Do you know what the problem is with imagining the future of food? The fact that almost all predictions turn out to be wrong. Where, for example, are all those dog-sized cows that have to graze in my backyard? Where is the food in pill form? Despite decades of expectations, insects have also not replaced farm animals as a significant source of protein. But we still try to guess what food might be in 2069.
What food will be like in the future
To start somewhere, we turn to Max Elder of the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, California. Elder is a researcher at the Food Futures Lab, which is hired by companies and governments for her job of imagining cows in the backyard - or, in the individual case, the blenders and refrigerators that could change the food market. Elder believes that whether these concepts are realized or not, engaging in such speculation is critical to shaping our world. It is worth for a second to stop dreaming about the future - and you lose your role in creating it.
Today, the grocery store as a species is undergoing a particularly rapid change as more and more companies compete for their share of the food sector. In the US, for example, this is a $ 650 billion market. Older supermarket chains are facing off against discounters like Walmart and Costco (we have Metro C&C), European natives Aldi and Lidl, and Amazon, which has been steadily taking over retail since the acquisition of Whole Foods. All this competition creates an atmosphere of innovation as retailers strive to outperform each other in exclusive products and services, cost, technology and convenience. The choices they make matter: everyone eats and won't stop eating, and what we eat is largely determined by the supply of grocery stores.
Predicting how this industry will develop over the next few decades, Elder said: “The idea is to push people beyond what is plausible and possible. What values are in question? What will the food system be like if we optimize it for different values? Think about it less of predictions than of imagination. Imagine a world where steaks grow on trees (or at least in bioreactors), snacks are perfect for your microflora, and morning coffee is brought by drones.
Fabio Parasecoli, a professor in the Department of Food and Nutrition Research at New York University, has thought a lot about food and what it will be like in the future. It is believed that the entire supermarket paradigm will fade into oblivion in the future: Instacart, a grocery delivery service, raised more than $ 1 billion in 2018, and Amazon is ramping up its two-hour Prime Now delivery service at almost all Whole Foods stores in the US. Human laziness will win, and more and more people will shop from the comfort of their couches.
Promotional video:
However, Parasekoli disagrees with this view. He sees retail stores in the future, but with expanded functionality. “Take a look around,” he says. In addition to the spacious café, the store has an extensive ready-to-eat section and a kind of food court, with barbecues, hamburgers and salad stands. In a sense, Whole Foods is already more of a restaurant than a grocery store.
Walking through Whole Foods, Parasekoli points out what he sees as the main trajectory markers for grocery stores. It all starts from the entrance to the store: the first thing you see is glass windows filled with bright candies, and the aroma of fresh bread comes from a nearby bakery. “It gives you insight into choice, abundance, quality and pleasure. There will be more and more developments in the sound and olfactory environment."
Pointing to the fresh food section, Parasekoli marks the apples. Instead of three usual varieties - a whole dozen. “More sophisticated supermarkets will stand out by offering more agri-variety,” he explains. On the other hand, displaying mounds of fruits and vegetables will disturb shoppers concerned with freshness and food waste. Imagine Apple Store-style merchandising: one piece of exhibit that can be scanned and instantly retrieved from a chilled underground pantry.
As for plastic water bottles, we won't have them in the future. Just as Styrofoam has lost its popularity, plastics will increasingly be replaced by reusable containers and biodegradable alternatives.
Will we be buying whole ingredients in 50 years - carrots and all? Parasekoli believes that technology sometimes advances faster than culture, and consumers will continue to cook for as long as necessary. Here, for example, is a station where you can grind nuts to produce your own nut butter, but juicers are perhaps the most efficient way to get orange juice. People are eager to participate in their own food production. They use food to express their passion, their personality, their understanding. Given time and funds, you will continue to cook yourself.
Parasecoli does what futurists call "amplifying weak signals" - looking at the data in real time and extrapolating it logically. This is the same approach taken by Mike Lee of Future Market, which explores how we will produce and buy food in the future. Lee, who works on food design, noticed that the auto industry is spending a lot of money on wildly futuristic concept cars, and wondered why the food industry isn't doing the same. The Future Market concept store at the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco is dedicated to the future of biodiversity and sustainability in the food industry.
Lee believes that digital grocery shopping is likely to increase significantly in the coming years, but the picture will continue to change. British retailer Ocado is getting close to setting up a fully self-contained grocery store; At a new distribution center in Andover, England, a fleet of robots that look like a cross between a mailbox and Wall-E slide across a metal grid, collecting items from the thousands of boxes beneath them and packing them into delivery orders. Ocado plans to license its technology to grocery stores around the world and eliminate the human labor that is costly to grocery delivery services such as Instacart.
Another innovation that will reduce the labor and trade problems of stores in the near future: no queues. At nine Amazon Go stores located in Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago, Prime members can pick up their groceries without paying at the checkout before leaving.
Like Parasekoli, Lee believes physical grocery stores will definitely remain in different sizes, shapes, and formats. People still enjoy touching, seeing and smelling certain foods like fresh produce and fish, and we still visit grocery stores to find ready-made foods like grilled chicken and lunchtime snacks. Retail stores have a strong incentive to make their stores attractive: in stores, shoppers leave three times more money than on the Internet. In China, for example, internet giant Alibaba has begun to expand offline with its Hema branded supermarket, where visitors can choose live seafood and cook it in front of them on an interactive food court.
Local food production is far from a new idea. But in the next half century, it could expand from cooking to cooking and the ingredients themselves. Test-tube-grown meat is on the way to becoming a commercial reality; Lee says the grocery store could be equipped with meat bioreactors in the basement and hydroponic crop production on the roof, which will produce fruits and vegetables for the store, harvesting rainwater and offsetting the store's carbon emissions. Such a system would be environmentally efficient, but would also attract consumer interest in freshness and traceability.
But the aspect of our food future that interests Lee - and Max Elder more - is the emergence of a food system in which, as Elder puts it, "consumers will be more than just mouths at the end of the supply chain." Each of us is gradually revealing more and more information about our needs and habits - from biometric data collected by wearable sensors, to our online traces and smart refrigerators that know which food supplies are running out - food manufacturers and sellers will be able to figure out what you want and what you need before you know it yourself.
At the same time, new production technologies, from 3D printing to hydroponic cultivation and cell cultivation of meat, will make it easier to create food products that are personalized for the individual consumer. Put it all together and you have a food system in which there is close feedback between the food producer and the consumer. The steak I buy for dinner can be grown with exactly the calorie and protein to fat ratio I need, plus some iron to help nip anemia in the bud - and it'll cook on time.
If products can meet consumer needs, so can the shopping experience. IBM has already applied for a patent for a drone to deliver coffee, which can be invoked with biometric data indicating fatigue. The Swedish startup is working on a so-called Moby Mart: a self-contained, mobile mini-market that can move around town in response to a level of need. "One of the possible options would be that we will not go to the store for food, and the food will come from the store for us."
As wonderful as this all is, these predictions ignore other, less pleasant signals pointing to darker features of our food destiny. For example, an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth is leading to a polarization of shopping and eating habits. Despite the generally recognized growth in the market for natural and organic products, people are not yet used to them. Visions of our food future point to a certain type of affluent, technologically free consumer. What will happen to everyone else?
The latest climate reports suggest that, in the absence of unprecedented interventions, many parts of the world will become unsuitable for food production, increasing food shortages, poverty and migration. Wild seafood will become scarce, if at all. Most likely, eating animals - fish or meat, game or farm animals - will be the privilege of the rich. Perhaps plant and cell based meat will be good enough to fill the voids, but listen, what would a cell based chicken look like?
Ilya Khel