The Capability Gaps Fresh Produce Boards Are Already Seeing
The calendar may have only just turned to 2026, but for fresh produce boards, the leadership challenges of this year arrived months ago. Across boardrooms from California to Kent, the same uncomfortable question keeps surfacing: are our current leaders actually equipped for what’s coming?
Increasingly, the answer is creating genuine concern.
Leadership readiness in fresh produce is becoming aboard-level issue. Many leadership teams, carefully built over decades, were designed for a different operating context entirely. The executives who performed strongly in 2018, or even 2022, are now facing demands their experience did not fully prepare them for.
Boards are beginning to ask a simple but pressing question.
Are our leaders built for what comes next?
2026 Is Already Here
Most leadership teams across fresh produce were shaped by a very specific set of challenges.
Operational scale. Margin pressure. Supplier relationships. Weather volatility. Trade logistics. Deep product knowledge.
Those capabilities still matter. They always will.
But the context around them has shifted faster than many boards anticipated.
Today’s leaders are being asked to navigate:
• Greater complexity across markets and geographies
• Faster decision cycles with less certainty
• Heightened scrutiny from investors, regulators and customers
• More visible people leadership expectations
• Strategic growth decisions under sustained pressure
This is why leadership readiness in fresh produce is no longer a future discussion. Boards are seeing performance strain now. Not because leaders are failing, but because the role itself has evolved.
The Three Capability Gaps Boards Are Flagging Now
In board conversations across the sector, three leadership capability gaps are emerging repeatedly. Often framed as unease rather than overt problems, but requiring attention nonetheless.
1. Strategic Commercial Acumen Beyond Production Excellence
Historically, produce executive leadership prioritised deep agricultural expertise, strong industry relationships, and operational excellence in growing, packing or distribution. These remain essential. But they are no longer sufficient on their own.
Boards are increasingly recognising that future skills for agriculture leaders must include broader commercial judgement. Many current executives were never required to develop this level of enterprise-wide accountability earlier in their careers.
Leaders are now expected to:
• Read and act on complex financial signals
• Balance short-term margin decisions with long-term value creation
• Translate commercial trade-offs clearly to investors and stakeholders
• Make strategic decisions outside their original functional discipline
This is where leadership can stall. Not through lack of intelligence or commitment, but through limited exposure to commercial responsibility at scale.
2. People Leadership at Scale
Fresh produce has traditionally promoted strong individual performers. Leaders who know the business, the product and the pressure.
What has changed is the scale and visibility of people leadership.
Boards are now looking for leaders who can:
• Build leadership benches, not just teams
• Hold difficult conversations early and clearly
• Lead through ambiguity without constant escalation
• Create trust across cultures, regions and generations
These are not “soft skills”. They are operational capabilities. Boards are increasingly aware that weak people leadership creates organisational drag long before it appears in financial results.
3. Strategic Judgement Under Sustained Uncertainty
The pace of change is not slowing.
Geopolitical risk. Climate volatility. Supply-chain disruption. Shifting consumer expectations. Regulatory pressure.
What boards are watching most closely is not whether leaders have all the answers, but how they think when answers are incomplete.
Strong future-ready agriculture leaders demonstrate:
• Structured thinking under pressure
• Comfort making decisions with imperfect data
• The ability to challenge assumptions without destabilising teams
• A clear line of sight between strategy and execution
Where this capability is underdeveloped, boards often observe hesitation, reactive decision-making, or over-reliance on external advisers.
What “Ready” Actually Looks Like in Practice
Leadership readiness in fresh produce for 2026 is about breadth, combined with the capacity to learn quickly.
Ready leaders tend to show:
• Sound judgement in complex, high-pressure situations
• Clear, commercially grounded reasoning
• The ability to lead peers, not just direct reports
• Confidence operating at board level without defensiveness
• A learning mindset that does not rely on past success
Crucially, readiness is contextual. A leader can perform exceptionally in one environment and feel stretched in another. Boards that recognise this early retain far more options.
How Boards Can Assess Readiness Before It’s Too Late
Many boards still assess leadership readiness reactively. During a crisis. After an unexpected departure. Or once performance has already deteriorated.
By then, options are limited and costly.
More forward-thinking boards are taking a deliberate approach, evaluating produce executive leadership capability against future requirements rather than past success.
This begins with honest capability mapping. What does the leadership team demonstrably do well, and where are the genuine gaps when measured against strategic demands? Not potential or intent, but observable capability.
External calibration is essential. Internal assessment alone creates blind spots. How do your leaders compare with best-in-class talent in adjacent sectors? What capabilities exist in the wider market that your organisation does not currently possess?
Scenario testing also matters. Place leaders into realistic future challenges. Could they lead a major acquisition integration? Navigate a material sustainability shift? Present strategy credibly to a new investor group? Readiness becomes visible under pressure.
Finally, boards must examine succession depth. For each critical role, who is genuinely ready now? Who could be ready with targeted development? Where is the organisation overly dependent on individuals without viable successors?
The Cost of Waiting
The boards experiencing the most anxiety are often those who identified leadership capability gaps a year ago and assumed time alone would resolve them.
Leadership readiness does not improve through hope. It improves through deliberate assessment, honest conversations, targeted development, and, where necessary, decisive hiring.
Fresh produce operates on biological timelines that reward patience. Leadership development, paradoxically, requires urgency. The executive capability you need in 2027 must start forming today. The gap you can sense now will widen quickly if left unaddressed.
Sanity-Check Leadership Capability Before the Year Unfolds
If you are a board director, chair or CEO in fresh produce and recognise elements of your own leadership team here, you are not alone. And you are not too late.
But you are at a decision point.
Before the complexity of 2026 fully unfolds, while strategic flexibility still exists, it is worth asking the harder questions about leadership readiness. Not in abstract terms, but specifically. Do we have the capabilities our strategy requires? Where are we exposed? What would readiness actually look like in practice?
If you would value a confidential conversation about leadership readiness in your business, this is exactly the moment to have it. Sometimes the most valuable thing a board can do is pressure-test assumptions before they become constraints.
