Food, climate, and the risks we don’t see coming with Helios AI

In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia talks with Francisco Martin-Rayo, chief executive of Helios AI about the uncomfortable truth behind today’s food prices: climate volatility is no longer a future risk — it’s already reshaping what we can grow, where we can grow it, and whether certain foods show up on our shelves at all.

This isn’t just about floods and fires. It’s about quieter, more destabilising shifts in seasons, rainfall patterns, pests and temperature thresholds that are undermining harvests and driving volatility through the global food system, often long before anyone notices the impact in the supermarket aisle.

Francisco explains how Helios uses artificial intelligence to forecast climate risk and price volatility across agricultural commodities and countries, and why the real problem isn’t a lack of data but a lack of decision infrastructure. Together, they unpack why food systems are uniquely fragile: from rural data gaps and long investment cycles to finance, procurement, and policy rules that lock farmers and buyers into crops that no longer make sense in a changing climate.

As always, at Shaken Not Burned we're not about having all the answers. What we believe matters is building the knowledge we need to ask better questions, in order to understand what’s actually breaking, why it’s breaking, and how better information — used well — could change who holds power in the food system and how resilient it can become.

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