Place and collaboration critical for regional food system resilience
One of the most pressing challenges facing our food system is the shortage of infrastructure and tools to bring good ideas to life.
Across Europe, innovators, farmers, co-operatives and community food enterprises are working hard to build regional resilience: to shorten supply chains, restore lost processing capacity, and create thriving local economies.
But time and again, existing regional infrastructure and financial tools fail to match the ambition. The Place Finance Lab, a new initiative incubated at Climate KIC — Europe’s leading climate innovation agency — is setting out to change that.
In a recent Farm Gate podcast, ffinlo Costain spoke with Tamara Giltsoff and Matteo Vanzini, the founding partners of the Place Finance Lab, and with Matthew Thomson, Director of Sustainable Food Cornwall. They discussed the Lab’s first major report, and what emerged was a rich and urgent picture of what is missing, what is possible, and why a new kind of financial innovation lab is so badly needed right now.
Good projects, wrong finance
The global food system is under mounting pressure. Supply chain fragility, climate disruption, and the concentration of distribution in the hands of a small number of major retailers have made the case for regional food resilience stronger than ever. As Matteo Vanzini explains, this is not simply a question of food security: it is also about the long-term economic viability of rural regions and the businesses and communities within them.
The frustrating reality, as the Place Finance Lab’s research in two regions — the southwest of England and Ireland — makes clear, is that there is no shortage of effort. Farmers, food businesses, co-operatives, land managers, river trusts and local authorities are all working, often in isolation, to rebuild regional food systems. The barrier is not vision, it’s finance — or more precisely, the wrong kind of finance, structured in the wrong way.
“But it’s not just about financing the projects,” Vanzini explains. “Sometimes they’re not big enough, maybe there is no strong enough business case, but often times we just lack the financial products for that. It’s a problem that comes down to how the instruments we have at our disposal are structured, how they function, and what they need to be for the different food system innovators.”
Existing financial products — bank loans, private equity, grant programmes — are rarely built with regional food system innovators in mind. They demand scale, speed, or risk profiles that simply do not match the reality of building a small abattoir, a food hub, or a collaborative landscape recovery project from the ground up. And the early-stage, high-risk work of designing and testing new financial instruments has to be done by someone. At the moment, no single organisation is well placed to do it.
That is the gap the Place Finance Lab intends to fill.
The Place Finance Lab
The Place Finance Lab describes itself as a financial innovation layer. It’s not a bank, a fund, or a grant-making body. It is a collaborative laboratory designed to work at the intersection of food system innovation and finance — to take on the early-stage, experimental work of designing new financial instruments, ownership structures and investment cases that can then be handed to capital providers ready to deploy.
The Lab was built on two core principles: place and collaboration. “Place-based and collaborative are two ingredients of the work that we’re doing,” says Tamara Giltsoff. “The focus on place really emphasises that regional resilience and food security starts with land stewards, farmers, local businesses, local governments and communities — the people that make up those places.”
Being rooted in place also means working with capital that can understand the unique characteristics of local economies — patient, long-term finance that sees the value in what is being created, rather than seeking the fastest route to extraction. This stands in deliberate contrast to the kind of capital that has historically flowed through — and often out of — rural regions.
The Lab’s business model is intentionally collaborative. Rather than positioning itself as an expert consultancy parachuting solutions into regions, it designs its instruments and investment cases alongside the people on the ground.
Three themes, three gaps
The Place Finance Lab report identifies three broad themes that emerged consistently from interviews and research across Devon, Cornwall and Ireland. Each one points to a different kind of gap — in infrastructure, in finance, and in the support structures that make both viable.
1. Local infrastructure for regional food systems
The most immediate gap is physical. Across both regions, the infrastructure that once connected farm to fork — abattoirs, flour mills, processing facilities, cold stores, logistics networks — has largely disappeared. In many cases it was simply allowed to fall into disrepair; in others it was deliberately consolidated into larger, centralised operations far from where food is grown.
The report distinguishes between three types of infrastructure:
Hard infrastructure is what you can touch: the building, the processing line, the storage facility.
Soft infrastructure is the enabling layer that sits beneath: business support, demonstration sites, digital logistics tools, food hubs that bring different parts of the value chain together.
Environmental or nature-based infrastructure refers to the web of soil health, water storage and cycling capacity, and biodiversity that underpins a functioning regional food economy — and which, like hard infrastructure, has been systematically underinvested in.
“One needs the other,” Vanzini insists. “In the same way that in emerging markets they realised that simply buying solar panels and putting them there without anyone knowing how to operate them was a complete waste of money — we need to start thinking that they have to come together.”
The business case for hard infrastructure cannot be made without the soft infrastructure that keeps it running. And natural infrastructure — the health of the land itself — is increasingly the foundation on which everything else depends.
2. Collaborative landscape regeneration
Beyond the farm gate and beyond individual supply chains lies a second, more ambitious challenge: how to finance the regeneration of whole landscapes. The Place Finance Lab’s report takes inspiration from frameworks like the Four Returns model and from pioneering projects like the Evenlode Landscape Recovery initiative in the Cotswolds, where farmers, investors and local institutions have come together around a shared vision for land use across a whole watershed.
The challenge is that most successful landscape finance projects are demand-led: a capital provider decides to invest in a landscape and makes things happen from above. Building a project from the ground up — assembling the farmers, aligning the incentives, designing the contracts, finding multiple buyers for multiple outcomes — is far harder, and far less common.
The Place Finance Lab’s proposed instrument here is a farmer-led impact bond: a mechanism by which a single landscape-level intervention can generate multiple outcomes — environmental, social, economic — and attract payments from multiple sources. The idea is still experimental, but work has already begun in Ireland.
“We can offer the financial innovation, we can come in and be experimental,” says Giltsoff. “We are not the experts in landscape recovery or nature finance, but we can act as a financial innovation layer. We can come and work with existing projects where there is a desire to do this thing.”
The social dimension of this work is too often overlooked. Giltsoff describes a conversation with an insurer who spoke of mental health on farms as a growing insurance risk. The outcomes that landscape recovery projects can deliver extend well beyond carbon and biodiversity — and financial instruments designed to capture those outcomes need to reflect that complexity.
3. Generational renewal
The third theme is one that cuts across both food systems and land ownership more broadly: how do we ensure that the next generation of farmers — including people with no existing connection to agriculture — can access land, take on farm businesses, and build viable livelihoods?
Across Ireland and the southwest of England, the research surfaced two interconnected problems. The first is the difficulty of farm succession: farm and family finances are often so entangled that existing farming families cannot afford to step back, even when they want to. There is no retirement pot; stepping aside is financially impossible.
The second is the challenge of access to land for new entrants — not just through ownership, which is increasingly out of reach, but through tenancies, novel partnerships, and creative approaches to land use. The report cites the example of Riviera, a field-scale vegetable business that has expanded by working with neighbouring farmers willing to allow production on their land — a kind of mosaic approach to farming that sidesteps the need for land purchase altogether.
From Cornwall to Ireland: the lab in action
Matthew Thomson, who leads Sustainable Food Cornwall and co-chairs the Peninsula Food Partnership, brings a grounded regional perspective to the conversation. The Peninsula Food Plan — developed with partners across Devon and Cornwall — asked a deceptively simple question: could the 1.8 million residents of the two counties feed themselves?
The answer, arrived at through careful agronomic modelling, is broadly yes. Between 80 and 90 per cent of the resident population’s nutritional requirements could be met by farming less than 60 per cent of the land currently in agricultural use. The partnership is now working to answer the next question: what infrastructure would be required to make that a reality?
Thomson describes a region with extraordinary assets: strong social capital, a deep culture of collaboration (the Cornish motto is “one and all”), and a growing ecosystem of food entrepreneurs, processors, and innovators. But the food economy remains highly dependent on external supply chains. In most Cornish towns, only around three or four per cent of local food spend goes on locally produced food.
What’s missing, Thomson argues, is not ambition but the kind of support — financial, structural, institutional — that can help locally significant infrastructure take root. He uses the phrase “locally significant infrastructure” to mirror the language governments use for nationally significant projects — and to highlight how little attention is paid to the former while the latter dominates policy.
“There is a lot of infrastructure in the southwest for a functioning food system,” he says. “But the infrastructure is all locked away inside different brands, different corporates. It’s not accessible, it’s not communal, it’s not optimised to work for the collective.”
Thomson’s example of Philip Warren, the Cornish butcher who has trained 130 new butchers over four years through an extended apprenticeship model, illustrates the soft infrastructure point with precision. Skills that were lost do not come back overnight. Rebuilding them requires patient capital, long runways, and the kind of support structures that allow businesses to invest in people without being destroyed by short-term financial pressures.
The fibre economy
Another important thread in the report is its treatment of fibre — wool, leather, flax, hemp — as an integral part of regional food and land-based economies. Fibre crops are often grown as rotational crops alongside food; animal fibres are frequently a by-product of livestock systems. And yet the infrastructure required to turn those raw materials into useful products has almost completely disappeared from the UK.
“If there ever was something that illustrates the problem with missing infrastructure, it’s fibre,” says Giltsoff, “because there’s absolutely none left. There is also a gap of know-how — we’ve lost our ability to know how to process a lot of these materials.”
The report points to the work of Zoe Gilbertson of Common Cloth Works and the Southwest Fibre Shed, who is experimenting with small-scale reintegration of fibre processing — bringing together growers, processors, designers and retailers to recreate a micro version of a fibre economy in the region. The know-how, in some cases, still exists in Eastern Europe as a legacy of Soviet-era production systems — and one of the less obvious roles the Place Finance Lab hopes to play is connecting these distant pockets of knowledge and machinery with the innovators who need them.
What comes next
The report is a foundation, not an endpoint. The Place Finance Lab is now moving from research to action, seeking strategic founding partners to help establish its governance structures and fund its first wave of experimental projects.
In Ireland, work is already underway on the Core Bia project — a bio-refinery network built on cooperative ownership principles, developed in partnership with ICOS, the Irish co-operatives body, and Climate KIC. In the southwest of England, the Lab is beginning to map the “missing middle” infrastructure — the sequence of investments that would do most to unlock a more resilient regional food economy.
The Lab’s longer-term ambition is not to do all of this itself, but to develop tools, instruments and models that can be made open source and replicated by others across different regions. “Our intention with the Place Finance Lab,” Giltsoff explains, “is to not do that everywhere ourselves, but to do that in a very experimental way, to bring the learning back to the centre, to create the tools and the instruments and make that open source for others to do this across different regions.”
Vanzini is equally clear about what this requires: a fundamental shift in how we think about capital and food systems. “We need to move from trying to put incredible effort into proving that the transition is viable, to start thinking that business as usual is no longer viable. Can we create the business case for that value being created and being recognised?”
A different kind of finance
What makes the Place Finance Lab genuinely novel is not any single instrument or project, but the underlying philosophy: that finance should be designed to fit the food system, not the other way around. That capital should be structured collaboratively. That ownership should be shared. That the operating model and the asset must be designed together. And that the people on the ground — the farmers, the food entrepreneurs, the land managers, the community builders — must be at the centre of that design process.
In a world of polycrisis, these ideas are not marginal. They are, increasingly, the only ones that make sense.
The Place Finance Lab’s report takes us from crisis on page one to practical investment opportunities by the end. That arc — from the scale of the problem to the specificity of the solution — is rare. And it is exactly what this moment demands.
This article is based on a Farm Gate podcast conversation produced by ffinlo Costain (8point9.com) and featuring Tamara Giltsoff and Matteo Vanzini from the Place Finance Lab, and Matthew Thomson, Director of Sustainable Food Cornwall.
The Place Finance Lab has been incubated at Climate KIC, Europe’s leading climate innovation agency.
Sustainable Food Cornwall is one of approximately 120 food partnerships across the UK working to build collaborative local food systems.