The unbalanced development among legume species regarding sustainable and healthy agrifood systems in North-America and Europe: focus on food product innovations

Increasing legume diversity in food will significantly contribute to sustainable and healthy agrifood systems. But this seems difficult to achieve due to strong path-dependency in the agrifood sector and needs to be better assessed to define sound sustainability transition policies. We analysed 100,000 food product innovations with legume ingredients (soya and fourteen different pulses) over 2010–2019 in North America and Europe to get an overall view of how legumes are developing. Using the Mintel Global-New-Product-Database, we observed that food product innovations containing soya represent six times more than those containing pulses. Therefore, while soya is a major crop for feed, it is also becoming so for food, when compared with the low development of pulses. This confirms that encouraging markets to increase crop diversity and overcome lock-in is still a challenge. Beyond the case of legumes, those methods can be extended to measure biodiversity regarding any other species in food products.