Valona Intelligence

We read around 50 Q2 earnings updates from 5 industries in agri-food business. The most interesting findings weren’t in any of them. They appeared when we put five parts of the value chain next to each other: agricultural inputs, seed breeding, dairy, flavours & ingredients, and restaurants. A few things stood out. 1. The same geopolitical disruption that benefited companies at the start of the food chain became a cost problem further downstream. 2. Some companies looked at exactly the same market signals and came to opposite conclusions about what would happen next. 3. And while everyone was watching quarterly performance, another shift was happening quietly in the background: across sectors, large companies are narrowing their portfolios after years of expanding them. There were also cases where a very positive headline looked quite different once I went back through several quarters of results. That’s really the point of this analysis. Reading one company tells you how that company performed. Reading one sector tells you how that market performed. Reading across the value chain can tell you why. I pulled the most interesting connections together in this video. Would be curious to hear what others following the agri-food industry are seeing. Valona Intelligence

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Ahead of the release of our H1 2026 Dairy Market Sentiment analysis on 17 September, Randy Steenbergen explored the story of protein as a major dairy trend to answer one key question: Why are dairy leaders betting on protein? 👉 Read the takeaways: https://lnkd.in/eABxZpxd Have you already subscribed to the next Dairy webinar on the 22nd of September? 👆 Do it now: https://lnkd.in/eX-7ByW4

Q2 QSR earnings are wrapped, and there is a lot to unpack in them. At Valona Intelligence we monitor company earnings to spot trends early, so Anna Iievlieva asked me to write an article about what I learned from the latest QSR earnings. We see that outperforming chains have moved ahead of the pack in returning to clear customer value, driving up transactions faster than the ticket size drops. We see continued momentum in emerging markets, where restaurant densities at 1/5th of mature markets allow fast payback cycles and therefore strong net unit growth. But we also see very little mention of GLP-1s future impact on QSR business models and the action that is needed to mitigate that today. Read it here, curious to hear what you think!

Why are dairy leaders betting so heavily on protein? Protein demand is accelerating driven by mainstream high-protein consumption and further boosted by the rise of GLP-1 medications. But there’s a problem: whey supply is struggling to keep up. In this dairy market update, Randy Steenbergen, Solution Consultant at Valona Intelligence, looks beyond the trend itself to explore what it means for dairy companies. ▶️ Why protein has become a strategic growth lever ▶️ How GLP-1 is adding to protein demand ▶️ Why WPI and WPC supply is under pressure ▶️ How whey economics could reshape the cheese market ▶️ Where dairy companies are investing next Watch the full analysis to understand how the protein boom is changing dairy market economics and what dairy leaders should be monitoring next.