Driving Change at Scale: Lessons from the Middle of the Supply Chain

Sarah Haire, Head of Agriculture, Dawn Meats / Dunbia

Shaping meaningful change within the beef supply chain requires more than good ideas or impressive datasets. For a business processing over a million cattle, selling into 50 global markets, and supplying 85% of output into UK retail, the task is less about isolated innovation and more about coordinating thousands of moving parts.

The supply chain disassembles into dozens of cuts, channels, and expectations. What begins as a single animal becomes a set of specifications, value streams and consumer demands. In this environment, research can easily become a project on the shelf – completed, reported, and forgotten. The challenge is to join the dots more deliberately.

Large-scale initiatives such as the Conception to Consumption (C2C) programme highlight both the power and burden of scale. Spanning 64 farms, 12,000 cattle, six breeds and more than 5,000 consumer taste tests, it generated half a million data points. The breadth was necessary to understand trends across the national herd, but the sheer volume has required two further years simply to analyse and interpret.

Smaller projects, such as the low-carbon beef trial on a single farm with 250 cattle, offer faster turnaround and deeper insight into biodiversity, soil health and water handling. Yet they also expose challenges. Dairy-bred animals struggled in regenerative systems, with pink eye, grass-seed irritation and inconsistent performance highlighting a genotype × environment mismatch that limits scalability.

Across both examples, the same weak point emerges: knowledge exchange. Research only creates value when the wider supply chain can act on it, including farmers who may supply a single animal a year. Jargon and complex messaging create barriers, and simply increasing the volume of information does not overcome day-to-day constraints such as finance, time, succession or tenancy.

These realities have shaped the Farm Green programme, designed to share information through shows, young-farmer partnerships, events with AHDB, and online webinars. The aim is to meet farmers where they are – acknowledging that 40,000 suppliers cannot be reached through a single channel.

Driving change also requires patience. Genetic decisions take years to express, while market trends shift in months. COVID disrupted consumer behaviour mid-project, reminding the sector that external forces can derail research before animals bred under the previous model even reach slaughter age.

Local context is equally important. What works in the catchment of Highland Meats may look different in Bedford. National messaging succeeds only when built on local relevance. To bring clarity to complex programmes, the C.A.K.E. model – Challenge, Activity, Knowledge Exchange, Exploitation – provides a practical framework. It reminds teams that no dataset, however robust, drives change without translation, a route to adoption, and an understanding of constraints across the supply chain.

Take-Home Messages

• Large projects answer national questions but require strong knowledge-exchange planning to avoid slow exploitation.
• Small, farm-level trials generate valuable insight but do not automatically scale across systems or genotypes.
• Knowledge exchange remains the critical bottleneck; clear, accessible communication determines whether research becomes practice.
• Behavioural understanding is essential. Adoption depends on farmer context, not the volume of scientific information.
• Collaboration and long-term commitment across the supply chain are required to convert research into meaningful, lasting impact.