is being decided and why. What data and AI should do is give that person everything they need to decide well, and fast enough to matter."
The companies still standing in fifteen years are not the ones that chased the technology hardest. They are the ones that understood their own operations clearly enough to know which question to ask. That connected their data before they tried to model it. That built the foundation before they built the future on top of it.
The value chain that feeds Belgium is under more pressure than it has been in a generation. The tools to respond have never been more capable. But tools do not build foundations. And the margin to wait is running out.
Jacob Willems is a food and agribusiness expert at Madison Partners, where he works with food manufacturers like Agristo and Vandemoortele, across Flanders, on exactly this question. If this resonates, if you already know where the pressure is but can't yet prove it, a 30-minute conversation is enough to know whether there's something worth finding in your data.
