A note from the TED Countdown

Last week we spoke at the TED Countdown event and served up a colourful dessert for the Dandelion Women in Action evening meal at Afrika House, showcasing the ethos of our business - using the widest possible range of biodiverse plants into every bite.

At Grove and Meadow we work with overlooked traditional crops - not just to celebrate them, but to create real demand for them.

For too long, the food system has treated human health as an afterthought.

Instead we dare to put nutrition back at the centre - where it belongs in any food value chain. We focus on preserving and amplifying the nutrition of ingredients, not diminishing it through processing.

Nutrition is complex  - but we often reduce it to just macronutrients. The real power lies in micronutrients  - essential to health, and linked to soil vitality. The future of food is already here. What’s missing is a shift in focus.

We need to reconnect eaters with biodiversity  - not through guilt, but through joy.

By widening our ingredient lens and embracing complexity, like nature does - we create food that is delicious, beautiful, and easy to love.

Reconnection begins with where food is made. If food was made closer to the farm, we’d close the gap between soil and spoon.

Food made in distant cities creates disconnection  - eaters lose touch with the land, and farmers become invisible. This disconnect makes it harder for farms to stay resilient, and for food to stay nutrient-rich.

When we rebuild connection, we unlock a chain reaction:

📈 Consumers choose biodiversity →

🌾 Farmers grow it →

🌱 Soils are restored →

🥗 Nutrition deepens →

🏡 Rural economies thrive

Let’s stop telling people to “do better.”

Let’s give them something better.

Better tasting.

Better for their bodies.

Better for the planet.

Ingredients for our dessert: yacon and rhubarb compote with candied angelica cream served on mango baobab sorbet. Everything bar the mangos and baobab home-grown on our biodynamic shamba in Tigoni!