Planet Protectors

AI and Big Data to Help Feed the World

SARA MENKER — FOUNDER, CEO, GRO INTELLIGENCE

By 2050, the united nations says, we’re going to need 70 percent more food to feed the nine billion people living on Earth. Global climate change threatens to upend their lives—worsening storms, droughts, heat waves and crop diseases. What kind of a world will we leave to our grandchildren?

Sara Menker says the problem may be even more urgent than the U.N. suggests. In 2017, she gave a TED talk in which she said a “tipping point,” beyond which global food markets become too overwhelmed to function effectively, could come in just a few years.

“We discovered that the world will be short 214 trillion calories by 2027,” she said. Or, in more familiar terms: “A single Big Mac has 563 calories. That means the world will be short 379 billion Big Macs in 2027. That is more Big Macs than McDonald’s has ever produced.”

Menker cannot change the world alone. But the firm she started, Gro Intelligence, is providing information that food companies, insurers, lenders and policymakers use to make food production more efficient, and perhaps help protect against that tipping point.