ALDI

What companies are leading in innovation in Europe in 2025?

Europe's Most Innovative Companies

See which workplaces made this year's list.

GPTW Retail Large 2024-ALDI Inc._US1__20240712204823_1

Employees say:"My store makes you feel as if your family. They actually care about you and your life. When our district or regional bosses come in they know your name. It makes me proud to be apart of this family as they are always there for you and always willing to help in anything you may need. Our managers at the store are more then willing to take the time to help you and help you achieve any goals you may have."

Best Large Workplaces in Retail

Fortune partnered with Great Place to Work to analyze survey feedback representing nearly 50,000 U.S. employees.

GPTW 2024 Chicago Large-ALDI Inc._US1__20240410151431_1

Employees say:&nbsp;"The management here is excellent, and my managers make me feel like a person—not just a number or cog in a machine. They never give me a hard time about taking PTO and, in fact, encourage us to take our unused vacation time. Even though I have a lower-tier role on the team, no one has ever made me feel lesser. Management listens to my concerns and provides good guidance on how to take action or will intervene when needed."&nbsp;

15 Best Large Workplaces in Chicago

GPTW 2023 Best Workplaces Retail Large ALDI Inc_2

Employees say: 
 
"I think ultimately, the leadership and employees at Aldi find the work we do incredibly rewarding. There is a great, collaborative culture here that allows teams to work together for a bigger cause."

Great Places to Work in Retail Large- 2022-ALDI Inc._1426526-2

Employees say: 
 
“The company offers a great business structure leading to a clear flow of information and chain of command. In addition, the company adopted a fair code of conduct that makes an exceptional internal company culture where I feel safe and open to add ideas that can potentially contribute towards the success of the organisation. I also feel empowered every day with the limitless amount of resources I am provided to succeed in my role.”

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Get insights into ALDI including business profile, stock information, news, and rankings from Fortune.

ALDI Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Dee-Ann Durbin

The Associated Press

Mondelez is suing Aldi, alleging the supermarket chain ‘blatantly copies’ its packaging. The side-by-side photos are wild

/2025/05/30/mondelez-sues-aldi-copying-packaging-comparison-photos/

HR Brew

Kristen Parisi

Aldi quietly scrubbed its careers website of all DE&I initiatives

/2025/01/31/aldi-scrubbed-careers-website-of-all-dei-initiatives/

Prarthana Prakash

The golden Christmas period was a huge boost for the U.K.’s biggest supermarkets Tesco and Sainsbury’s. But 2025’s storm clouds are brewing

/europe/2025/01/07/christmas-period-retail-spending-tesco-sainsburys-next/

Chris Morris

Aldi’s Thanksgiving meal deal can feed 10 people for just $47

/2024/10/16/aldi-thanksgiving-meal-deal-47-dollars/

Anne D'Innocenzio

Retailer bans personal checks after rise in fraud

/2024/07/09/retailer-bans-personal-checks/

Aldi quietly scrubbed its careers website of all DE&amp;I initiatives

https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/aldi-scrubbed-careers-website-of-all-dei-initiatives/?itm_source=parsely-api

Mondelez is suing Aldi, alleging the supermarket chain 'blatantly copies' its packaging. The side-by-side photos are wild

https://fortune.com/2025/05/30/mondelez-sues-aldi-copying-packaging-comparison-photos/?itm_source=parsely-api

As return-to-office pressure ramps up, Zillow is holding its ground—keeping all 6,900 employees fully remote. The company’s remote-first approach, known as “Cloud HQ,” has reshaped operations, boosted engagement, and quadrupled job applications. But is flexibility a competitive advantage—or a risky gamble? McKinsey’s latest research suggests what’s important is not where people work, but how companies intentionally design the experience to unlock innovation and impact. In this conversation, a McKinsey workplace expert and Zillow’s chief people officer explore the nuance—not the noise—of the RTO debate, offering data and on-the-ground insights from both research and real-world application. 

SEE YOU AT THE WATERCOOLER?: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE RTO DEBATE

Conferences

Thank you, Elizabeth, um, and now a message from our partner Gild on how it's helping people turn hard work into debt-free degrees and real career growth. I'm working towards the career that I want with no debt. I saved up for years to go to community college, and in two semesters it was all wiped out. Having something you worked so hard for vanished so quickly, it was heartbreaking. I found out Chipotle has this great benefit called guild where they pay for your education. So I got a job at Chipotle, signed up for guild, and now I'm getting a degree without paying tuition. Not only that, I've been promoted twice with Chipotle and guild. I'm just getting started. All right, um, so I edit a lot of stories about RTO, and you really need to take it from me that the reader interest is off the charts. We get love letters, we get hate mail, we hear about it one way or another. So show of hands who here has been part of delivering an RTO mandate to a workforce? OK, yep, lots of hands. OK. Who here has been personally traumatized by that experience? Still lots of hands. All right. Our next guests are here to help us understand how flexible work or lack thereof affects corporate culture and things like productivity, success, and happiness. Dan Spalding is the chief people officer at Zillow, which lets staffers work from where they want to, and Brooke Wettle is a workplace expert and senior partner at McKinsey and Company. So please join me in welcoming them to the summit. All right, Dan, I'm gonna kick it off with you. Um, Zillow has something called cloud HQ. What does that mean and what made you take the leap? Yeah, uh, first, thanks for having us here to share our cloud HQ story. We're, we're really excited and, and proud of it. Um, for us, cloud HQ is about enabling our employees to work where they work best, whether that's at home, in the office, or in the office sometimes. Now we call it cloud HQ because we wanted to take the politics of proximity out of the equation and start from a place that remote work isn't a perk, it's a business strategy. And so for us at Zillow, it's an intentional strategy of everything we do starts in the cloud. It's gonna be documented, it's gonna be written down, it's gonna be clear for our employees to follow. So whether they're working at home or in the office together. Uh, that they know the rules of the road and, and for us it's, it's, it's been really transformative on our, on our culture. Yeah, so you've had some notable results. I'm gonna go through them. 4 times the number of job applicants, 84% of employees say that they can be themselves at work, and there's been a 5% increase in women employees. What was your secret sauce to making this work? Well, we started from listening to what our employees wanted and what they clearly wanted coming out of the pandemic was a workplace that wasn't going to change the rules on them and a workplace that understood that we all learned different ways of collaborating, different ways of working. Uh, and, and so we started down, how do we figure out what the future of work is going to look like, and applying those learnings to building a really intentional strategy around how do you enable remote work that doesn't feel remote, uh, that that allows for in-person connection, allows for teams coming together, um, and. Those results that you just listed really speak for themselves. We're we're 5 years into this project. We've made a ton of mistakes, but we learned from them. And the best part, we're building this in partnership with our employees, so they're really motivated to come to the office when we ask them to come to the office versus feeling like we're forcing them there. All right, we're gonna get back to those details, but Brooke, I'd like to, uh, ask you, so McKinsey released a bombshell study earlier this year, and it found that across remote, hybrid, in person, the levels of burnout, intent to quit, effort and satisfaction were all pretty similar. So do work arrangements matter at all? Yeah, first of all, I've never heard of McKinsey report called a bombshell report, so thank you for that. Um, yes, it was, it was a surprising result though, to your point, we did find that, uh, irrespective of the model, we looked at hybrid, remote, in person, we found that burnout levels, exactly as you say, intend to quit were all similar and so it it it begs the question, right? Well, what's happening here? And if you look. Yeah and and this is what we did, we looked at 5 practices that we know are critical to workplace culture and health, and those are collaboration, uh, and connectivity, right? It's one kind of category innovation, and then you have, uh, mentorship and skill development and what we found is that employee perceptions of all five practices were extremely low. And most interestingly, leaders' perceptions of those practices were orders of magnitude higher, which got us thinking maybe the what question, what policy should we have is perhaps not the wrong question, but not a sufficient question. The more important question, the more nuanced question is how do you implement any kind of workplace policy? Right, and, and so we see study after study say that like workers really love remote options. They like really, really love it. So how do you square what we know to be true with the results from that study? Yeah, well, I think you know it's interesting and and and I've seen the same studies that talk about the preference that a lot of workers have for remote work or hybrid work. Those same studies though typically elucidate a number of other key factors that drive employees to stay or go, and those would be things like compensation. It matters, right? People like to get uh paid something that they think is a fair wage. Uh, meaning and work, especially that connection with the manager, right? Do I feel valued by by my team and my manager, uh, and development. So I would encourage us to take a more nuanced, a more, um, differentiated approach to thinking about this. And by the way, Dan and I were talking about this earlier, flexibility can manifest in many different ways. I work with a lot of manufacturing, uh, companies, a lot. Retail organizations that are building flexibility into in-person work right and we've seen the um the kind of the uberization of of different shift models um there's been some great innovation on that front it's in particular to support working parents right and we're gonna get back to that cohort in particular right Dan, we've heard about the big upsides to cloud HQ. What were some of the specific challenges you ran into, um, lessons learned along the way, stuff you wish you had known on day one. Yeah, absolutely, um, for us, the thing that we knew we had to figure out right from the start was the intentional time together for teams. And so from the beginning, one of the biggest challenges was how do you organize bringing thousands of people together across the year. And we had a lot of learning as we went through that process and what has resulted is we now have a really interesting team that sits at the intersections of a lot of bodies of work but really focuses on that schedule of bringing. Most of the company together on a fairly regular basis for that in-person collaboration. So whether that's scheduling, uh, planning the meetings, planning the food, planning the activities, things that that take a lot of time centralizing those activities, but then actually publishing we call it the cruise calendar of when every group across the company is coming together, where they're coming together, what the purposes are of those groups coming together, and then making that transparency. To the company really gives our employees the ability to understand kind of what's happening outside of the virtual world that they work in on a daily basis. So is this like a big party like 4 times a year? No, uh, it's not, but fun in person is a key goal for a lot of our retreats. Uh, employees want to feel connected like Brooke said, feeling connection to your manager, making sure that we're bringing people together for intentional training time, uh, has been a key part. Of the strategy, but no, sadly it's, it's not about parties. But what I will say is data, as you might imagine is quite important to us at Zillow. We've now used 5 years of data to really dial in for which types of jobs do people need to collaborate more in person. And so we set the expectation when we're hiring people, even though you may be remote and can work anywhere in the US, hey, you're gonna travel to one of our core offices 6 times a year. And, and we need you to be comfortable with that. And then there's other jobs that may get together only once a year and then frankly there are jobs where you may work your entire time at Zillow and only get together a handful of times. So we're trying to use a data oriented approach which really helps, uh, our, our employees understand when they're coming together and why they're coming together. OK, yeah, and I want to talk about optimizing different styles of work. So in person, hybrid, remote, should these look different, how should they look different? Yeah, I, I think they, they should look different, um, and one of the things that we've also been working with a lot of companies on is to acknowledge that a policy setting a policy is not a strategy policy is not equal strategy, right? So setting a policy that the next step is creating a framework, right, creating a set of guard rails right around how you want to implement that policy and that could be in person. It could be hybrid, it could be remote, and I think that's really important because we actually put a great deal of responsibility and, and I would say in some cases pressure on some of our middle managers to interpret a broad policy at scale that's very difficult to do and to the question you know if you're looking at collaboration uh you know, virtually versus in person, yeah, that's gonna look really different and and it's not all easy. In person either, right, it's not, you know, all parties and, um, you know, companies that are trying to prioritize in person work. In fact, many employees have come back to an office and I'm sure some of you have experienced that and been like this, this is terrible. Like I'm just walking the halls of people on on their different Zoom calls, right? Well, that is not fostering any kind of connectivity or collaboration so from everything from real estate to. How to structure work time and versus time for, you know, collaboration, which by the way is work too. All of these things need to be thought through and then there needs to be a process by which you upskill managers to really embrace and role model those practices, but that's not necessarily a skill set that managers had, you know, even 56 years ago, right? OK, we're going to do best case, worst case. So Dan, remote work, best case. Uh, best case, I think you're going to see a lot more companies adopting a cloud HQ model because employees are going to demand it over time. But what are the specifics of that best case look like? Schedule the Z retreats throughout the year, how many, any kind of special other tools? Oh, best case, I mean, you have to rethink everything around your employment policies. You have to think everything. You have to rethink everything around the employee life cycle, how you're onboarding your employees, how you're training managers to support remote employees that come together. And frequently, uh, and then how they're actually managing through the reality of, uh, a workforce that may be trained to do everything in person in the office and it may be traditionally inefficient ways into a culture where you got to write everything down to a culture where you have to be really clear and articulate in in your written thoughts as much as as as you are in your verbal thoughts and then planning of course when when groups are coming together and what you're going to accomplish when you're in person collaborating. Worst case remote. Worst case remote is, uh, people who are looking at it as a way to optimize solely for their personal situation. Uh, aren't committed to the organization, uh, and are, are not willing to adap adapt their style to the working norms of the team or the broader organization. OK, Brooke, in person, best case. Uh, well, I think I would start with a story, right? So how are you creating value for an in-person, um, kind of environment and how does that enable you to, uh, drive whatever performance outcomes you have that tactically means the CEO, the, the top leaders down into the organization know that change story and know why we are choosing that in this case the in-person. Working model versus not right so that's, that's the starting point. Uh, second, I think you need to get smart about how you're actually, uh, upskilling, right? Talked about the managers, but that goes all the way down to the front line if you will, uh, in a, in a in person working context so that's equipping them with things like, you know, meeting rituals, right? Uh, how do you, uh, start a meeting? how do you. End a meeting what are some of the common practices and norms by the way, a lot of these would be similar practices to, uh, virtual, but they would look and feel different in an in-person office obviously you're, you're gonna have a different kind of meeting versus virtual. Then I would think about things like data and analytics, right? You're looking at who's coming in are you leaving people out right that can't come in what's, you know, what's happening there you. Monitoring your high performers, right? uh, what's the impact? It doesn't mean that you should change your policy, but you might be curious about some of the impacts right as you fine tune and approach that. So those would be some of the things I'd look at and I mentioned real estate. I do think there are real ways and we, you know, heard a earlier presentation in which people are evolving their workspace to really live into some of the practices that we've been talking about collaboration, innovation, etc. OK. Um, you know, some groups really value flexible work more than others, caregivers, working parents, like it's really important to them for, you know, for companies thinking about what to do, do they have to sacrifice that group of people if they want to do in person? I, I look, I think, uh, it is hard to say that all caregivers are, you know, have one preference versus another. I think there are certain certainly groups of people that are prioritizing flexibility that is for sure, but as I said earlier, there are different ways to solve for flexibility and one thing I would say about this RTO debate, um, is that a lot of it really. Is about power right? and when can you do your work and how does that fit in with your broader life goals, right? We went through a period during the pandemic where I think we really were, you know, whether you were, um, at home in your office, I was at home in my office, my kids like pressed with their faces against the glass door like we all reexamined why we are doing work and what trade-offs we're making. And so I don't, I don't think you can unsee that and so as you think about crafting a policy, I think you need to acknowledge that, um, but also help people who need more flexibility also get in the flow on things like development right? One of the pieces of research we did a couple of years ago coming out of the pandemic that really stuck with me was around this notion of social capital and guess what, women. Have less social capital meaning fewer connections, fewer relationships, fewer diverse connections than men. Frontline workers have fewer or lower levels of social capital compared to senior leaders. We gotta give, we gotta work to level that playing field and so I think we need to acknowledge some of these needs, but also help people get to where they want to go um in in terms of their careers and development. I'm wondering, you know, for a company deciding what kind of work model they want to go with, what are some foundational questions they need to ask themselves at the beginning to make the right choice? Dan, let's start with you. I think one, how willing are you to listen to your employees and act on what your employees tell you? Uh, secondly, how willing you are to disrupt the ways that you work today, uh, if you're a culture that, you know, only values face to face interaction, uh, and believes that's the only way that that you can, uh, share and extract value from, from the relationship, then it, it's gonna be a challenge if your employees feel that that that they would be better served in driving innovation going in a different direction so you have to really be willing to take. Not the essence of what's important to you as a culture down to the studs, but the way that that culture shows up on a daily basis for your employees, listening to them, letting them architect it along with you, of course, with high expectations about performance and productivity that can't go to the wayside, but your employees will really help to to architect it if you give them the opportunity. Um, you know, we hear from a lot of CHROs, and you know they are the ones who give these mandates even if they disagree with them. Um, so I think a lot of people in those positions are like wondering how do I make the case, how do I show this to my CEO, what's the magic word, what advice do you have for them to, uh, make the best case they can to the powers that be? Well it's a great I I completely agree. I, I work with a lot of CHROs that are like if I get one more forwarded email about RTO from my CEO, right? I'm literally gonna just die. um, so I think it's a thing, um, I guess where I would start from is, you know, going back to what Dan said like let's actually put aside my own feelings and think about what does this business need to deliver value, right? Um, you know, I work at a large aerospace and defense company well they. Manufacture big things. They need to be in person and they wanted to make sure that there was parity right between the in person workers and those that were sitting in the corporate office. Great. So they, they have a clear thesis and they're gonna go implement that. I work with a large quick service restaurant, right? They also have a huge emphasis placed on in-person work, but they ultimately ended up with a hybrid model and wanted to cultivate development in that way, so. I think you really got to figure out, I like the down to the studs what are going to be the critical ways in which your people need to work to deliver that value and by the way, employee experience is part of that formula for value let's not forget that, right? And so that's where I would have the discussion with my, you know, fellow executives if I were making a case and then discern the policy and ultimately the strategy based on that discussion. All right, Dan Brooks, thank you so much for joining me. Bye. All right.

Satyen SANGANI, Co-founder and CEO, Alation Geraldine WONG, Group Chief Data Officer, GXS Bank Moderator: Nicholas GORDON, Editor, Asia, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: How To Deliver AI-Ready Data

The world is facing an unprecedented hunger crisis, driven by a perfect storm of socio-political instability, knock-on effects of the pandemic, and our growing climate emergency. Yet food production is also one of the biggest contributors to climate change, generating up to 37% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Hear from the experts about the innovative solutions needed to stave off global hunger as we face rising temperatures and more extreme weather events throughout the world.

Sustainable Agriculture: Tackling the Rising Food Crisis

The world is facing an unprecedented hunger crisis, driven by a perfect storm of socio-political instability, knock-on effects of the pandemic, and our growing climate emergency. 

thrilled to have both of these women with us today, truly experts in their field here. Um and you know, I think I think a great place to start actually is with Catherine who um is joining us from a booth at the airport in Washington, D. C. Um having just left the White House conference on Hunger. Um I think this is just a great way for us to start here. Tell us what you heard, Why was this such um special event? Well, thanks for that question. Um the in the the White House conference on hunger, nutrition and health was the first time that an administration has convened a dialogue on us hunger related issues since the Nixon administration 50 plus years ago. And even during that conference, we did not have a president used the bully Pulpit of his office to commit to ending hunger in the United States and addressing the issues of diet-related disease here in the United States. Some 50% of our population either suffers from or is on the verge of suffering from diet-related diseases, specifically diseases like Um like hypertension and diabetes. Um and so this was a a more a moment that I think will look back in history and say where we pivoted toward a more positive outcome. And what made it really exciting was that in the $8 billion $2.5 trillion. I'm sorry, $2.5 billion, let me say from uh private sector, specifically VCS and corporate investment. Our arms committing to investing in those small businesses that are necessary to support the changes in the food system that are required to ensure better access to more nutritious foods produced in a sustainable manner. Great, okay, so you brought up this 50%. You know, we're really in a food crisis here in this country, but there's also this issue of supply and man and Geraldine, I'd love for you to talk about this a little bit. You know, we produce more food than ever. Why then? Are more people going hungry? Hope you're muted? I'm sorry, sorry. There we go. Can you hear me now? Great. Thanks. That um, it's actually a pretty tricky situation in many ways. On the one hand, you can think of this as a perfect storm. Uh, and that is a combination of of course the disruption caused by the war, Ukraine Russia being, you know, absolute exporters for the world of a lot of grain. So there is a supply issue right now, disruption. There's of course, the combined part of all the covid issues that we saw by the way, it's not only going, it's also fertilizer, which is very conflict, but this really, we have to realize, yes, there's a short term factor, but there's also a long term one and that is the climate. So if you look at today right now, about a third of arable land suffering from drought. So when you have, and this is something that's going to be recurring and rick. So you have anyway these these factors now on top of that which is uh we've known it for a long time. You have about a third of food which is so if you look at the food space from end to end we actually lose a third of what we produce. And when you think that in the world there is. And the numbers I heard earlier in last week at the U N. G. A. We called about 350 million people on the brink of starvation of which 50% are Children and young mothers and the number of people who suffer from hidden hunger. So effectively malnutrition, lack of micronutrients that used to be estimated at two billion people is actually more in the range of 3 to 4. There are all kinds of factors here which basically one can conclude are are pretty broken in many respects. Despite the fact that the green revolution of course managed to seed, we were 2.5 billion people in in 1950 with three times more humans on this planet now in one lifetime. So it's been a great amount of achievements. But if you look at the facts really with a cold eye, it's not looking good. So how do you mentioned the crisis we're in right now and sort of addressing these long term problems. How do we do both of those things at the same time. You know, how are you working on this problem? Okay, well I think Bite knows a lot more than I did on the relief side and the short term and and really tackling that. So you want to start with the short and then we put it to the law or that. Perfect. Right. And and I would say very quickly we must address the issues of those 350 million people who are on the verge of famine. Uh and those Children suffering from acute malnutrition. That is that that's a given that's part of our humanity as a global community is required. But we also need to support what I call preemptive humanitarian response, investing in the mid and long term agricultural production and food system transformation that is necessary to ensure that we're not feeding the same families every time the rains don't come that even in the developed world we are beginning to invest in the processes that are necessary to support an agriculture and food system that can can can sustain and and continue to produce at the level required even during when in in this climate affected in environment and back over to you Geraldine because that's where D. S. M. Is doing some really great things. Yeah, and that's where innovation does help. So let me give a few, there's a lot of things we could be talking about but maybe if we come back to the situation in the U. S. For example, it was really amazing to see that in the inflation reduction act um that came out very recently there is actually money towards switching agriculture to what is broadly defined as regenerative agriculture now one can spend you know a PhD lifetime defining what regenerative is. However if and we've had some great discussion with farmers who are switching at scale and if you boil it down it's basically a way of producing food that preserves the soil that actually leads to better healthy soil. Why? Because if you have healthy soils you don't have erosion, you have much more resilience to climate shocks and that is the biggest threat for the whole planet is a lack of resilience when they are climate shocks, be it drought particularly I have to say but also lots of biodiversity. So soil quality health. The second one is reducing emissions. So clearly unfortunately agriculture is about a third of greenhouse gas emissions. Um and has been a big cause of, we can also see the other way, it's the biggest victim. But in the causal side and there's a lot of C. 02 emissions, Methane emissions. Key so regenerative has to reduce emissions. But thirdly and that is the most critical part, how do we retain productivity if you do not have high productivity, you have two issues. One you need more land to produce as much you have a problem with vegetation but you also clearly have a farmer likelihood that basically farmers can't survive. So scaling regenerative agriculture and then there's a whole raft of innovation. So whether you look at fortification micronutrient deficiency is hidden hunger which is actually impacting a lot of people, How do we scale that in an ecosystem that can sustain it? Very very important and we can you know introduce innovations. I mean the sm has many but um whether it be on micronutrients going to animal to reduce the methane emissions that they produce um or whether it's looking at actually how do you fight the waste of food that is viable operation? Um That is fighting micro toxin contamination like aflatoxin, every grain in the world matters right now. But a lot of it is around the things that one can do. Um It does require both governments to be part of this. It's very much it's because all the stakeholders to work together in order to move this much faster than we have so far. If I can just add in on that. I think it's critical that um agriculture and are in particular as part of our food system, become less of an extractive industry and much more regenerative as Geraldine is just describing where we move from focusing on yields per acre to income and profit per acre that farmers make because as we think about agriculture in the future. Geraldine has done a great job of talking about the the regenerative agriculture and the sustainable intensification and new biological and digital tools that D. S. M. Is leading in the space to help us bring to market but also to ensure that we are working on how far Masic wester carbon that is going to be a big piece of business in the future. As we look to the the role of the the agriculture and the food system in addressing the the R. R. R. Drive towards zero carbon. So charlie, one thing you mentioned before and I don't want to let this pass, but you you brought up food waste right? And and I've heard you talk before, you know, no other or this has come up a lot but no other industry would allow for the this level of inefficiency. Why is this happening? And what are some of the solutions that that you're looking at? Yeah. So very fair point. Um So indeed no other industry would accept that a third of what it produces basically gets trashed. Um Now of course food is a perishable. So you have issues at the farmer end. So how do we make sure that to the greatest possible way they actually do this produced locally for local consumption. Um And then you have a lot less issues with cold chain with preserving of course perishables. Um There's also processing. So in a lot of countries food is wasted in very low income countries because the food is actually not preserved or processed so it rots uh it gets stuck. And if you look at, you know, even in countries like India um a lot of the food that is produced doesn't actually get even to the household yet along on the plate. So there's an element of upstream part. Uh and there for example this contamination of grain, you can do bio preservation, you can fight fungal um infections of crops which impact uh that so there's a whole aspect of that part and then of course there's consumers. Um so there is a sort of a mindset of food is plentiful and it's not expensive. So you know, accessible, affordable food in more higher income countries has been taken for granted. And if you look at the statistics around food waste, be it um in restaurants, be it in institutions, being in households to some extent, you can argue and it's a controversial statement to make, but food is too cheap. And what I mean by that is that the way that people buy, they don't buy to everything they buy, they buy anticipating to throw and so sometimes you need some technology to help with chef shelf life. Um people when we think the patterns of consumption and diet, so there's a lot and that's why it makes it a little bit difficult because as you can see you need the whole value chain to work together. Um and I always like to say what can we do together that we can't do alone? Well, one of the things is addressing food waste because that is clearly something that requires connecting from production to consumption. Do you let me ask a follow up on that, Do you think our current inflationary environment will change that? What people's perspective on? Food shift? Yes, I think two things are gonna change that to some extent. There is clearly currently a big concern and and you know, I'm sitting in europe here uh and you have a combination of electricity bills, heating bills going up, good world going on and it can go ways um partly it may push back towards, we don't want to price in externalities into food, a music externalities can be, you know, greenhouse gas emissions for example. So it could delay actually shifting to these regenerative practices that actually fight climate, which then takes us down the negative spiral because the more the climate change is the worst food production trucks we're going to get On the other hand, what can happen is that there's actually an awakening that you cannot take food for granted. And what I've seen from Cop 26 where nature joined the climate debate. So it wasn't only about energy source for example. Then looking at cop 27 cop 28 we're really steaming that food reliability, food security, quality of food, nutritional value of food is becoming number one topic and and it's quite clear in the shaping of cop 28 So it's gonna be, you know, not the one that's coming this year, but the next one. Um but it is actually agenda item number one. Uh and and that is partly because in some countries, you know, basically affordability and access to food is really at risk. You know, if I can just add on that very quickly. I think it's critical that as we look at the solutions for addressing the food, the sustainability of our food systems and the new tools that come online that we ensure that they don't just come online for the affluent, whether they're fluent farmers or fluent consumers. As we talk about the issues related to food, waste and food availability and affordability, we must remember that 3.1 billion people on this planet can't afford a nutritious diet on a regular basis, a diverse and nutritious diet. And so these solutions are going to be very complex. They're going to require us to work across the entire food system is really noted from farm to fork, but also across different cultures. And it is going to require the participation of the public sector as well as the private sector Earth Aaron Geraldine, thank you so much for joining us. Great conversation. Really appreciate you making the time to be here with us today. Thank you

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