The value of food foresight
Food and agriculture, like no other industry, has a profound impact on the health of people and the planet. The cost of not looking ahead and being thoughtful about the accumulative effect of your business on the future is far higher than in most non-food industries.
I grew up in The Motor City – Detroit, Michigan – and one of my favourite things to do as a kid was see the annual Detroit Auto Show.
But I wasn’t there for the regular cars, I was there to see the concept cars. Something about the audacity and ambition of a huge industry like the automotive industry spending all this time and money on a product that wasn’t for sale was inspiring. Concept cars were not moneymakers. They were projects that would help car companies not only think deeply about the future, but shape it.
The food and agriculture industry needs to take a page from the auto industry and spend more time practicing foresight like those concept cars.
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With big challenges tied to food like climate change, soil degradation, and diet-related diseases looming large, business as usual is no longer an option. Despite these dangers, food companies and consumers are frequently stuck in short-term thinking.
Next quarter’s earnings targets or tonight’s dinner are usually more of a priority than the long-term well-being of human and planetary health.
To build a more sustainable, equitable, and nourishing food system, the industry needs to spend more time on foresight – the practice of envisioning possible futures to inform better decisions today.
Here are three big reasons why:
1. Food is defined by tensions
Food is a domain where many contradictory forces collide. It’s an enormous trillion-dollar global industry, yet eating is one of the most intimate and personal things we do daily. The food and agriculture industry requires a lot of logic to operate, but most of the time eaters make food decisions emotionally and sometimes illogically.
One of the most powerful things one can do in the food industry is to be fluent in understanding how it works at a macro and micro scale, and a logical and emotional level.
Foresight, with its methodical approach to storytelling, is uniquely suited to helping food executives navigate these tensions.
For instance, the field of personalised nutrition has been a hotbed of innovation over the past decade, with many startups and established companies trying to capture your biometric data, process it with machine learning, and produce tailored dietary advice for healthier eating.
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But it’s rarer for those innovators to consider the implications on our personal relationships and food culture by having an all-knowing, ultra-personalised AI guiding our every move at the dining table.
How will we share meals in a world with personalised nutrition? Will people accept the presence of more digital devices at the table? Are eaters ok with surrendering their dietary free will to a machine, as personalised and “intelligent” as it may be?
These are crucial questions to consider as more personalised nutrition apps and devices are developed. It would be a waste of resources to have an ingeniously designed piece of technology fall flat in the marketplace because it didn’t consider the human food experience enough.
A strong foresight practice can avoid situations like this and enable innovators to better anticipate the future and build better products today.
2. Humans are biased toward the present
If I offered you a delicious looking cheeseburger and told you there was a chance it might make you sick immediately, would you take it? What if I told you there was a chance it might make you sick 10 years into the future?
Almost everyone I ask this to prefers the cheeseburger with the chance of sickness 10 years in the future.
Which makes sense, because this is essentially what people are choosing to do when they binge drink, smoke cigarettes, or engage in other risky behaviours – feeling the benefits immediately while delaying the costs. This is human nature. So, is it any surprise that big food companies, who are run by humans, tend to focus on short term success over long-term well-being?
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Foresight is a tool that, by definition, brings potential futures to the present. Thinking deeper into the future helps to ensure companies can not only be better at anticipating obstacles but be more adept at capturing new opportunities that might not meaningfully exist right now.
Giant companies like Google, Apple, and Nvidia are market leaders in part because they had more insightful, vivid visions of what the future could look like, then they deployed resources toward making that future real.
Foresight was a way of life for them. None of the great inventions they’ve brought to the world would have been possible if they only thought about the next couple business quarters. Yet that’s precisely what so many food and agriculture companies do on a regular basis.
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3. Food is a complex system
The food system is frequently referred to as a complicated supply chain. But I think the word “chain” is the wrong metaphor – rather, a domino effect is more fitting.
For every action in food and agriculture affects another part of the system, which can be hard to predict.
I recall over a decade ago when I first heard of companies making plant-based mayonnaise out of yellow peas and other ingredients, eliminating the need for eggs. They were heralded in the media as the saviors of the planet by making animal agriculture obsolete.
But what if one of those companies did dominate the world and eliminate the need for eggs in our mayo? They would certainly need a massive supply of yellow peas and the other dozens of ingredients on their label to enable a global plant-based mayonnaise giant to operate.
And once plant-based mayonnaise scales up to a global scale, is having a new set of plant monocultures any better for the planet than the eggs they replaced?
Animal welfare advocates would surely be happy, but we’d have one more product that would need to be farmed intensively, degrading soil health and increasing our dependence on synthetic agricultural inputs.
Many new food brands are so focused on surviving their first year that they don’t imagine the implications to people and planet if they actually succeeded and became multi-billion-dollar brands.
Foresight can even help newer brands be better stewards of the planet by illustrating their impact at scale, so they can adjust how they operate from the start. After all, the best time to build a better future of food was decades ago—the second-best time is right now.
Mike Lee is a food futurist, innovation strategist, and author of the book Mise: On the Future of Food.