Food Futures Lab
Who We Are
IFTF's Food Futures Lab is a multidisciplinary team of researchers, designers, and strategists who all share a deep passion for creating a more sustainable, healthy, equitable, and humane future of food. With experience in startups, academia, design, philanthropy, agriculture, and the food service industry, we are highly-networked food futurists who craft and tell stories across many mediums—pages, packages, stages, and even dining room tables—to inspire change.
What We Do
We scan the global horizon to understand how change is unfolding and synthesize complexity into coherent and actionable visions of what’s possible.
We deliver strategic foresight to stakeholders across the global food value chain, taking a systems lens to the urgent challenges our global food system faces.
We teach tools for futures thinking, methods honed over fifty years at the Institute for the Future, to those around the world who use food as a medium for innovation—brands, startups, farmers, foundations, and engaged eaters.
We offer trusted advice to NGOs and changemakers in the public and private sectors who are working to create transformational change.
We provoke insights about the future through dynamic keynote addresses, immersive design, edible experiences, and visual storytelling.
Public Research
Media
9 Experts Predict What the Future of Food Will Look Like in EatingWell
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods burgers could change the way we think about masculinity in Quartz
Healthy People, Healthy Planet: Linking Nutrition And Sustainability Through Food Choices in Forbes
Why your chicken wings mean we’ve entered a new epoch in The Guardian
Designing for Resilient Futures in Food+Tech Connect's Biodiversity editorial series
In 2069, Your Food Will Shop for You OneZero by Medium
Mentor Series: Sarah Smith, On Creating Multiple Food Futures for Food Future Co
Six Artifacts
from the Future of Food in Fast Company
The simple change you can make
to stop wasting food in Quartz
Kitchen of the Future: Smart and Fast but Not Much Fun in The New York Times
Three strategies for
designing kitchens of the future in MOLD
Imagine a better future of food now-
or be shocked by what we get in Fast Company
Hear Us Speak
Foresight Talk: Futures and Forests—Strategic Foresight at the U.S. Forest Service by Sarah Smith
Foresight Talk: Nestlé's Global Consumer Insight & Market Intelligence by Max Elder
[Podcast] Max Elder is interviewed for the Yale Sustainable Food Program's podcast "Chewing the Fat" for the episode "Wasted: Untold Stories of Food Waste." (9/13/19)
[Video] Max Elder gives a talk on designing trust into cultured meat products at the Cultured Meat Symposium 2018
[Video] Quinault Childs gives a talk on "Why anyone who eats needs science fiction" at TEDxSan Luis Obispo
[Video] Rebecca Chesney on Imagining a Smart Kitchen Future at 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit
[Podcast] Max Elder on The Climate Change Diet on Why We Eat What We Eat
[Podcast] Ep. 33: From Steak to Insects – The Future of Food – with guest Max Elder
[Television] Rebecca Chesney on CNN Technology—Cooking dinner when your kitchen thinks for itself
Current and Past Partners
Positioned at the center of Silicon Valley, California’s agricultural powerhouses, and the Bay Area’s dynamic food culture, IFTF's Food Futures Lab is embedded in an epicenter of food innovation and has ties to other innovation hubs in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Some of our partners, both present and former, include:
- AB InBev
- Air Liquide
- Barilla
- Beam Global Spirits
- Big Heart Pet Brands
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- Campbell's Soup Company
- Coca Cola
- General Mills
- Givaudan
- Hershey's
- Ingredion
- Institute of Food Technologists
- MARS
- MLA Donor Company
- National Restaurant Association
- Nestlé
- Newman's Own Foundation
- PepsiCo
- Sanitarium Health & Wellbeing Company
- Syngenta
- Tetra Pak
- The University of California, Davis
- The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia: UNIMORE
Foresight for Global Food Innovators
In addition to our research and projects with food brands, we catalyze long-term futures thinking across a global network of food innovators to help expand their impact. Our foresight inspires people around the world to build new solutions for urgent food futures.
- We shaped challenges at the Food Hackathon: Nutrition for All, and designed Rethink Food to Remake the World, an ideation framework for the Bimbimbap Hackathon.
- IFTF taught a "Thinking Like a Food Futurist" master class to students and young entrepreneurs at the 2017 global Thought for Food Summit, held in Amsterdam.
- We partnered with Meat and Livestock Australia's Young Value Chain Innovators program to create a three-day Future Food Experiences design workshop with farmers and food technologists from across the region.
Contact us at [email protected] to learn more about our special projects and how to collaborate with us.
Partner with us Today!
The Food Futures Lab is supported in part by IFTF’s Vantage partnership—a circle of future-smart organizations that think strategically about near-term choices to reshape the long-term future. IFTF Vantage draws on a half century of futures research from our labs focusing on society and technology, the economy and the environment, food and health. Its goal is to create the perspectives and expert viewpoints, the signals and the data, to make sense out of disruptive forces in the present. Grounded in a framework of Foresight-Insight-Action, the IFTF Vantage partnership invests in critical research, boundary-stretching conversations, and strategic experiments that will shape the business, social, and civil landscapes of tomorrow.
The Food Futures Lab conducts custom research, immersive experiences, and collaborative visioning workshops for organizations across the global food supply chain. For more information about working with us, contact:
John Clamme | [email protected]
Food Futures Lab | [email protected]