I used to believe that the right path forward was to create a regenerative version of every product on the supermarket shelves.
After two years working in regenerative food, I no longer believe that regenerative can scale as a category in Europe today.
To explain why, it helps to go back to the origins of regenerative agriculture.
In the US, it gained prominence in recent years as a counterculture response to decades of eroding organic standards and declining overall food quality. Champion farmers turned a focus on soil health into a new model of producing food, one that works with nature rather than against it.
As regenerative moved from the field to the shelf, certifications emerged to translate regenerative into something that shoppers could recognize.
One of the most prominent certifications is the Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC), which started in 2019 with 19 brands, and now covers 344! Endorsement from retailers like Whole Foods gave brands the confidence to make regenerative claims in-store, allowing the movement to gain traction even before consumer demand had formed.
Given all this, it was reasonable to assume Europe would follow the same path.
The assumption was simple: if regenerative could scale in the US through certification and retailer endorsement, Europe would be next.
But Europe lacked the same underlying drivers.
Organic standards in the EU have their share of challenges, but belief in them hasn’t been lost.
Overall food quality and related health outcomes haven’t declined as dramatically as in the US, which means there really wasn’t a need for such a counterculture to emerge.
And whenever consumers look for “something better”, Europe already has strong signals with organic and biodynamic certifications.
Together, this left little room for regenerative to emerge as a distinct consumer-facing category.
Similar Initiatives, like agro-ecology and nature-inclusive farming, are happening, but mainly at the supply side, rather than consumer-facing labels. In other words, there was no gap for regenerative to fill in the European market.
So what are the most successful regenerative brands doing in Europe?
Across very different categories, from soy sauce to bread to herbal teas, the pattern is the same.
Tomasu, a soy sauce made by one of the regenerative farmer pioneers in the Netherlands, doesn’t mention “regenerative” at all on their website. Similarly, brands like Wildfarmed, Amfora, and Wilder Land source key ingredients regeneratively, without making it a headline claim.
The reason is clear: regenerative isn’t emerging as a consumer-facing category. Instead, these brands treat it as a real asset that adds value by strengthening supply chains and enabling superior products.
Being regenerative allows them to produce differentiated products that stand out in taste, nutrition, and quality, advantages that can be communicated directly to consumers.
In other words, regenerative explains why the product is better, not what the product is.
I saw the same pattern during my year as the commercial lead for Gabanna, a regenerative pasta company.
Creating a “third” category alongside conventional and organic pasta didn’t work. Organic alone is already challenging for consumers to understand, and adding “regenerative” on top only confuses the message. And I got a similar response from most professional buyers.
What resonated was communicating why the product was different. Highlighting better digestion, gut health, nutrition and taste immediately created a connection with consumers. Using different grain varieties, legumes and vegetables allowed us to produce a pasta that’s healthier, more nutritious, and could even be offered with hyper-local ingredients, all enabled by regenerative sourcing.
This is where I’ve landed.
In Europe, selling regenerative as a category doesn’t work. At least not today. The gap between what happens on the field and consumer understanding is still too wide.
Sustainability claims sit far down the list of purchase drivers. Trying to lead with them only weakens the proposition. Instead, regenerative works best when it’s used where it can create leverage.
In practice, that shows up in two places: as a system advantage that strengthens supply chains, and as a quality flywheel that enables better products.
I believe that in Europe, regenerative food won’t win by being labeled as such. It will win by being baked so deeply into products and supply chains that it no longer needs to be explained at all.
That’s the challenge, but also the opportunity, for brands trying to balance better sourcing with commercial reality.
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