Saudi Arabia’s agricultural sector is transforming at a pace unmatched in its history. Vision 2030 has elevated food security, water efficiency, and agtech adoption to national priorities. Capital is flowing, new technologies are entering the market, government programmes are reshaping incentives, and critical self-sufficiency gaps are being addressed, particularly in aquaculture, poultry and red meat.
Yet despite this progress, one truth continues to surface in our consulting work within the Kingdom. Strategic planning remains critically underdeveloped in Saudi Arabia’s agricultural sector, with many agribusinesses lacking the strategy planning and execution expertise required to compete in a modern, data‑driven, and efficiency‑focused economy.
Saudi agriculture stands at a strategic inflection point. Vision 2030 demands agricultural transformation, but that transformation has outpaced internal systems, talent, and strategic maturity. With the state underwriting risks, setting prices, and directing capital, agribusinesses have not needed to build their own independent strategic planning muscles.
The inevitable outcome of this has been a generation of businesses that have built strong operational capabilities but limited strategic planning capabilities. Unless agribusinesses address these gaps, they will likely struggle to convert investment into sustainable performance.
Below, we outline the three areas where the strategy development process frequently falters for food and agribusinesses: strategy understanding, strategic planning, and strategy execution. We also highlight how Farrelly Mitchell can help close these gaps and build strategy execution capability.
Understanding strategy: The conceptual gap
The core of the problem is that strategy is widely misunderstood as a budget plan, government compliance document, or list of operational targets rather than as a set of deliberate choices about where to compete and how to win.
Across the agribusiness sector, “strategy” is often treated as a slogan or ambition rather than a discipline. Consequently, we see some companies investing resources in activities that feel strategic but in fact deliver little by way of competitive differentiation.
Agribusinesses frequently declare that their strategy is to “expand production”, “increase exports” or “adopt new technologies”. But these are outcomes, not strategies. A real strategy requires clarity on where to play (segments, geographies, customer types), how to win (cost, differentiation, technology, quality, speed) and what capabilities are required (water efficiency, genetics, cold chain, digital systems).
Similarly, many agricultural companies conflate day-to-day operational goals with genuine long-term strategic positioning, often assuming that strong operational performance will, in time, deliver strategic outcomes on its own.
Strategy development is not grounded in data
Limited analysis of competitors, market dynamics, value chain positioning, and other key strategic inputs compounds the above challenges. In the absence of an evidence base, strategy becomes intuition-driven rather than performance-driven. Companies default to mimicking their peers, which ultimately leads to commoditisation and margin erosion.
The same evidence gap shows up on the measurement side. In many Saudi agribusinesses, KPIs track operational objectives, like production volumes, sales, and basic financials, but rarely capture the more strategic metrics that signal genuine competitive progress, such as water productivity, cost-to-serve, customer retention, asset and technology utilisation, process efficiency, or customer profitability. Without these strategic indicators, even a well-formulated strategy can drift, and an organisation can end up retreating into day-to-day operational concerns. Leaders, in turn, often prioritise immediate ‘plug-and-play’ solutions over long-term strategic investments.
Strategic planning: Fragmented, siloed, and reactive
Even when agricultural companies do attempt structured strategic planning, the process is often treated as a reactive exercise rather than a proactive discipline, and the activity itself is not anchored in any coherent organisational framework. Instead, companies respond to government mandates rather than develop forward-looking, scenario-based plans. As a result, many companies only turn to strategic planning when a crisis emerges, a bank requests a business plan, or a government program requires documentation. This reactive approach reflects an absence of long-term directional thinking and stunts the long‑term capability that strategic maturity requires. The lack of scenario planning is particularly alarming given the sector’s exposure to commodity price swings, policy change, climate risk, and water constraints.
No integrated strategic planning framework
Few agricultural companies follow a disciplined annual or multi-year strategic planning cycle with defined inputs, outputs, and governance. Without structured systems or accountability mechanisms to translate plans into results, a familiar set of issues emerges. Operational planning cycles focus on maintaining the status quo rather than advancing it, strategic objectives do not cascade to function-level management, and departments become siloed and misaligned.
At the same time, strategic planning activities are mostly confined to senior leadership and seldom extend into operational departments. This, in turn, creates an absence of cross-functional ownership, which leads to more siloed planning, where each function works to its own priorities rather than to a shared strategic direction. The result is fragmented plans that do not reinforce each other or align with the company’s intended strategy.
Vendor-driven decision-making
Resource allocation, too, is often disconnected from strategy. In many cases, technology, feed, and equipment providers inadvertently shape strategic direction, producing capex-heavy commitments and technology adoption without ROI analysis or operational readiness.
Time and again investment decisions are driven by persuasive vendors and short-term opportunities rather than strategic logic. Consequently, capital, talent, and technology investments accumulate without a unifying rationale, each acquired on its own merits rather than against a shared set of priorities. As a result, many Saudi Arabian agricultural businesses are saddled with expensive assets but no strategy to guide them.
Strategy execution: Where ambition meets reality
Inevitably, all of the issues outlined above eventually surface at the strategy execution stage and so this is where many Saudi agribusinesses falter. A strategy that is conceptually unclear, disconnected from data, or fragmented across functions will inevitably struggle to translate into results, no matter how capable the organisation runs day-to-day.
Strategies often fail here, not because they are wrong but because the governance structures and internal capabilities needed to execute them are either not present or are too nascent.
On the capability side, four capability gaps tend to recur (particularly at the middle-management level): limited analytical skills, thin financial literacy outside the finance function, uneven exposure to the strategic planning process, and weak cross-functional communication. It is important to note, however, that these gaps are structural, not individual. They are a product of businesses that modernise faster than their internal capabilities allow.
Governance structures are similarly underdeveloped. Often there is little or no formal strategic review cadence in place, and so, in the absence of quarterly or annual strategy reviews, there is no way to assess progress and hold departments to account. Instead, performance management bears little or no connection to strategy, with short-term focus on individual OKRs and MBOs targeting operational effectiveness and missing the bigger strategic picture.
How Farrelly Mitchell helps Saudi agribusinesses close these gaps
Farrelly Mitchell’s food and agribusiness consultants offer a combination that is rare in the region: global agrifood expertise, deep operational understanding and extensive regional experience. This allows us to support clients at every stage of strategy development, from building strategic literacy within the leadership team through to formulation, planning, and execution.
Strategy development
Our strategy development is evidence-based, drawing on market intelligence, competitor and product benchmarking, feasibility studies, financial modelling and scenario planning. The result is a realistic, data-driven, and investment-ready strategy.
Strategic planning systems
Beyond the strategy itself, we help companies build the systems that make it work. That includes annual strategic planning reviews, strategy maps and balanced scorecards, KPI frameworks, operating models, governance structures and cross-functional planning processes. Combined, these systems carry the strategy into every function, institutionalising the discipline required for effective strategy execution.
Strategy execution and delivery
We support effective execution by developing implementation roadmaps, operational dashboards and monthly strategy execution performance review systems so progress is tracked against measurable targets.
This is usually complemented by the creation of dedicated internal PMO or OSM functions and further reinforced by our strategy-execution capability-building programs, which provide tailored planning, coaching, and facilitation training for senior leaders as well as financial literacy training for non-finance managers. Together these programmes and systems build the internal muscle companies need to develop and execute their strategy and sustain performance over the long term.
Few companies have all the strategic development, planning and execution elements in place today, but the foundations can be built relatively quickly with the right partner and the right discipline.
At Farrelly Mitchell, we understand that Saudi Arabia’s agricultural sector is full of opportunity, but also full of complexity. From regulatory shifts and funding architecture to water constraints and value chain gaps, we know the terrain, and we know that turning opportunity into lasting performance requires the right blend of strategic discipline, sector expertise, and on-the-ground execution. Our strategy execution consultants understand strategy deeply, plan systematically and execute rigorously. We know how to build internal capability that aligns with Vision 2030, and create planning and performance systems that rely on data, not intuition. Our wide range of services include strategy development, market research, supply chain optimisation, brand positioning, market entry and regulatory guidance. To discover how we can help you build the right strategy for your organisation contact us today.
