Why Is British Agriculture the Only Brand Unable to Turn Trust into Tender?

According to the latest AHDB insight report, trust in British farmers is at record levels. Before we get excited as an industry, we must remember that this trust is not translating into willingness to pay. Admiration remains just that, a warm feeling. Meanwhile, the economics of farming still see producers as price-takers. Something is seriously off.

I wanted to use what I had learned in over a decade of brand marketing and put my behavioural science postgrad to work to figure things out...

1. Trust without transaction: the value gap

The well-known attitude–behaviour gap (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977) is alive and well in UK food. Trusting farmers is an attitude; buying a higher-priced product that incorporates a meaningful premium for them is behaviour. Most food decisions are governed by automatic System 1 reactors (Kahneman, 2011) anchored to “normal” price expectations, convenience and habit. So even though consumers say they trust farmers, they don’t change what they pay. The value they place stops at a thought, not a purchase.

2. Framing the wrong questions

One reason for the disconnect is how support is measured. Asking “who do you trust, and lining farmers up alongside doctors, academics, politicians and supermarkets and asking the participants to indicate their level of trustworthiness, invites the socially acceptable answer. It’s low-cost “virtue signalling”.

What’s less asked is: “Would you pay 10% more if that went directly to the farmer?” or “How much of your purchase price do you believe the farmer receives?” Without such trade-off questions, we measure sentiments, not commitment and certainly not price elasticity.

I would love a study that looks at where the headroom is on products directly connected to farmers - bread, milk, meat and cheese, and how messaging might increase headroom - there may well be some easy wins hidden in plain sight.

3. System design keeps cheap food king

The food system is designed around low price anchors: multibuys, value ranges, heavy discounting. That template makes anything higher seem unfair. Consumers may believe they “support British farming” but they cannot trace how the pricing system works, so paying more feels like charity, not fairness. If transparency is weak, trust becomes cheap talk.

A further factor: UK households spend a comparatively low share of their consumption on food. According to UN/Destatis data, in France, for example, household consumption expenditure on food represented 13.52 % of total consumption in 2022. Meanwhile the UK figure for food and non-alcoholic drink in 2023 was 11.2% of household expenditure. A low food spend share means less visible margin for paying “more” for fairness. The mental benchmark remains “cheap”.

4. Generational separation and the invisible producer

Another layer here: Britain’s population is now further removed from the land than almost any time in our history. In the 1950s and 60s many households had a direct connection—someone in the family or the local community working farms, knowing where the food came from. Today we’re perhaps seven or eight degrees of separation from that reality (no exact data found to validate the “7-8 degrees” figure, so treat that as a metaphor rather than fact). What is clear is that agriculture is no longer part of everyday lived experience for the vast majority. When your link to the producer is invisible, it’s far harder to translate trust into spending. The “story of the farm” becomes abstract.

So, who has the power to turn trust into something tangible for farmers?

If British agriculture wants to convert public affection into financial resilience, it needs a behavioural playbook - kind of like how the big brands operate, consistancy in the message, tone of voice and channels of communication. It will re-engineer how trust turns into action across every link in the chain.

Farmers: make the story tangible

Farmers are the most trusted storytellers in the food system, but they are rarely visible. Direct-to-consumer efforts, from farm shops to social media storytelling, give authenticity a face. The behavioural principle of identifiable impact shows that when consumers can picture who they’re helping, they’re more willing to pay. if you need an example, check out some of the D2C success of Petite Peonies and Lancashire Lamb Boxes.

• Farmers can show the “why” behind the price - sharing real examples of costs, weather challenges, and production trade-offs.

• Collaborations between farmers and local schools, markets, or brands can personalise the purchase, turning faceless produce into a relationship.

• But storytelling alone isn’t enough; it must be paired with transactional opportunities (QR codes, “meet your farmer” links, transparent labels) that make it easy to act on that empathy in real time.

  
  

Farming bodies and sector organisations: shift the narrative

Bodies like AHDB, NFU, and LEAF can play the critical convening role in reframing what “value” means. Rather than reinforcing the language of cost and subsidy, they can nudge a new social norm: paying fairly is what responsible citizens do.

• Campaigns should focus less on “support farmers” - because the last thing you will want as a farmer is to be seen as a charity case - and more on “support fairness in food” aligning moral and market incentives.

• Shared industry frameworks (e.g. “Fair Food Mark” or “Farmer’s Share” labelling) could make fair pricing visible and standardised.

• These organisations can also ensure research questions evolve, from gauging attitudes to testing actual behaviour, using conjoint, experimental, or revealed-preference methods to understand drivers for change, not just reported metrics

  
  

Supply chain and processors: start transparency at home

Processors and packers are often invisible to consumers — but they’re pivotal in translating values into pricing.

• They can audit and communicate the farm share of value, showing the breakdown of where every pound goes.

• Transparency tools like blockchain-backed labelling or QR-based storytelling are behavioural signals that build trust through proof.

• But crucially, transparency must start on home turf. If we can’t build open, traceable, fair systems for British produce - where relationships and accountability already exist - what hope is there for achieving fairness across multi-national, long-distance supply chains?

• If the domestic food system can’t model fairness, sustainability elsewhere will always ring hollow.

  
  

Retailers: redesign the choice environment

Retailers are the gatekeepers of behavioural change. They have the power to normalise fairness, or bury it under “price match” labels.

• Choice architecture should make “fairer food” the default. That might mean tiered pricing with transparent labels (“This milk ensures 10p/litre more to the farmer”) or supermarket-wide commitments to minimum farmgate margins that is front and centre for consumers - not buried in an article in last year's Grocer.

• Use social norm cues (“Most customers choose fair-priced British meat”) and default settings (favouring British-sourced or assured products).

• Finally, stop going off on a tangent in an attempt to differentiate your products - the farmers find it a nuisance and the consumers are confused - I don't even know the difference between higher welfare, Red TRactor, RSPCA assured, freedom to roam, free range or barn reared! Consistancy of message - use it to support farming, not yourselves otherwise you won't have much of a supply chain left in a few short years!

The other option; if the food fight is lost - is there another way?

Ok, this one is a bit left field - and I might be going off on a tangent myself...but...In recent work around environmental baselining, there's a compelling opportunity to shift the supply-chain dynamics for agriculture. We might be too late to change things on the price of food, but the environmental markets are still an opportunity ready to be shaped.

A national programme that records and transparently reports farm-level environmental baselines (soil health, biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions) offers farmers something beyond commodity pricing: a “currency” of value. In such a model farmers are not only price takers, they become value creators with measurable credentials.

• Farmers can gain agency: when the baseline data is collected, farmers have evidence of their on-farm environmental services and can claim a share of value accordingly. They become suppliers of ecosystem outcomes, not just bulk produce.

• Sector actors and supply-chain can redesign contracts: instead of raw volume‐price agreements, contracts can include environmental performance payments or value-sharing based on baseline data.

• Retailers and brands can use the baseline data to offer differentiated products: “This product came from a farm that reduced emissions by X%” – making it possible to link premium pricing to verifiable farm outcomes.

  
  

But crucially: this transparency needs to start at home, on the UK farms and UK supply chains. If supply-chain transparency remains restricted to multinational, long-distance flows then the “fair and resilient food system” remains rhetorical. If UK agriculture can’t model transparency and fairness in its domestic chains, what hope is there for the global system?

Final Thoughts...

British agriculture has earned trust. But it’s not enough. The system around it must evolve: from trust to transaction, from transparency to premium, from commodity to relationship. A national environmental‐baseline programme offers a once-in-a-generation chance to shift power in the supply chain, giving farmers more control and consumers clearer value. If we fail to start this on our home turf, the “fair and resilient food system” risks being nothing more than a slogan...food fairness can be part of that story, it might not be the main character.