Ask a European shopper what "regenerative agriculture" means, and you'll probably get a shrug or a guess that lands somewhere near the truth without quite hitting it. Ask the same shopper if they'd pay a bit more for food that tastes better, has fewer chemicals in it, and comes from a farmer they can actually picture — and the answer changes completely.

That gap is the whole subject of a new report from the EIT Food Consumer Observatory, released just as food system resilience climbs back up the EU policy agenda ahead of Ireland's turn holding the Council presidency. The report has a dry academic title — *Making Agriculture Matter: Toward consumer-centric positioning of resilient and regenerative agriculture* — but its finding is refreshingly simple. People do care how their food gets grown. They just don't shop using the words the industry uses to describe it.

The Words Aren't Working
"Resilient" and "regenerative" carry real meaning inside agricultural policy circles — the ability of a farm to keep producing food through a drought, a price shock, a supply disruption. But drop those words into a supermarket aisle, and something gets lost in translation. Consumers in the study understood, in the abstract, that farming needs to become more resilient. What they didn't feel was that resilience was something they were personally responsible for at the checkout. That's a job they expect governments, farmers and the food system at large to handle — not something a shopper should have to weigh while comparing two bags of tomatoes.

What actually moved people, instead, were things they could taste, trust, or verify on the spot: better flavour, a sense that something was healthier, fewer synthetic inputs, a visible link back to an actual farmer, a certification label they already recognised. Not the method. The outcome.

Klaus Grunert, who leads the Observatory and teaches marketing at Aarhus University, put it about as plainly as a researcher can. Farming needs to change, he said, and consumers are telling the industry so — but "resilient" and "regenerative" simply aren't the words people shop with. Translate the same practices into something a person can taste, trust and verify, he argued, and the interest that was already there finally has somewhere to go. His advice to the sector was blunt: lead with the benefit, not the technique.

Old Values, New Tools 
One of the more interesting findings buried in the report is how specific consumers were about the story they wanted told. A straightforward return to "the old ways" of farming didn't land well — it read as naive, or simply unrealistic at the scale modern food systems operate at. But frame the same shift as traditional values delivered through modern tools — better soil science, smarter monitoring, precision techniques applied in service of an old-fashioned idea of good farming — and the same consumers found it both credible and genuinely appealing.

When the researchers tested three different ways of framing this to consumers, one pulled noticeably ahead of the others: "Food that actually nourishes." It tied resilient farming to healthier soil, stronger flavour, fewer synthetic inputs, and claims that were independently verified rather than just asserted. That message worked especially well around processed and manufactured foods — precisely the category where shoppers don't automatically assume something is healthy, and are looking for a reason to believe it might be.

Farmers Are Trusted. Brands, Less So
There's a trust problem sitting underneath all of this, and it isn't a new one. The study found consumers trust farmers considerably more than they trust retailers or manufacturers, and tend to greet brand claims with a fair amount of scepticism. That lines up with the Observatory's own Trust Report 2026, which named farmers the most trusted actors anywhere in the food system.

Put those two findings together, and the implication for anyone trying to sell resilient or regenerative food is fairly direct: claims land better when they're tied to a visible farmer, a clear product origin, and independent verification — not when they're delivered by a brand talking about itself.

The Price Question Nobody's Fully Answered
Trust wasn't the only obstacle. Price came up just as often, and in a fairly predictable way — consumers assumed, almost by default, that better farming practices meant a higher price tag. Claims of lower prices only felt credible in specific circumstances, mainly when a middleman had been cut out entirely, as with direct-to-consumer farm shops or local distribution networks.

Interestingly, a lot of consumers didn't see affordability as something farmers or shoppers alone should have to solve. Many placed that responsibility squarely on government, arguing that the current food system rewards cheap, large-scale production over genuinely better farming — and that public policy, not just market forces, needs to help bring the cost of good food down.

What This Means for the Industry
The report's central recommendation is almost anticlimactic in how straightforward it is: stop explaining farming methods, and start explaining what those methods mean for the food someone's about to buy. Flavour. Health. Naturalness. Where it came from. Whether an independent body actually checked the claim. That's the vocabulary consumers are already fluent in — the industry just needs to meet them there instead of expecting shoppers to learn a new one.

“Resilient agriculture is one of Europe's greatest opportunities to strengthen food security while restoring nature, improving farmer livelihoods and building more competitive agri-food value chains,” added Elvira Domingo Varona, Director of Resilient Agriculture Thematic Leadership EIT Food. “At EIT Food, we bring together farmers, industry, innovators, researchers, investors and policymakers to accelerate this transition. Through collaborative landscape initiatives, innovation and new financing approaches, we help turn regenerative agriculture from isolated pilots into scalable, economically viable solutions. By connecting the entire food system, we are creating the conditions for resilient agriculture to deliver lasting environmental, economic and social impact.”