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2026 EVENT AT A GLANCE
This October, we will gather for the eighth annual Food. Ag. Ideas (FAI)—a premier event where food, health, and innovation converged. Through a full day of fireside chats, panels, immersive experiences, and high-impact networking at Machine Shop in Minneapolis, FAI spotlights the future of nutrition and wellness.
This year's theme: Building a Living Economy from the Ground Up explores how Minnesota's century of cooperative economics, land stewardship, and connected layers of food system infrastructure has built something durable—and what the rest of the country can learn from it.
With top speakers from major brands, healthcare, and startups, FAI 2026 is a must-attend event for anyone shaping what we eat and how we live. Together, we took steps toward building a healthier, more sustainable future.​​​
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TUESDAY: 10/27
Building a Living Economy from the Ground Up
7:30 AM – 8:30 AM | Machine Shop
Check-In & Networking
8:30 AM – 9:20 AM | Machine Shop
The Minnesota Moment: What the Living Economy Is, Where It Came From, and Why It Matters Now
A galvanizing opening that names the forces reshaping food and agriculture—not to alarm, but to orient. GLP-1s, trade volatility, climate pressure, AI, shifting consumer trust: these are the conditions in which a living economy either proves itself or doesn't.
​This keynote lays out the three-layer model—local, regional, global—and names the Minnesota cooperative tradition as its connective tissue. It frames the day as an honest examination of how the model works, where it still falls short, and what other communities can take from it.
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The speaker should acknowledge the tension honestly: Minnesota's largest companies are part of the same industrial system every other food region is navigating. What is distinct is not that we resolved that tension—it is that we have been living inside it for over a century, and we built real infrastructure for navigating it. That history is what makes us worth studying.
The room should leave not anxious, but activated.
9:30 AM – 10:20 AM | Machine Shop
Eating Reimagined:
What the GLP-1 Era Means for Food & Ag
One bank's projection: GLP-1 medications could remove $30–50B in food and beverage sales by 2030. But this isn't just a pharmaceutical story—it is the clearest signal yet that the industrial food system's core value proposition is failing. Smaller portions. Different protein preferences. Greater demand for nutrient density over volume. A consumer genuinely re-examining their relationship with food.
This session opens the day's argument by naming the disruption clearly: the old model—volume, convenience, cheap calories—is losing. Consumer behavior is shifting toward intentionality and nutrient density in ways that are structural, not cyclical. For everyone in the FAI audience—farmers, brands, retailers, entrepreneurs—the question this panel leaves in the room is: if that model is failing, what replaces it?
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What do we grow, make, and sell when people eat less but demand more? Where are the opportunities hiding in plain sight? And what does this mean for farmers whose livelihoods depend on volume?
10:30 AM – 11:00 AM | Machine Shop
Networking & Refreshments
11:00 AM – 11:50 AM | Machine Shop
Food As Health: From Category Trend to System Infrastructure
The answer to what consumers actually need is not a reformulated product. It is a food system oriented around nourishment from the ground up. This session connects soil health to human health, regenerative farming practice to nutrient density, and the clinical to the agricultural as one story.
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FAI 2025 opened the door on food and health. In 2026, we walk through it. The frontier has moved: nutrient density measurement is advancing, personalized nutrition is becoming practical, the gut-brain axis is reshaping how we think about mental health and cognition, and bioactive compounds are moving from supplement shelves to mainstream food formulation.
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The bigger structural question: what does it mean for healthcare systems, insurance companies, food policy, and retailers to treat food as prevention infrastructure rather than a consumer product category? Minnesota has pieces of this answer already—Mayo Clinic's precision medicine work, U of MN's nutrition research, and a growing functional food startup ecosystem. This session builds on 2025 momentum while making the biological argument for the living economy.
12:00 PM – 1:10 PM | Machine Shop
Featured Lunch Conversation
1:15 PM – 2:05 PM | Machine Shop
Nourishing the Economy: Protein, Innovation, and the MN Collaborative Model
​Protein is the most significant nutritional driver of our time and Minnesota is at the center of what comes next. But this session is not about protein as a trend. It is about how Minnesota built the collaborative infrastructure to address one of the most important nutritional questions of our time—and what that infrastructure reveals about how a living economy generates its next chapter.
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The global protein transition is a structural shift, and MN is positioned at its center: the MBOLD Protein Catalyst, the Plant Protein Innovation Center's research pipeline, the Bridge2Food Summit coming to Minneapolis, the Bold Growth mentorship program connecting protein startups to Cargill, Target, and General Mills executives. This is all three layers of the living economy operating together—from field to lab to market, rooted here.
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The harder questions also belong here: What does the protein transition mean for conventional animal agriculture? How do plant and animal protein co-exist in a resilient system? What crops and production systems does Minnesota need to develop to supply the next generation of protein ingredients?
2:15 PM – 3:05 PM | Machine Shop
Resilience & Volatility: The Stress Test
The sessions before this one have shown what the living economy produces and how it generates its next chapter. Now the stress test: does the model hold when it gets hit?
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Trade tariffs, Strait of Hormuz disruptions, regulatory whiplash, climate volatility, and shifting geopolitical alliances are forcing food and ag to rethink supply chains in real time. The conversation moves beyond “regional food systems” as the default answer to a bigger question: what does systemic resilience actually look like across supply, finance, policy, and ecology? This session asks why the layers of Minnesota's infrastructure absorbed shocks that other regions could not—and what was built before the disruption arrived that made that possible.
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Minnesota's answer is multifaceted: the MN Protein Hub creates domestic supply chain depth; regenerative agriculture builds soil-level physical resilience; AI enables real-time logistics rerouting; and Minnesota's position as home to global commodity traders means we understand both local and global flows. International partnerships with Canada, the Netherlands, and Asian trading partners represent new resilience nodes, not just export opportunities.
This is not a session about Minnesota's advantages. It is a session about what was built, why it held, and what that means for anyone trying to build something that lasts.
3:45 PM – 4:35 PM | Machine Shop
The Local and Regional Food System as Economic Infrastructure
The day has made the case for the living economy at scale. This session brings it back to ground—and makes the case that what happens at the local and regional layer is not separate from the larger story. It is where the story starts.
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Food hubs. Cooperative distributors. Community-rooted brands. Farmers growing new crops for regional buyers. Mutual aid networks that activate when things get hard. Co-manufacturers who make it possible for a small brand to get to market. This is the layer where new ideas begin, where farmers take risks, where community trust gets built that eventually enables the larger collaborations.
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Minnesota operates across all three layers—local, regional, and global—and connects them in practical ways that other regions have not. This session tells that story honestly: local is where ideas start and trust gets built; scale is what enables the system to serve people and create durable impact. Both matter. The connection between them is the model.
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The frame for every attendee who is not from Minnesota: you cannot replicate MBOLD tomorrow. You can start building local food infrastructure tomorrow. This session is the door in.
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4:45 PM – 5:25 PM | Machine Shop
The Playbook: Can the Minnesota Model Travel?
The audience has spent the day walking the full system: from shifting consumer demand through the biological imperative for nourishment through collaborative innovation through stress testing to ground-level infrastructure. They understand what the model is and what it required. Now the hardest and most honest question: which parts of this are transferable—and which are specific to this place?
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This is not a victory lap. It is a provocation. What are the specific ingredients that make Minnesota's approach to food and ag innovation work? What would it take to build this where you are? The speaker might challenge the room: What are we still getting wrong? What does it still require from us?
The goal is to send people out the door activated—not with a to-do list, but with a sense of what they are part of and what they are going back to build.
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This is a model to amplify across the country and across the Naturally Network national ecosystem.
5:30 PM | Machine Shop
Reception
Evening reception, celebration, connections, and the next generation of MN food and ag entrepreneurs.