Frequently Asked Questions

Vitagri is a UK organisation building the first credible framework to measure, verify, and reward nutrient-dense food production. We connect the dots between soil health, farming practice, and human health outcomes — and we build the systems to make nutritional quality visible and valuable in the food market.

Vitagri was co-founded by Rob Ward (CEO) and David Rose (Chairman) — combining commercial AgTech and FMCG leadership with deep farming and food systems expertise. The team includes agronomists, nutritionists, food system specialists, data scientists, and technologists. See the Team page for more details.

Vitagri Org Ltd is a UK for-profit limited company, funded at seed stage by a grant from the Frank Parkinson Agricultural Trust (FPAT) and through SEIS-qualifying equity investment. We hold HMRC SEIS advance assurance, offering 50% income tax relief to qualifying UK investors. We are also pursuing Innovate UK ADOPT funding across three commodity research projects — beef, potatoes, and wheat — with a combined application value of £300,000. See our Invest page for full details.

Yes — significantly. The same crop type grown under different conditions can vary up to 200-fold in antioxidant content. Farming practice, soil health, and variety selection are major drivers of this variation. This is not a fringe claim: it is well-established in peer-reviewed science and forms the foundation of our Growing Health Report.

Yes. Growing Health is freely available as a PDF with no sign-up required. A companion Citations & Glossary document is also available for free. We share this openly because the problem affects everyone.

There is a substantial and growing evidence base linking regenerative practices — cover cropping, reduced tillage, composting, rotational grazing — to improved soil health and measurably higher crop nutritional quality. The Growing Health Report summarises this evidence across multiple crop types, soil conditions, and farming systems.

Diet-related chronic disease costs the UK an estimated £268bn per year, accounting for lost productivity, NHS costs, and social care. This figure is drawn from analysis in our Growing Health Report. Improving the nutritional quality of staple foods is a high-leverage, underexplored intervention.

Calorie density measures energy per unit weight; nutrient density measures the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytonutrients per unit weight. A food can be high in calories and low in nutrients — and farming practice moves nutrient density largely independently of calories. Full definition and examples: What is nutrient-dense food? →

Polyphenols are plant defence compounds — flavonoids, phenolic acids and stilbenes — that act as antioxidants in the body, and plants make more of them under mild biological stress, so regeneratively farmed crops typically carry more than high-input conventional ones. We keep the full explanation, with the mechanisms and the farming levers, on our definition page: see What is nutrient-dense food? →

Soil organic matter fuels the microbial activity that makes minerals bioavailable to plants and supports the mycorrhizal networks that extend a plant's root reach — so crops in higher-organic-matter soils consistently test higher for minerals, omega-3s and polyphenols. The full mechanism sits alongside our definition of nutrient density: What is nutrient-dense food? →

A 200-fold difference means two fruits or vegetables of the same crop type and weight could contain dramatically different levels of health-protective antioxidants — with farming practice as the primary variable. This variation is invisible to consumers and to the market, since food labelling reflects average compositional data rather than actual nutritional testing. It is a fundamental reason why current food systems fail to reward quality or guide meaningful consumer choice.

PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) is a standardised framework for conducting and reporting systematic literature reviews, designed to minimise bias and ensure comprehensive coverage. Vitagri applied PRISMA protocols in compiling the Growing Health Report to synthesise 19,000+ peer-reviewed studies — ensuring the evidence base is reproducible, transparent, and traceable.

The Bionutrient Institute is a US-based non-profit focused on nutrient density measurement, standardisation, and public education in food systems. It has developed accessible spectrometry tools for real-time nutritional testing of food. Vitagri and the Bionutrient Institute are international partners working together through an Innovate UK-supported collaboration to advance the science and infrastructure of nutrient density measurement in the UK and globally.

The evidence is strong and growing. Meta-analyses by Barański et al. (2014) found organically and regeneratively grown crops contained significantly higher antioxidant content and lower cadmium levels than conventionally grown equivalents. Średnicka-Tober et al. (2016) found similar results for dairy and meat from pasture-based systems. The Growing Health Report synthesises the full body of evidence across 19,000+ studies spanning multiple crop types, animal products, and farming systems.

The GroundUp Framework is Vitagri's 7-component measurement and verification system for nutrient-dense food production. It covers soil health metrics, crop nutritional testing, farming practice standards, third-party verification, and certification pathways — providing a credible basis for premium pricing and policy incentives. Read more on the Framework page.

The framework is in active development. The Growing Health Report establishes the evidence base and outlines the framework components. We are currently building out the measurement protocols, verification systems, and pilot farm programme. If you want to be involved in the early stages, contact us.

We are looking for farming businesses interested in trialling the GroundUp Framework and exploring how nutrient-dense production can command a price premium. Pilot participation involves soil testing, crop nutritional assessment, and practice documentation — with the goal of demonstrating measurable value to buyers. Get in touch to discuss.

Retailers, caterers, and food manufacturers can use the GroundUp Framework to verify nutritional quality claims in their supply chains, support premium product positioning, and demonstrate commitment to food quality beyond cosmetic standards. Contact us to explore how it could work for your procurement.

Organic certification restricts farming inputs — prohibiting synthetic pesticides and fertilisers — but does not measure the nutritional quality of outputs. The GroundUp Framework measures what actually ends up in the food: nutrient levels, antioxidant content, mineral profiles, and omega-3 ratios, verified through rigorous testing. A farm can hold organic certification without demonstrating measurable nutritional uplift; conversely, some high-practice conventional farms may achieve strong results under GroundUp. The framework is output-based, not input-based.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) is the UK government's main farm payment scheme post-Brexit, rewarding environmental outcomes including soil health, biodiversity, and water quality. It does not currently reward the nutritional quality of food outputs. Vitagri's position is that nutrient density should be integrated into future iterations of the scheme — since the soil health outcomes SFI already incentivises are strongly correlated with higher nutritional content in crops.

Pulse Workshop is Vitagri's product-scoring workspace — a place you work in, not a training day you attend. You bring your products and their claims; Workshop scores them against the Pulse Brain evidence catalogue so you can see, and defend, where each one stands. Plans are billed per user, per month: Pioneer at £90 (1 seat, 2 Claims Check reports per user each month), Foundation at £67 (5 seats, 3 reports), Professional at £54 (10 seats, 5 reports), and Enterprise on tailored terms with unlimited seats. First-time teams can start with Growing Together — a two-seat share of Pioneer at £45 per user, per month for the first 12 months. Not sure where to begin? See where you stand → or See plans & pricing →

Pulse Check verifies a single claim. Upload a report, article, label or PDF and it grades every factual claim against the evidence catalogue, returning a verdict for each one — Critical, Investigate, Supported or Evolution — with the records it drew on. Your first report is free when you sign up with a work email that matches your company website, and a full report is typically ready in under 15 minutes. After that, reports are £10 each, or less in packs: £37.50 for a five-pack and £49 for a ten-pack. Try Pulse AI free → or Run a Pulse Check →

Pulse AI to explore the evidence. Pulse Workshop to score your products. Pulse Check to verify a claim. Pulse Check answers one question — does this specific claim hold up against the evidence? Pulse Workshop is the ongoing workspace where a team scores its whole range, tracks its claims and works the evidence over time. Most people meet us through a free Pulse Check and move to a Workshop plan when they have more than one claim to stand behind.

Pulse Cultivator is the version of Pulse built for advisers and groups — an agronomist, a trade body, a co-operative or a buyer — who want to bring a whole community of farmers or members onto Pulse together. Advisers run their groups from one place, and members get the evidence tools in a shared space. If you advise or convene a group, you can start a free pilot: see Pulse Cultivator →

“Membership” means one thing at Vitagri: a paid Pulse Workshop subscription. The Research Partner programme is something else — an apply-only programme for trade bodies, retailers, food corporates, R&D commissioners, foundations and academic institutions who want Pulse Brain as evidence infrastructure: a branded portal on their own subdomain, tailored ranking, AI-generated briefs and a governance review. It is application-based — apply and access is scoped to the work you want the evidence to power. Apply to the Research Partner programme →

Every record in the catalogue carries a tier that reflects how strong its evidence is. T1 Strongest — systematic reviews and meta-analyses. T2 Strong — randomised controlled trials. T3 Emerging — observational studies and field trials. T4 Context — narrative reviews, policy and practice sources. The tier lets you weight a claim honestly: a T1 meta-analysis and a T4 policy note both have their place, but they do not carry the same evidential weight.

Pulse Workshop is billed monthly and you can cancel at any time from your account; you keep access to the end of the month you have paid for. Pulse Check report packs are one-off purchases of report credits. If something has gone wrong with a purchase, email rob.ward@vitagri.org and we will put it right.

Vitagri is for anyone who wants nutritional quality in food to be measurable, provable and rewarded: farmers and growers demonstrating the quality of what they produce; food businesses, retailers and buyers who want claims they can stand behind; advisers and groups bringing communities of farmers onto shared evidence tools; and researchers, policymakers and investors backing a credible UK nutrient-density framework. The free tools — Pulse AI and Pulse Check — are open to everyone.

This is the central methodological challenge, and we don't underestimate it. Our approach deliberately separates three things that are often conflated: direct compositional measurement; the agronomic and environmental covariates that drive variation (soil biology, weather, season, geography, cultivar); and the markers that let us reason back to farming practice. On measurement, near-infrared spectroscopy is a tool we are exploring, but we are candid that it is still in its infancy — the associated reference work is led by the Bionutrient Institute, and we don't claim that capability as our own. On priorities, our instinct is to start with a focused set of nutrients that are both health-relevant and practically measurable at scale, rather than a long aspirational list — and we actively welcome input from sector bodies and levy organisations on which vitamins and minerals to anchor on first.

We agree the term does too much work when used loosely, so we avoid it as a flat claim. Comparison only means something within like-for-like categories: the same cut, the same product, the same matrix. The honest unit of analysis is variation within a product type attributable to how it was produced — not a ranking across product types.

This is an important gap, and we are honest about it. As our Growing Health Report discusses, farm-gate nutrient density and plate nutrient density are not the same number — post-harvest losses can be substantial. Point-of-sale and post-chain measurement sits on our seven-step action-plan roadmap, but we'll be direct: it is currently secondary to our focus on farm-production-to-farm-gate. That is not because the question doesn't matter — it is that we already have more than enough to solve in getting the data right up to the gate first.

The evidence backbone is substantial: our Growing Health Report draws on 19,000+ peer-reviewed studies, and our Pulse citation catalogue lets us systematically gauge the credibility of the claims being tested. We are working in partnership with the Bionutrient Institute (BI); the reference-measurement approach is driven by the predictive element BI has built from ten years of testing across more than 10,000 farms and over 25 crops. We are now forming UK trade partnerships to mirror that work. On pilots, we are well progressed with three Innovate UK ADOPT applications — milling wheat, beef and potatoes. These trials are observational and modest compared with the far wider trials we will ultimately need, but they are the beginning of the measurement roadmap.

Pulse AI is a free assistant that has read the whole Pulse Brain evidence catalogue — 19,000+ curated records, plus the Growing Health Report and its references. Ask it anything in plain English about the evidence base, measurement methodology or the framework, and every answer cites the real records it draws on. No account required — free to use. Try Pulse AI free.

Subscribe to the Vitagri Substack for research summaries, policy analysis, and updates on the framework. You can also follow us on LinkedIn. Both are free.

Use the contact form on our Contact page, find us on LinkedIn, or subscribe to our Substack. We aim to respond to all enquiries within a few working days.