Original subtitles

We're dropping the pineapples,

we're dropping the stars,

we dropping the flags.

The humble hamburger is the most

popular sandwich in the world.

Americans alone eat 50 billion of

them a year.

That's an average of 150 burgers

per person.

But there's more to this patriotic

patty than meets the eye.

The hamburger, excuse

the pun, pun intended,

the hamburger holds the secret sauce

of the global food chain.

The story of this 16-dollar

dish holds the secrets

of how we feed the world.

We discover how the chain

transformed...

Our daily bread.

Traditional bread production requires

only four ingredients.

Flour, yeast, water,

and salt.

Mass production introduces a whole

range of other ingredients.

How we produce

beef without grass.

If all livestock providing our beef

was grass-fed, free-roaming,

we'd have a lot less cows, a lot

less beef, and they'd cost a heck of

a lot more.

How ketchup started a global

trade.

Most of the Chinese tomatoes are

exported to Italy because Italy

consumes a lot of tomatoes.

And how we grow fresh produce

with the help of oil.

Almeria produces about

4 billion kilos

of greenhouse vegetables

each year.

Four ordinary items with

extraordinary stories,

brought together for this one

moment.

A moment that is only possible

because of the supply chain

professionals who power the

chain.

We can't see it, but it touches

every part of us.

It's the story of where everything

comes from, from the mines,

the ocean,

all the way through every factory

and every truck to your house.

Lots of companies, lots of people

all around the world working

together to bring us the products

that we need.

Consumers don't know how many hands

it has touched, how far it

has traveled.

It's so efficient we take it for

granted.

We expect full shelves

of a wide range of products,

but we should actually be surprised

that there are full shelves to

begin with.

If these chains went away, we'd have

to revert back to growing our

own food and sewing our own

clothes.

Invisible links that bind the

world.

The people who manage this

chain are involved in forecasting,

collaborating with their suppliers.

These people live 24 by 7

trying to keep that flow going,

trying to keep that chain unbroken

day in and day out.

Without the chain, store shelves

would sit empty.

Gas pumps would run dry.

The lights would go out,

but it comes at a cost.

For the chain to improve its impact

on the environment, it passed a

check.

The chain is all about solutions.

Every day we're finding new methods

and inventing new materials to

create what we need without damaging

the world we live in.

There's a ton of innovation

happening to help to make this

transition.

Getting what we need shouldn't

cost the Earth.

Centennial Hall, Dallas,

Texas.

Teams of top chefs are competing in

the ultimate culinary competition.

The World Food Championships.

We've got a mountain man burger,

it's going to be a mixture of Elm,

venison, wild boar,

wagyu and bison.

Over 850 cooks

from across the globe battled

to be judged the champions in

categories ranging from seafood to

steak, bacon to burgers.

There are lots of contests here at

the World Food Championships but the

burger is the most prestigious and

if you win that you're like the king

of burgers in the United States.

The U.S.

Coast Guard has entered a team.

Master Chief Ball and I, Master

Chief Reed, we're in the burger

competition because I judge a lot

of burger competitions in the Coast

Guard. So I've seen the best.

I thought I'd bring the best to the

table. So hopefully we'll pull it

off today. We have a French onion,

triple onion burger.

The thousands of spectators enjoying

the contest probably have little

idea of the incredible journey

and extraordinary effort

that provided the ingredients being

cooked in front of them.

The supply chain is really the story

of where everything comes from.

It's the trip from the

mine, the farm, the forest,

the ocean, all the way through every

factory and every store and every

box and every truck to your house,

your refrigerator.

And food.

Is one of the oldest.

If you look at the history of supply

chain, it's a millennial

old practices.

So the supply chain has been part

of the human DNA for

thousands of years.

From the ancient Egyptians importing

olive oil from the Mediterranean to

the 3,000-year-old spice

trade that brought the world black

pepper and cinnamon,

the chain now allows us to eat

pretty much whatever we want,

whenever we want it.

The food chain is

amazing.

There are so many people along the

way who've helped move that

burger in one way

or another.

Without everything from the

farmers to the cashiers

that are actually ringing your

food, we would not be

able to eat burgers.

I do a burger list every year.

I travel around the United States

eating burgers.

And for me, the big thing is the

bun. The bun has to be perfect.

The rest of the country agrees with

Trey.

And industrial bakeries produce over

one million burger buns a day

to keep up with demand.

But to make even a simple burger

bun can take hundreds of people,

thousands of hours.

And the ingredients can travel

tens of thousands of miles before

they reach our table.

In the U.S., the burger

bun begins life here,

in the wheat fields of Kansas.

America's Bread Basket.

An incredible 90%

of Kansas is farmland.

And the state grows over 6 million

tons of wheat a year.

Wheat is the second most commonly

grown grain crop worldwide.

And annually we produce over eight

hundred and fifty million tons.

One of the reasons farmers can

produce so much is thanks to

machines.

They helped transform agriculture

into a global trade.

We as humans do like optimizing

things.

We like figuring out a way to do it

better, faster, cheaper, and farming

is no different.

And we've seen mechanization

play a very large role in

farming productivity.

It takes four months from the

fertilized seeds being sown

for wheat to be fully grown and

ready to cut.

Giant, high-tech combine harvesters

can process 90 tons in

just one hour.

Every second they cut enough wheat

to make 45 loaves of bread.

But planting, growing, and

harvesting are just the first steps.

There are many more points in the

chain that this raw material has to

travel through before becoming a

bun.

We have to have the grain elevator

owners and operators working

directly with the trucking

companies.

We might have to a railroad operator

that's gonna be bringing grains from

Kansas to Maryland,

for example, or Washington, D.C.

Without this infrastructure,

we would not have grocery stores

full of loaves of bread

or hamburger buns.

Over the years, this efficiency

in the chain has increased the

food supply, creating

a boom in global trade.

The stock in grocery stores is

a multiple, three, four, five times

as much as it was a couple of

decades ago.

And it's fairly amazing, not only

the variety of fresh produce,

fruits, vegetable, meats, but

also the packaged foods.

Colombia exports its coffee.

Thailand its rice.

Pakistan its mangoes.

Brazil its bananas.

The U.S.

Exports almost half the wheat it

grows.

We've had this shift.

We've started to rely on other

countries for our basic everyday

needs.

Saudi Arabia imports 80%

of its food,

the UK 46%.

The United States only imports

15% of its total food

supply, but that includes

30% of its fresh vegetables

and around half of its

fresh fruit.

No country is self-sufficient.

Every nation imports from another.

This has led to a really interesting

cycle of specialization

where there are certain areas that

are really the breadbasket of the

world, producing large portions of

the grains of the word.

Countries like the U.S.,

India, Russia,

Ukraine, and China

now account for more than 50

percent of wheat produced globally.

Global trade has dramatically

diversified the food supply that

anybody can expect to consume where

they live, almost regardless of

where they lived.

But chains can often be very

vulnerable. It just takes a single

failure point to bring the whole

chain to a grinding halt.

Kiev has come under heavy fire

overnight, although it has not

fallen.

40% of the caloric intake

in Africa and

some of the Asian countries

comes from wheat and Russia

and Ukraine combined had a

28% of market share.

So when the war started,

the disruption of the wheat supply

chain truly caused

a massive disaster.

There are lots of places around the

world where their ability

to produce the food

necessary to support their

population is just not there,

that they are reliant on imports

in order to support the population

and that requires this

global chain of food to function.

Egypt is the world's largest

importer of Russian and Ukrainian

wheat at over 13

million tons a year

A country like Egypt is heavily

dependent on imports.

If they are not able to import the

wheat, how do they feed their

population?

People are worried about civil

disorder happening.

As you build toward these

breadbasket of the

world-concentrated regions, you are

exposed to these kinds of disruption

risks.

At the World Food Championship,

there's no shortage of supply.

The wheat that comes down the chain

for bakers and our burger chefs

is all grown at home.

Our number one thing that we're

worried about today for our

recipe is getting the

buns in the oven.

It's 70 minutes from beginning to

end.

But our chef's baked buns are

a very different product from the

mass produced ones baked across the

country.

Working its way along the chain,

our wheat from Kansas is transported

to a mill where it's ground into

flour.

It's then moved on to a plant bakery

that produces over 2

million loaves every week.

Bread making has changed

significantly as it's moved

from smaller bakeries

to commercial bakeries.

Traditional bread production

requires only four ingredients,

flour, yeast, water,

and salt.

Mass production introduces a whole

range of other ingredients.

All of which are delivered by the

chain to get them to the bakery.

For yeast, the world's biggest

producer is in France.

The enzymes might come all the way

from India.

Chili provides 15%

of all the salt imported into

America.

The people who manage this chain

are making sure there's enough stock

around, keeping track of it when it

goes wrong, and then when and it

does, something breaks, they have

to jump in and solve it in about an

hour or else it's not on the shelf.

At the bakery, the ingredients are

blended together in a high-speed

mixer for as little as five minutes.

The dough is then divided,

kneaded,

shaped,

and put into tins for rapid proving.

Once the dough has risen,

it's then baked,

de-tinned,

cooled, and packaged before

it's loaded into trucks and

distributed to stores.

This mass produced bread, we can

make a lot of it.

We can make it quite quickly and

then it becomes less expensive.

So this is usually what you see at

the supermarket.

Food overall is a

smaller percentage of

people's budgets than it used to be

years ago.

When you look at food manufacturers,

the consolidation that's happened in

transportation and manufacturers,

food has become more efficient.

And because of that, it means

it's more affordable overall.

Thanks to technology, we produce

vast quantities of cheap bread,

costing little more than a dollar a

loaf, but that has made us wasteful.

Globally, we throw away 900,000

tons of bread every year.

That's 24 million slices

every day.

Almost 10% of that waste happens

in the chain before it reaches the

customer.

For consumers, a full shelf

is a better shopping experience.

Consumers tend to buy more from a

shelf that's full, fully stocked,

than if it is half full or

there's only one or two left.

Every retailer tries to

make things look abundant,

but that abundance can lead to

waste.

Bread is inexpensive because

it's cheap to produce, but

also because the market

fragmentation is high.

A lot of different companies are all

competing with each other.

And because big stores buy in

bulk, it gives them an advantage.

Some only pay for what they sell,

what's called a take-back agreement.

This means they can over-order and

not bear the cost of the wasted

bread.

Grocery store waste is quite

interesting, because we bring

together commodity bread together

with consumer behavior that likes a

full shelf.

But not all hope is lost.

There's a company in the UK that

goes around and picks up stale

bread, and then they make

beer out of it.

The brewery buys surplus bread

from bakeries and then mixes it

with barley.

This is then fermented to become

beer.

Since 2016, the company

has saved over three million

slices of bread from landfill.

And the beer is called Toast,

which I think is very clever.

And this is just the beginning.

Scientists are experimenting with

bread waste to feed the fermentation

process in a range of food

industries like bakeries, dairy,

and winemaking.

Of course, the grill is the best way

to cook it.

That way you get all that good

flavor, all those good spices, all

the smoke and flame kissing it for

you.

Back at the World Food

Championships, the buns are done,

and the chefs are prepping the most

important ingredient in their prize

dish, the patty.

My beef is from Kroger.

It's just a regular, everyday 80-20

beef that we're doing.

We don't have the wagyu, we don't

the money, so we just went regular

burger on this one.

Bought it for $8.99 a pound.

So anybody out there that has that

wagyu for $115 a pound?

I hope you win.

I hope you win!

Globally, we consume roughly

130 billion pounds of

beef a year.

And the United States accounts for

over 20% of that.

In 2022, there

were 940 million head

of cattle in the world.

That's one cow for every eight

people.

If we were to do free-range

grass-fed cattle for all of the

meat that we produce, we would run

out of space.

If all the world's cattle were

grass-fed, they would need

a pasture the size of North

America to graze on.

There has become this expectation

that we should have access to lots

of very affordable meat.

That shift then means we've

industrialized the meat industry

and it's made a big difference

in the way that we raise animals.

At the World Food Championships,

our chefs get just 90 minutes

to cook their signature burger for

the judges.

But it takes up to 42 months

to produce just one pound of

beef.

A process with a dozen links

in the chain.

The beginning of most beef produced

now starts with corn.

If all livestock was grass

fed, there would be a

significantly lower number

of cows that would be available for

beef consumption.

So feedlots are one alternative

in order to meet the

demand that we have for

beef.

Fidlot is the most efficient way

to feed animals.

So how quickly do I get

that cattle to the maximum size

and yield in a shorter

amount of time?

And the Fidlots helps achieve that.

To make beef production faster and

more efficient.

Once a calf has been weaned,

it spends time on grass before

it's moved to a feedlot,

where it's fed a grain-based diet

for between 90 and 300

days to increase its weight.

The largest feedlots are home to

100,000 animals.

You're talking about an

awful lot of grain when you consider

it takes about seven pounds

of grain for that cow

to gain one pound.

To keep up with this demand in the

chain, American farmers plant

the equivalent of 69 million

football fields of corn every

year.

The majority of which is field corn,

very different from the sweet corn

you'd put on the barbecue.

Tough, low in sugar, but high

in starch.

It's used primarily for animal

fodder, corn oil, and biofuels.

I believe that 30% of

all corn production goes to

feeding livestock.

Field corn silage is delivered

to the feedlots and blended with

roughage and other protein

supplements which are sourced from

other suppliers.

This mix is then poured out into

enormous troughs for the thousands

of cattle to eat.

A feedlot is where you are

able to gain economies of scale

to reduce the price and create

consistency in the way that you are

raising the cattle.

Feedlots are very good in

the sense that you can create

efficiency, but given

that they are confined in

smaller places, one of the biggest

concerns among the

environmentalists, the animal is not

really living a good life.

This farming method allows us to

produce the cheaper beef customers

now expect, but it

puts huge pressure on a natural

resource at the heart of the food

chain.

The water footprint has been a

growing area of concern in

terms of livestock because

they have to consume water.

Water goes into the corn

that is produced to

feed the livestock.

From growing the feed crops to

keeping a cow properly hydrated

throughout its life, it takes

more than 1,800 gallons of

water to produce a single pound of

beef.

That's 690 gallons

per patty.

In Texas, feed crops like

field corn are irrigated using

underground aquifers,

which filled up over centuries.

But due to drought and over-usage,

they're quickly being drained.

This shortage of fresh water is

a global problem that some countries

are trying to solve by moving their

operations to places where water

is more abundant.

Due to water scarcity, you find

rich nations buy land

in a lot of other places to

grow crops.

Over the last decade,

Saudi companies have been growing

alfalfa in Arizona and

then exporting it 8,000 miles

back to Saudi Arabia to feed

their livestock.

But droughts in Arizona have made

this business relationship

unsustainable and the leases

were canceled.

WaterSketchity has put tremendous

pressure on the food industry

and I think that

we are going to have to find

alternative ways to

grow this livestock, alternative

ways outside of aquifers

to replenish sources.

Seventy percent of all the fresh

water used globally is used

in agriculture.

And that's a big weakness in the

chain.

It's believed that we could run out

of fresh water before we run out

of oil.

We already have alternative sources

for oil, but we

don't have alternative source for

water.

Faced with the looming reality of

less water, farmers in the

chain are looking to science to

help.

Corn, like so many large

commercial crops, has

been engineered to be drought

resistant, pest resistant, disease

resistant, and robust.

Recent trials of drought tolerant

corn have showed crops need 30%

less water.

I think the future for

the food chain is really

more sustainable food.

That is a huge focus right now

on looking at the cradle to

grave footprint of a particular

product.

Most people don't know that, but

it needs to be measured, and

then people will start selecting

based on that footprint.

The sheer scale of industry we

see in feedlots continues through

the chain.

When the cattle reach a market

weight of around 1,400 pounds,

they're sent by truck and train for

processing at a meatpacking plant.

In America, just four

giant companies handle the

slaughter, processing, packaging

and distribution of all

America's meat.

Traditional butchering is an

incredibly time-intensive process.

It takes between eight and 10 hours

to go from a steer

carcass into

meat that can be sold

as food.

What changed all that was the

introduction of a type of assembly

line production of meat,

where the cows go in one end and

beef comes out the other.

Now a steer can be fully butchered

to a carcass in just 30 minutes.

And more than twice as much meat is

extracted from each animal as

traditional butchery.

Half of the output becomes ground

beef, which is turned into products

like burgers.

The feedlot beef is

viewed as fattier, and

it is mixed with leaner

beef to provide

that flavor that we are

all accustomed to from a beef patty,

which means that a number of

different cows go into

one particular beef paty.

This mass production model means

a single hamburger patty can

contain meat from 100 different

cows and still be safe.

Food safety regulation has

evolved over time

to really recognize that

it's the larger producers

where there's more risks.

But every manufacturer of meat

follow the Food Safety Modernization

Act. They ensure

that they are monitoring

and recording all

along the way.

So that's really a chain

of information.

And so anything that comes through

has been proven safe.

Our cattle have traveled along the

chain, from fields or feedlots

to the meatpacking plants.

But now it's a race against time to

get it to consumers.

Needs to be refrigerated

or frozen to keep it safe.

It's critical that you're being able

to store it at those temperatures,

transport it at those temperatures

and all along each

node, keep it cool.

From slaughter to shelf,

beef is kept in the cold chain,

a process formulated in the 1930s

to keep fresh food cool and

prevent it from spoiling.

From cold storage, the beef is

transported in refrigerated

containers called reefers,

which keep their contents at a fixed

temperature.

Frozen beef at five degrees

Fahrenheit and chilled at

37 degrees.

The cold chain is probably one

of the most important entities

in all of agriculture,

in my opinion.

The cold chain allows us to

trade produce with buyers all over

the world.

I've got items here that are great

examples of the cold chain.

So this first thing right here is

called the Big Glory Bay King

Salmon. So that was in

New Zealand not more than 24

hours ago. So we find out

what boats have these products,

they're hard to find.

We get the number from

the fishmonger, how many he caught.

We then arrange for transport on

a plane all the way from New

Zealand. It's got to go all the ways

to Dallas as soon as it gets to

Dallas. We have trucks meet the

fish that are packed in ice and they

go straight to our stores.

So transportation is really quick,

within 24 hours, this was in a

boat. Today it's on ice here in

Dallas, Texas.

The food chain is

amazing.

There are so many people along the

way who've helped move that

product in one way or

another. So many points, so many

nodes, so many on the supply chain.

People walk into a supermarket

and grab a product without

any idea of the

long chain that exists to

support that.

It's a Mexican-style burger.

We have some charred coriander.

We have tequila-pickled avocado

and some candied jalapeno salsa

verde.

The chain has moved beef from farm

to fork, and the chefs at

the World Food Championships have

their patties cooking.

But with just 40 minutes left on the

clock, they need to start thinking

about finishing touches.

Fresh produce is essential, it's

extremely important.

Gotta have crispy lettuce, chilled

lettuce, crisp, clean onions,

and then of course, ripe tomatoes.

A burger wouldn't be a burger

without the sweet slice of tomato.

And it's not surprising that they're

the most traded fresh vegetable in

the world.

Tomatoes are a staple in our

diet.

We want tomato on our burgers.

We want a tomato in our salads.

Regardless of where we are in the

world, if we're in Alaska,

I still want my tomatoes in

December.

Our food comes from far away

because we want

items that shouldn't be

growing next to us right now and

we want to eat them all year round.

People take for granted that they

can have strawberries every season.

They do not think about the

efforts that are needed to actually

accomplish that.

Consumers have grown accustomed to

wanting the foods they like the

most any time, regardless

of whether it's the growing season.

And the tomato is a great example of

that.

We have a large variety of tomatoes.

We buy from where the product

tastes the best and where it's

fresh. So it will depend

by season, but we'll

buy from California.

California switches out of season.

We'll buy it from Mexico.

But there's one place on earth where

every month is a growing season.

Almeria in Spain.

Almeria is covered in greenhouses.

1,400 businesses grow

produce across 80,000 acres.

The 130-square-mile

area accounts for around 60

percent of Spain's greenhouses.

This is the largest covered area

of cultivation on the planet,

and it's so big, it can be seen from

space.

Almeria produces about

4 billion kilos

of greenhouse vegetables

each year.

And out of these 4 billion,

about 700 million

kilos are tomato.

The greenhouses are

fundamental to be able to produce

all year round without having

to heat.

And we do not have to use fossil

energy for heating up the

greenhouse. It's all done by solar

power.

The growers in Almeria trick their

plants into thinking it's summer all

year round by using the

sun to heat their greenhouses.

But they're still reliant on fossil

fuels.

These greenhouses aren't made from

glass.

They're made from plastic.

50% of all the fruit and veg in

Europe is coming from Almeria.

Without plastic, you have problems

with water loss, you have problem

with temperature control, you have a

problems with maintaining the

security of the crop.

Plastic is critical to that success.

The greenhouse cover is changed on

average almost every four years.

And after that, it can easily be

recycled, because that can be

converted into granulate,

which is the basic

material for the production of

all kinds of other plastic devices,

boxes and all kinds of tools and

things like that.

So 85% of all the plastic that's

used is recycled,

which contains 100% of the

greenhouse covers.

From a seed, it takes between

three to four months for the tomato

plants in Almeria to grow fruit

that's ready to be picked.

These ripe and ready-to-eat tomatoes

are then packaged and transported

around Europe.

But in other countries that export

fresh tomatoes long distances,

the picking and packaging can be

very different.

Generally, these tomatoes

are picked before they're perfectly

ripe. They come in

green, they go to

a holding area.

Green tomatoes are more resilient

to travel than ripe ones, but

obviously they're not red like

customers expect.

So the unripe fruit is taken to

giant storage chambers where they're

exposed to ethylene gas.

This gas turns the tomatoes red,

but keeps them firm and unriped

on the inside.

But before they're shipped, they're

packaged in plastic.

Sealed plastic packaging in

the food chain is critical because

you're talking about taking food

from long distances to the customer.

The conditions change, you have

ambient, you have cool, you had

moist, you dry.

To protect what's inside the

packaging, it has to be sealed and

it has to be essentially

impermeable.

Otherwise you have food waste, which

ends up being a far larger problem.

The downside of plastic packaging

in the Food Chain is that it's easy

and consumers buy it, tear it

off and throw it away and don't

think anything of it.

Single-use plastic is

very impactful within the

food chain. That is an area where

a number of organizations are

looking to improve upon,

because single-use plastics

produce a lot of waste.

Plastic is so cheap to produce,

it's become a costly problem.

It creates over 420

million tons of waste a year,

a figure set to double by 2034,

and half of which is single use.

It's a love-hate relationship we

have with plastic and packaging.

The way to solve the problem of

plastic waste isn't to get rid of

plastic, it's to redesign the

plastic that you use.

We're seeing a lot of investments in

the changes in supply chain

networks, in the way that we use raw

materials, for example, a

plant-based plastic.

Bioplastic is a type of plastics

that derive from the renewable

biological sources such

as corn, sugarcane,

and many other commodities that's

available in nature.

For many decades, supply chains

have been incredibly unsustainable.

And I think that the only way to

really kickstart more sustainable

supply chains is by increasing

demand for sustainable products and

services.

By buying something, you vote for

a certain system.

And if you buy a sustainable

product, you vote for that system

and you don't vote for something

else.

Pineapple, three cheeses, coffee

bacon, coffee in it,

coffee aioli, and a gaoxiang

spice on the bottom.

Just enough time to have some

coffee.

In Dallas, the chefs are

assembling their burgers, getting

them ready for the judges.

And a good sauce on their patties

could secure a win.

Being from Montana, huckleberries

is what we do in Montana.

So we're going to be doing a

huckleberry barbecue sauce that's

going to go on top of the burger

today.

It sounds delicious, but at

home or in a fast food joint,

most burger lovers will reach for

something ready-made.

A condiment with multiple

ingredients,

requiring a complex chain that

spans the planet.

Ketchup is king in the United

States. We put it on everything.

You can see that there's over

20 different brands of ketchup alone

here.

Just illustrates how popular ketchup

is to the American market and

around the world.

A staggering 10% of

all tomatoes grown globally end

up as ketchup,

and the market is estimated to be

worth $24 billion.

And most of the tomatoes that are

turned into the red sauce are grown

in northwest China.

A country responsible for 17%

of the world's

The term ketchup actually

comes from a Hokkien Chinese

word, keziap.

And it refers to this

fish-based sauce.

And we think that Europeans

encountered it as

part of trade exploration

and tried to reproduce

it back in Europe.

But they didn't have access to the

same ingredients.

So instead they used mushrooms

as the base ingredient.

Tomato ketchup, the ketchup we're

familiar with came much later.

The tomatoes grown in China for

ketchup are different from those

you'd buy at your local store.

This variety has been grown to have

a tougher skin so they can be

harvested by gigantic picking

machines.

And because tomatoes aren't a widely

used ingredient in Chinese cuisine,

this entire crop will be processed

into paste and exported.

In China, they actually genetically

modify the tomatoes in

such a way that the

shelf life is gonna be longer, that

they can cut them earlier before

they ripen.

But the flavor and the smell might

be a little bit different.

You want to taste them, go to Italy.

Most of the Chinese tomatoes are

exported to Italy because Italy

consumes a lot of tomatoes.

Italy grows plenty of its own

tomatoes in regions like Parma,

but tomato production is falling

because, thanks to

economies of scale and logistics,

it's cheaper for buyers to source

their stock from China.

Not all countries, not all

geographies, not all states have the

same rule.

So knowing what you're buying isn't

necessarily as easy as it

should be.

It takes approximately six kilograms

of tomatoes to make one kilogram

of the paste that will be used to

make ketchup.

But some Chinese products have been

found to be only 50%

tomatoes.

The rest is made up of dyes and

fillers like soy starch.

The role of regulation is really,

really important, and we want this

because we are going to eat the

items. But each country

then has a different set

of regulations for the foods that we

eat.

The paste is then shipped out to a

factory in Italy, where it

will begin a process that will see

it turned into ketchup.

And the consumer might never know

that the tomatoes inside their

condiment came from

China.

Many products that say

made in a particular country

contain ingredients from another

country.

So you can have the tomato

paste from China, go

to Italy, and they can label it

as from there.

What that?

Often means is that final

transformation happened

in that country.

Quite difficult for a consumer to

figure out where that tomato

actually came from.

More and more labeling laws

are trying to require that

you identify the various

countries that the

produce may have come from.

But that's not easy for ultra

processed foods like tomato ketchup.

Any individual product you see that

looks like a standard product could

easily have components, ingredients

from dozens of countries.

At the ketchup factory,

different chains feed into the

process as spices,

sugar, salt and vinegar are

added for flavor and

then thickeners like xanthan gum or

starch to achieve the correct

viscosity before

being quickly cooled and bottled

and sent out to stores.

One bottle of ketchup could

contain ingredients from 15

different locations.

The more processed it is, the more

likely it is to be hard to see where

things actually came from.

Ultra-processed foods like ketchup

now make up 60% of some

country's daily energy intake.

And our appetite for these foods

means the food supply chain has

never been more complicated.

Products like frozen waffles,

breakfast bars, and chocolate

cereals have over 25

separate ingredients each.

But amazingly, consumers can

still afford to buy them.

In supply chains we need to

use something called economies of

scale so it's the cost savings,

the economic benefit of producing

at scale.

This is why we produce food

in mega mega industrialized

environments because it will be

cheaper per unit.

The upside of ultra-processed

food is consistency,

quality, efficiency, low

costs, taste.

These are all big upsides.

The downside is the ultra-

processing has a tendency to take

away some of the nutrients.

But ultra-processing foods has

other more positive impacts.

At present, 40%

of all fresh produce either spoils

or is wasted from farm to fork.

And processing fresh ingredients

helps reduce this loss.

Food wastage and spoil

continues to be predominant

in a food chain.

Ultra-processed food, on the other

hand, has overcome that

by having ingredients

that outlast the

natural food chain

In Dallas, using the chain,

ingredients ranging from fresh to

processed to ultra-processed

have allowed the chefs to create

their world-beating burgers.

The only thing left to do is the

judging.

It went really well.

Every taste and flavor that I had

and wanted was a different onion

taste.

Crunch factor, the jus came out

really nice with the French onion.

So yeah, I mean, it's up to the

judges now to see if it's exactly

what they think was a great burger.

So how the judging works on scoring

is you have a score card and

they have different judges score

each burger themselves, do different

walks of life.

They take those scores, they combine

all those scores and they tally them

up and then they divide them.

That's how they figure out who wins

the burger.

It's a tense weight,

but with their $9 grocery store

ground beef, the Coast Guard team

makes it to the finals.

These hamburgers are a miracle of

the modern food chain.

It can bring in wagyu beef from

Japan, salad from Mexico,

and tomatoes from China.

Spices and grain can be grown,

processed, packaged, and distributed

across the world.

But how long can the chain continue

like this?

The food industry has contributed

to some of the environmental

problems we have today by

concentrating the production

of food in certain locations,

and therefore radically altering

water tables, the nature of the

biodiversity in that environment.

Some of those downsides are part of

the process of getting to scale,

getting to efficiency, and getting

to low prices.

What we need is people inside

the chain making the right decisions

for the world we live in.

We should think about the energy

that it takes to move those fresh

fruits and vegetables from where

they're being grown, someplace where

there's lots of sunshine, to a place

that is ankle-deep in snow.

Producers in the chain are already

reacting.

Vertical farming is a solution.

What happens is you go into a

warehouse without windows and

on multiple layers you grow

vegetables, mostly green leaves.

And you can control them quite well

because they're all on the same

irrigation system, you don't need

soil, you're not bothered by

the weather and you can produce very

close to the consumer.

But every decision has consequences.

To decide we don't want fruit that's

traveled thousands of miles from

Africa means their farmers

may struggle.

What happens to them?

What is their next livelihood?

And this is where I say supply chain

is more than just products.

It also involves humans.

If we demand that beef is

grass-fed and organic,

it may mean hamburgers cost $50,

making it unaffordable for much of

the population.

Small changes in this chain,

as hyper-connected as it is, can

have unintended effects.

If I change an ingredient because

I think I want it to be healthier,

cheaper, better tasting, and

suddenly it alters the balance of

availability of that product, I may

mess up an entire farm community

by virtue of what I've done to the

economics of their industry.

But despite the problems,

the chain has made it possible for

us to produce more food efficiently

and to get that food to

people who need it.

The chain has eradicated food

insecurity across most of the

world.

In the 1970s,

35% of the poor countries

did not have enough food on the

table. Through globalization,

we have uplifted close to 1.6

billion people from the extreme

poverty.

There is an incredible

accomplishment as a

human species.

But the chain cannot solve all

starvation at all because

most starvation that we see today is

a result of some sort of a political

regime.

That's not a problem that you can

solve with a supply chain.

We produce enough food for

everyone.

So how do we eradicate waste and

share it among the people who really

need it?

Consumers have almost 100%

of the power to determine what

happens in the supply

chain. If the consumer doesn't

buy the sustainable product that

they say they want, it

will not be produced.

If, in contrast, they do buy

it, we'll make more of it,

we'll have systems get increasingly

efficient to make that lower cost,

and you'll end up with a very

effective and sustainable,

financially, as well as

environmentally, supply chain for

what you want.