If food producers aren’t paying attention to the ageing of our population, it’s about time they did. Most conversations about food demand start with a simple sum: more people means more mouths to feed.

But there’s a number hiding underneath population growth that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime, and that’s the average age of that population.

By 2050, the number of people worldwide aged 65 and over is expected to more than double, from 761 million in 2021 to 1.6 billion.

That’s not a rounding error in a UN report. It’s a fundamental reshuffling of who the global consumer actually is.

Everyone knows children need protein to grow. Fewer people realise the extent to which the other end of the age spectrum needs it; just for a different reason.

Older adults need more protein per kilogram of body weight than someone in their 30s, not to build anything new, but to hang onto what they’ve already got.

The numbers back this up. Under Australia’s nutrient reference values, a man in his 20s or 30s needs around 64 grams of protein a day. 

Past age 70, that jumps to 81 grams. Women go from 46 grams per day to 57 grams per day. Muscle, strength, immune function, all of it erodes with age unless protein intake keeps pace, and the official guidelines already say as much.

Scale that up. Apply that same gap across the projected 1.6 billion people aged 65 and over by 2050 and it works out to roughly an extra 8 million tonnes of protein required each year, just from the shift in individual need as the population ages.

That’s before population growth or rising incomes add a single extra person to the table. It’s a rough estimate rather than a precise figure, but it gives a sense of the scale involved.

The usual protein story is an income story: get richer, eat more meat and dairy. While that’s still true and drives much of the growth across Asia, ageing is a second engine bolted onto the same trend: one that keeps running even where population growth has stalled or gone backwards. 

A shrinking, greying population can still be a growing protein market. On a per-person basis, it might need more, not less.

This isn’t just a livestock story. Beef, lamb, pork, poultry, dairy and eggs are the obvious categories, but grain growers are in it through feed demand, pulse growers through plant protein, and oilseed producers through meal markets. Processors, exporters, retailers: nobody in that chain sits this one out.

None of it happens automatically, of course. Older consumers still need the income to act on it, the access to buy it, and often the advice to prioritise it. 

Cost-of-living pressure could cap how much high-quality protein makes it onto the plate, even as health systems push the other way, encouraging protein intake as part of healthy ageing policy.

Supply, currency, trade access and consumer taste still decide where prices land in any given year. What’s changed is that there’s now a slow structural current running beneath the usual cycles, and it’s pushing in one direction.

Australia is well placed here. We already export significant volumes of high-quality protein to markets ageing faster than almost anywhere else: Japan, South Korea and increasingly China, with South-East Asia not far behind.

These aren’t buyers chasing calories any more. As they age, they’ll care more about nutrition, safety and consistency, and that shift in what they value matters as much as how much they buy.

Population growth, rising incomes, urbanisation and food security are all good arguments in favour of protein. Ageing is simply the one that doesn’t get enough credit, and it’s backed by numbers.

The next food challenge isn’t just feeding more people. It’s feeding the older ones. And older bodies need more protein, not less.

• Andrew Whitelaw is co-founder and director of Episode 3 (EP3)