Institute For The Future

The Future of Food in the New Operating Environment

In an unintentionally absurd turn of events, consumers in 2020 were surprised to find a bag of grapes that arrived in stores, with an end user license agreement printed on the package that would have been at home in a stringent legal document. The producers had a rational reason for including it (they wanted to retain ownership of their proprietary grape varietal), but it came across as oddly out of place. This incident nicely exemplifies the rapid and sometimes-jarring challenges that food companies are tackling as they grow into the emerging operating environment of the 2020s.

IFTF’s recent Ten Year Forecast laid out a set of transition areas that will define the future operating environment that will take shape over the next ten years. But what do those transition areas look like specifically in the food system? After this year’s conference, a group of food systems experts and futurists got together to discuss how profound shifts in our constructs of evidence, ownership, privacy, meaning, belonging, equity, and collaboration may influence the global food system. The conversation included experts Lauren Abda of Branchfood, Ziyan Hossain and Calla Lee of Method Collective, and Sarah Nolet of Agthentic.

Evidence: too much information, not enough sensemaking

The future of evidence will be shaped by new tools for quantification and measurement that add data to the ecosystem, while at the same time eroding our ability to create a shared sense of information and understanding. As more data comes in from new stakeholders across supply chains (on the farm, in logistics, at the grocery store, etc.), it may create an environment of overwhelming information without clarity as to who takes on the risk and responsibility for making decisions from that information.

For instance, regulations in agricultural commodities - like grains - mean that there can be an imbalance between those who buy goods and those who have critical information about them. Soon, technologies like those developed by Hone Ag, who give farmers the tools to test their grains in new levels of granularity, will shift the control and origin of evidence across the value chain. This won’t necessarily be a simple shift; it will upend the assumptions around who gets access to what information, which may lead to a chaotic paradigm change.

The Vantage 2021 research coined the term “crimes of foresight” to describe the future phenomenon of having the ability to predict and monitor risks, and then neglecting to act upon that information. Crimes of foresight could manifest in industries like cannabis testing, where processes for removing toxins can lower the quality of the product. In that future, testing and processing creates business risk for those who do it. When means of measurement are available to more people, it may become harder to manage that risk. In restaurants and grocery, sensor networks that allow us to identify point sources of an e.coli outbreak in produce, for example, shifts the nature of the problem from systemic to individual - and creates the risk for individual producers to become responsible in ways they never were before.

 

Ownership: retaining control over intangible assets

In a world where physical objects and data are increasingly intertwined, ownership—and the rights it entails—will experience drastic shifts. Broadly, we’ll see the emergence of new ownership models and more fluid ideas around what ownership means. This could have varying implications on food systems. As climate change effects drive new models like precompetitive collaboration, ideas around who owns what parts of food innovation might become trickier to navigate.

At the level of the individual eater, we may see machines with (previously) production-level capabilities move into the home: innovations in 3D printers, for example, will mean that the home cook could create brand-identical products by following digitally-distributed recipes. For example, Open Meals’ Cube digitizes and standardizes foods so they can be sent and printed anywhere. The idea of ownership over a concept, recipe, or food product will be complicated in a world where digital connectivity means anyone can produce products that used to require specialized processes.

In the longer term, as we see the potential for legal personhood rights bestowed to ecosystems, it’s possible that managing ecosystem services on farm land could be incentivized or owned through similar legal structures. Could the long-term future see the rise of farms having legal personhood to better balance the services they provide to humans and integration into a sustainable ecosystem?

Privacy: keeping track of what everyone eats

How does growing dependence on digital networks play out in food systems? At the level of organizations and industry, centralized online systems can mean vulnerabilities to digital attacks, like those that some producers are currently suffering. In the domain of eaters, it may cause some other changes entirely.

The concepts of pay-for-privacy or transactional exploitation may come to the fore as more data about food consumption is tracked (through biometrics and personal sensors) and integrated into commercial settings. For example, it isn’t out of the question to imagine a future in which data on your behavior effectively dictates the price you pay for food, based on whether or not you give up relevant personal information. Fast-food restaurants in the US are beginning to integrate AI into their drive throughs, scanning license plates to determine what your order might be - not a far cry from the controversial surveillance technologies used in other contexts.

This effectively means that privacy becomes a luxury good. Those who can afford it keep information about what they eat and their personal health to themselves, while many others sell personal nutritional data to insurance companies, advertisers, and retailers in exchange for discounts. The advancement of biometrics and advanced personalized nutrition may mean that food purchase and consumption is as infused with data collection methods as social media is today.

Meaning: reckoning with massive cultural shifts

Humans today have never been so free to define and pursue meaning and purpose in their lives. But being free to seek meaning doesn’t mean you’ll find it, and eaters are struggling to find meaning through food in new ways.

Climate migration will likely be a defining major shift over the next decade. Of course, the movement of people means the movement of cultures and identity. The meaning imbued in food through cultural heritage, a sense of place and belonging, and community building will similarly undergo major changes.

As more cultural groups move to more places, global food companies will have to cater to a greater number of distinct markets. The American grocery store has historically cordoned many cultural foods to a single “ethnic” aisle, but recently more brands are breaking out of that artificial positioning, and we’ll likely see many more do so, to the point where it may no longer make sense to silo off “ethnic” products.

The scare quotes in the above paragraph are quite intentional, and hint at the risk of backlash when food companies manage meaning poorly. Issues of cultural appropriation, authentic meaning, and ownership of cultural food identities will become more common and also more complex.

Belonging: opportunities and challenges in the societal role of labor

Much like the domain of meaning, climate migration will be a major driver of change in people’s senses of belonging, and of course food is a major way that people identify with a community. Already in the early 2020s, food is emerging increasingly as a signal of identity; the coffee you buy, the restaurants you patronize, the brands you affiliate with - these are all signifiers of political affiliation to a degree never before seen. As more people move around the globe, especially in the context of xenophobia and nationalism, food consumption may become an even more important avenue of finding belonging in new communities.

In the realm of labor, belonging can be a byproduct of work. For example, today, hospitality workers (like many other workers) are facing a threat from automation. On one hand, automation and platforming (e.g., food delivery apps) are fracturing food worker communities, making it harder in some ways for them to organize and have a shared sense of belonging. On the other, many jobs in food are underpaid, thankless, and rife with systemic abuse - automation could theoretically be an avenue for workers to exit a problematic industry, but at the risk of forming a vacuum of belonging.

Lastly, there are new forms of identity (and therefore belonging) arising out of digital connection. Research and technology in the science of the gut microbiome is allowing people to identify, seek support, and connect in ways never before conceivable. The field of nutritional psychiatry, for example, is making clear direct links between what we eat and our emotional state. It’s possible that in the next decade, individuals can improve their emotional interactions with the world through hyper-personalized diets.

Equity: swimming upstream against industrial food systems

The materiality of equity in operating an organization is rising to importance, and will be one of the major concerns over the next decade. The Vantage research notes that this will require adopting four key aspects: new stories, new metrics, new intervention points, and new rules.

The new stories of food (currently at the fringes) include those that challenge the industrialized systems of production and the Silicon-valley-esque models of innovation. Community-owned farms, mutual aid networks for feeding people, decolonization of supply chains, and ground-up political “curators” or influencers in the food system are all examples.

New metrics are emerging in understanding who provides value to the food system who may have been previously discounted or unseen by the dominant paradigm. For example, landback campaigns, the wider recognition of indigenous techniques for food production, sustainability, and resilience, and even new understanding of the contributions of nonhuman entities to food production will all influence how we measure value.

New intervention points are being identified to effect change in equity, as the shift from corporate CSR to holistic or integrated sustainability is starting to take root: understanding the social impact of women in food production in the global south, for example, is shifting how major food companies address their sustainability metrics.

Finally, new rules are perhaps the slowest to come around, but discussions around accountability for carbon emissions as well as socially extractive and exploitative production practices are currently in a turbulent state. Nothing is certain, but the outcome of these fights will be the new rules.

Collaboration: resilience through sharing resources and knowledgeIn 2018, fires in Oregon blew smoke over vineyards, tainting the grapes, leaving growers unable to sell their entire crops. Out of this disruption Oregon Solidarity Wine was born, a collaborative initiative to make wine out of the grapes regardless (dealing with the smoke taint in the process), and provide income to the farmers. This sort of collaboration will become more common as emergent climate effects wreak havoc; working together quickly to create new products or processes that may not be replicable or relevant, but boost the industry’s overall resilience.

Collaboration, or working towards a shared outcome, will undergo many critical changes over the coming decade - not only in the structures of organized work, but also in who (and what) contributes to shared work, and emerging motivations for stakeholders to collaborate.

Already we’re beginning to see this in the food industry as there’s a shift away from incumbent players competing with food startups towards more models of collaboration like corporate accelerators. The next decade could see even more structures that strive to achieve more robust industries rather than simply more robust firms. An underlying driver will be less stability (in large part due to climate effects) as supply chains become more brittle, and scarce or specific resources become threatened.

Conclusion: imperatives for a resilient food system

The coming decade will surely be one of chaos and instability, but also great opportunity for building resilience in the global food system and thriving despite the challenges of the new operating environment. Doing so will require understanding how to implement certain new skills and strategies:

• Fostering collaborations that cross sectoral boundaries, including precompetitive collaborations to build stronger supply chains, food production systems, and knowledge resources for farmers, producers, and consumers.

• Managing information and understanding how to make sense of a future where many more people can measure, track, and make public data about food and who eats it.

• Understanding the interaction between food and culture at a granular, human-focused level.