The world is hungry for resilience

Pulses are a valuable protein diversification tool that can deliver for people and the planet.

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Dry beans, lentils, peas, and chickpeas are among the oldest food security technologies we have: affordable, nutrient-dense, shelf-stable, and endlessly adaptable. In an era defined by supply chain shocks, climate extremes, and economic uncertainty, the quiet strengths of these crops are becoming even more apparent.

For many farmers, this isn’t a new realization as much as a long-standing practice. As Denis Tremorin, Director of Sustainability at Pulse Canada, puts it:

“Canadian growers have been using pulses to maintain soil health and resilience on their farms for generations. Pulses diversify their rotations, making them more resilient to climate change and weather shocks, and improve productivity by increasing yields, contributing to both agronomic and economic resilience.”

What’s slowly shifting is the scale of that impact. Pulses are increasingly becoming a backbone ingredient for a new era of protein—one where agriculture and climate resilience aren’t separate conversations, but part of the same strategy.

That’s where alternative proteins come in. By diversifying our protein supply—across plants, fermentation, and cultivated approaches—we reduce pressure on land and water and spread risk across supply chains. The logic is simple: diversification builds resilience.

Pulses fit this perfectly. They’ve always been resilient—nutritionally, culturally, and agriculturally—but they’ve been underused in a food system built around a narrow set of commodities and protein sources.

This is a story about how alternative proteins can help solve modern-day challenges. Not by replacing beans, but by scaling their numerous benefits across entire supply chains. If we’re serious about food security, we need to realize the full potential of this humble ingredient. Pulses aren’t a side dish; they’re foundational for strengthening our food supply for people and the planet.

Pulses are nutrition powerhouses

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For most of human history, pulses weren’t a niche health food or a sustainability talking point. They were simply staples. From lentils in South Asia, beans in the Americas, chickpeas in the Mediterranean, and cowpeas across Africa, pulses reliably met nutritional needs across climates and cultures long before modern supply chains.

That’s part of why organizations like the FAO continue to point to pulses as strategic crops for the future of food systems—they’re not only environmentally efficient, but they deliver real nutritional value in forms people already know how to use. When food systems are under pressure, the most valuable foods are often the ones that combine nourishment with practicality.

Here’s what makes pulses so important for human health and nutrition security.

Dense nutrition at a low cost

Pulses are rich in protein, fiber, and key micronutrients like iron, potassium, magnesium, zinc, and folate, making them especially valuable in places where diets are protein-limited or where animal-source foods are expensive, unreliable, or culturally inaccessible. They’ve long played this role in traditional diets, offering a dependable source of nourishment that doesn’t depend on refrigeration, daily market access, or high input costs. FAO’s nutrition guidance highlights pulses as foods that support healthier diets while fitting easily into low-cost, familiar cooking methods.

Fiber: the nutrient we chronically under-eat

In many high-income countries, fiber intake falls well below recommended levels, with consequences for gut health and metabolic disease. Pulses are one of the simplest ways to close that gap. They deliver substantial fiber in everyday portions, without requiring supplements or specialized products—just regular meals built around beans, lentils, or peas.

Shelf-stable protein is shock-resistant protein

Fresh food is often the first thing disrupted by transport delays, power outages, or sudden price spikes. Pulses are different. They can sit in warehouses, food aid stocks, and household pantries for months without losing their nutritional value. That durability makes them especially important during disruptions—whether it’s a household dealing with job loss or a region facing climate shocks, conflict, or a public health emergency.

A flexible protein format

Pulses aren’t limited to one role on the plate. They can be eaten whole, split, or mashed; milled into flour; concentrated into protein ingredients; or used as the base for meals across cuisines. That flexibility matters when the goal is to improve nutrition at scale. Foods that succeed widely need to be adaptable to different tastes, traditions, and levels of time and access.

Put simply, pulses are one of the rare foods that check multiple boxes at once: they’re nutritious, affordable, culturally familiar, and resilient in the face of disruption. That combination is exactly what a more secure food system needs.

Pulses as a climate solution

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In climate and environmental conversations, carbon often takes center stage. We talk about emissions, offsets, and targets—but far less about the living system that holds much of that carbon in place: soil.

Healthy soil is a dynamic, living ecosystem—one that quietly determines whether farms can withstand droughts, absorb heavy rainfall, and keep producing food under changing conditions. If you look closely, down at the level of roots and microbes, healthy soil starts to resemble a functioning city. Carbon moves through the system as energy. Microbes do much of the labor. Plant roots provide structure and connection.

Much of modern agriculture, however, treats soil less like a living system and more like a substrate to extract from. Globally, around 30 percent of the world’s soils are moderately to highly degraded—from erosion, nutrient mining, compaction, salinity, contamination, and the loss of organic matter and biodiversity. Over time, this approach breaks down the very processes that keep soils productive. The result is a slow, often invisible form of degradation—one that makes farms more dependent on external inputs and more vulnerable to climate stress.

This is where pulses come in.

Agronomists tend to like pulses not because they do one thing well, but because they do several things at once. They feed people. They support soil biology. And they help stabilize farming systems that are under increasing pressure from climate variability. Here are a few of the ways pulses contribute to healthier soils and more climate-resilient agriculture.

They fix their own nitrogen—so the soil doesn’t pay the price

One of the most immediate benefits of pulses shows up in how they handle nitrogen—a point farmers feel directly when input prices rise. As Shaun Dyrland of Viking Acres, Inc., Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, and Pulse Canada stated in our recent webinar series on Pulses:

“Fertilizer costs are extremely high right now, which makes the nitrogen-fixing ability of pulses especially valuable. They supply their own nitrogen and enhance the nutrient availability for the crop that follows.”

That advantage comes from pulses’ partnership with soil bacteria. Through symbiotic relationships in their root nodules, pulses fix nitrogen from the air and convert it into forms plants can use. This biological nitrogen reduces the need for synthetic fertilizer in the pulse crop itself and often leaves residual benefits for the crops that follow.

When pulses are part of a rotation, research consistently shows a more efficient use of nitrogen across the system—often translating into higher yields for subsequent crops, like wheat, and lower nitrous oxide emissions compared to fertilizer-heavy systems. Biological nitrogen fixation isn’t a universal substitute for all fertilizer use, but it is a meaningful lever for cutting both environmental impacts and farmers’ exposure to volatile input costs.

They diversify rotations and support biodiversity

Many of the world’s grain belts are locked into simple rotations like corn–soy or wheat–fallow. These rotations lack diversity and resilience when it comes to pests and diseases, precipitation, and the economic resilience of farms.

Soil microbial diversity is particularly impacted by pulses in crop rotations, as pulse roots produce compounds that feed soil microbes and benefit soil health. These healthier soil microbial communities help mobilize phosphorus and other micronutrients, and also help to ‘crowd out’ disease-causing bacteria and fungi, making for healthier plants throughout a crop rotation.

Some pulse crops also work beautifully as cover crops, offering dense ground cover that protects soil from erosion and suppresses weeds.

They are climate tough (within reason)

Pulses tend to perform well under low-input, rainfed conditions. Many varieties are relatively resilient to heat and water stress compared to high-yield cereals, making them important allies in increasingly variable climates. Pulses also improve the drought resilience of whole cropping systems by using less water than other crops. This benefit becomes really valuable in areas of the world where irrigation is not available, and rainfall is unpredictable (like the Great Plains and Prairies of North America). Pulses tend to mature and stop using water when other crops are still green, therefore leaving more water in the ground for next year’s crop. Farmers use pulses in this way to reduce the risk of drought for their whole crop rotation.

Those agronomic benefits are increasingly being backed by more rigorous data. As Denis Tremorin, Director of Sustainability at Pulse Canada, explains:

“To capture the environmental outcomes of pulses, we have invested in developing life cycle assessments for Canadian peas, lentils, dry beans, and faba beans, measuring a range of environmental indicators that provide companies with transparent farm-based data to make informed sustainability decisions.”

That kind of measurement matters because it helps translate on-farm experience into information that food companies, policymakers, and investors can actually use—linking crop choice to environmental outcomes in a credible way.

None of this means pulses are invincible. They have their own sensitivities and require careful management. But they are inherently aligned with low-input, diversified systems, and both research and farmer experience consistently show that including pulses improves the overall productivity and resilience of entire crop rotations.

How plant-based meat can unlock the full potential of pulses

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Plant-based foods succeed when they meet people where they already are: busy, budget-conscious, and accustomed to certain formats and flavors. A bag of dried beans may be nutritionally powerful and cost-effective, but for many households, it still represents time, planning, and culinary confidence they don’t always have.

On the other hand, a familiar plant-based chicken patty or nugget made with pea protein, fava flour, or chickpea ingredients delivers pulse-derived nutrition through formats people already know how to buy, cook, and enjoy.

This is a quieter but important role plant-based meat can play in supporting public health and food security: by embedding high-quality, fiber-rich plant proteins into the convenience foods people already rely on, rather than asking entire populations to fundamentally change how they eat.

Making pulses even tastier at scale

Taste and texture are important characters in the pulse story. GFI’s technical analyses of the plant-based sector consistently point to sensory performance as a primary driver of adoption, and pulse ingredients present some functional limitations in certain applications.

The upside is that these challenges are exactly what alternative protein R&D is designed to solve. The plant-based category depends on getting flavor, mouthfeel, and cooking performance right. That pressure has helped concentrate investment and expertise around pulse processing techniques: improved fractionation methods, fermentation, formulation strategies, and approaches that reduce off-flavors while enhancing functionality.

What emerges from this work is a broader toolbox for making pulse-based foods more appealing across the food system—whether they show up as whole foods, blended products, or ingredients in everyday meals. In other words, plant-based meat doesn’t just use pulses. They help make pulses work better for everyone.

Stable demand changes what farmers can grow

Food systems are shaped by markets as much as by agronomy. Farmers can’t redesign rotations or take on new crops unless they have confidence that demand will remain strong next year and the year after. Without stable markets, even crops that make agronomic and environmental sense can feel like a gamble.

That’s why recent shifts in pulse demand matter. As Tim McGreevy of USA Pulses and Global Pulse Confederation recently pointed out, pulse crops have been one of the few bright spots in recent growing seasons:

“In the spring of 2025, pulse crops were a very popular choice — peas, lentils, chickpeas — and acreage increased. In North America, they were one of the few crops showing a positive return.

We’re turning them into flours and protein products. There’s a large and growing market for plant-based protein, as well as for pulse-based flours, pastas, and other products. For peas in particular, we’re seeing a lot going into the ingredient market. Most processors and fractionators — those producing protein, starch, and fiber — are now paying a small protein premium. Every good farmer thinks it should be higher, but it’s a start.”

What’s important here isn’t just higher acreage—it’s the signal behind it. As ingredient markets begin to reward protein content, that signal travels upstream. Breeding programs respond. Processing capacity follows. For peas—and increasingly for other pulses—protein is becoming the organizing principle, reshaping what farmers plant and how those crops fit into rotations.

When demand is reliable, pulses can do more than pencil out economically. They can anchor entire farming systems. As Paul Kanning of USA Pulses describes in our recent webinar series:

“Having pulses in our rotation supports the farm’s financial health because it allows me to diversify markets and reduces our vulnerability to volatility in any one sector. From a community sustainability standpoint, pulses have also been incredibly beneficial. As pulse production expanded across the Northern Plains, it brought an entire industry with it. Processors established operations in small rural towns, creating jobs and driving local economic investment. So from a sustainability perspective, pulses have been extremely valuable.”

Taken together, these perspectives show how stable demand reshapes agriculture—not just at the field level, but across regions. More consistent contracting, investment in processing infrastructure, and support for breeding and agronomic research don’t just benefit pulse growers. They make cropping systems more flexible and less brittle overall, which is exactly what food security depends on.

Building a resilient protein portfolio

At GFI, we believe there is no single “best” plant protein. Different applications require different attributes: nutrition, functionality, price stability, and regional availability. We understand that the future of protein revolves around portfolios, not a single silver bullet.

From a food security perspective, this portfolio logic is essential. Systems built around a narrow set of crops are more vulnerable to regional droughts, disease outbreaks, trade disruptions, and sudden spikes in fertilizer or energy prices. A system that draws from a wide range of pulses, such as peas, lentils, chickpeas, fava beans, dry beans, mung beans, and others, can adapt. It can shift sourcing, reformulate products, and respond to shocks without breaking.

Pulses are one way we build that flexibility into the protein system. Plant-based meat is among the most powerful ways to scale it.

How do we put pulses on the map?

If pulses are so nutritionally powerful and environmentally valuable—and if plant-based meat can extend their reach—it’s fair to ask why they still play such a small role in many modern diets.

The answer isn’t a lack of evidence. It’s the friction between what’s possible and what’s practical.

Food systems rarely change on the strength of good arguments alone. They change when incentives, infrastructure, and everyday habits line up. Much of our work across plant-based foods and agricultural transitions points to the same conclusion: technical feasibility is only the first step. Scaling requires solving for taste, price, and reliability at the same time.

Convenience is one piece of that puzzle, but it’s not the whole story. Plant-based foods have made pulses easier to access by translating them into familiar formats—burgers, nuggets, ready-to-eat meals—but ease only matters if people actually want to buy the product again. And that’s where the category still has work to do.

Taste remains a real constraint. Despite progress, many plant-based products still struggle with off-flavors, inconsistent textures, or cooking performance that doesn’t quite meet expectations. These aren’t superficial issues; they’re central to whether pulse-based foods can move beyond early adopters. GFI’s technical analyses are clear-eyed on this point: continued investment in ingredient processing, fermentation, and formulation is necessary if pulses are to perform well across a wide range of products, not just a few standout successes.

Price is the other major barrier that must be overcome. While pulses themselves are among the most affordable sources of protein, the products built from them often aren’t—at least not yet. Processing costs, smaller-scale manufacturing, and fragmented supply chains still put many plant-based foods at a premium compared to conventional options. Our research consistently shows that cost parity is a major determinant of consumer adoption, especially for households that are most sensitive to food prices.

That tension shows up clearly on the supply side. As John Manuel, VP of Commercial Operations and Merchandising at PURIS, put it during our recent webinar series, pulse markets have been under real pressure.

“A significant portion that once went to export has essentially been cut off due to current geopolitical risks. Export markets can be fickle, which is why we’re focused on building a strong domestic ingredient market for plant-based protein.”

The strategy, he explained, is to build a robust domestic ingredient market for plant-based protein anchored in foods people genuinely enjoy eating. There’s a reason that emphasis keeps coming back to taste and innovation. As Manuel also noted, consumer interest in protein is growing, and pulse protein can be an affordable, allergen-friendly option.

This only works if the products deliver on experience. Growing those end markets is what makes it possible to create stable, domestic demand for pulses and pulse protein, rather than relying on fickle export markets.

And then there’s the farmer side of the equation. Pulses often make agronomic sense, but volatile prices and yields can still make them a risky choice. New protein markets could help stabilize demand and diversify farm income. That doesn’t happen automatically. It depends on things like long-term contracts, insurance that actually works for pulse crops, and continued research into climate resilience and pest management. Without those supports, pulses remain an option, but not always a safe one.

Putting pulses on the map isn’t about optimism or inevitability. It’s about doing the work on taste, price, infrastructure, and market design to make them truly viable at scale. Pulses already have many of the qualities a more secure food system needs. The harder part is building the conditions that allow those qualities to shine.

That realism matters because food security isn’t tested in easy moments. It’s tested when prices spike, harvests fail in one region and ripple outward, and households have fewer choices rather than more. Foods that are technically sustainable but too expensive or unfamiliar don’t offer much protection. If pulse-based and plant-based foods can’t compete on taste and price, they stay optional—and optional foods don’t stabilize food systems under stress.

Pulses as a blueprint for a more secure food system

This story goes beyond “eating more beans.” It’s about how we grow food, how we use land, and how we align food security, climate resilience, farmer livelihoods, and protein innovation instead of pitting them against one another.

Pulses are not a futuristic technology—they’re older than most countries. They are what humans have always turned to when systems get tight. In a century defined by repeated stress tests from climate, conflict, public health, and economic volatility, pulses can serve as a blueprint.

Alternative proteins are not a rejection of traditional foods–they are a way of translating the most resilient crops into the formats that fit into modern life: quick meals, familiar textures, and dependable supply.

Diversifying protein production builds resilience and reduces risk across supply chains. Pulses are one of the best ways to do that because they strengthen diets, strengthen farms, and strengthen the system.

The next time you see a bag of lentils, you could see it as dinner.

Or you could see it as infrastructure.

And if we’re smart—if we build the markets, the processing, the products, and the culture—those two meanings can finally become the same thing.