TEN Food Trends

AMSTERDAM - No one has the crystal ball to see what’s going to happen in the future, but still we like to predict each and every year what the food trends – often hypes – will be for the coming years. And which trends will be relevant the coming decades. You can debate on the predictability of all this, it also depends on what level you look and the span of time you take into account.  

September 1^st 2017 it was exactly 10 years ago TEN the export network started her activities: supporting food companies with internationalization. The past 10 years we have seen many food and retail trends and hypes passing by. We think back at the rise of food trucks, free from food, superfoods like chia seed, açai berries, kale, the ‘from farm to table’ restaurant, forgotten vegetables, paleo food, flavored water, craft beer, ancient grains (amaranth, quinoa) and so on. We gathered 10 important developments that had and will have a large impact on the international food world. 

1.      Sustainability – an ongoing development that will become more a precondition than something you can distinguish yourself with in the long term.

2.      Health – as overweight has become a bigger problem than undernourishment (although 1 billion people still suffer from chronic starvation) the attention for fat, salt and sugar reduction increases. Health trends remain a base for innovations, personalized nutrition is also an example we will hear much more about in the (near) future.   

3.      Blurring all over – between channels (AH to go), between technological companies and retailers (Amazon, Google, Walmart), between rural and urban areas, between food and pharma – frontiers are pushed back and new horizons open up

4.      Technological developments – new conservation techniques like pascalisation, food printing, genetic modification, increasing usage of robots, lab-grown meat, but also online shopping, usage of drones, big data, we cannot imagine what the exact will be impact of technological developments, but that it will have an enormous impact is for sure.

5.      Online business – although profitability is often still far away, the rise of e-commerce is unstoppable. In China online shopping and paying via Wechat is very common. New players like Amazon, Alibaba will change the retail landscape drastically. Besides this, social media has become a very important way to get directly in touch with the consumer. It is expected that digital platforms will not only focus on retail, but also on financial matters, media and health care and so on.

6.      Rise of discount and PL – the position of Aldi and Lidl, their geographical expansion and success that soft discount in general has generated in Western Europe has surprised many of us. Also the increase of Private label – not only at discounters, but also at premium banners like Marks & Spencer – is a very fascinating phenomenon illustrating the changing role of brands in general. 

7.      Convenience – the ‘on the go’, grazing and snacking trends are the base for the growing demand for convenience concepts. It is expected that this will continue to grow, also because of the fainting traditional meal moments (liquid meals, all day breakfast etc).

8.      Authenticity and transparency – Despite or maybe because of all modern developments there is a growing demand for pure, authentic products. Consumers have a profound distrust in industrial production, are scared for artificial ingredients, for food scandals, for everything that is ‘chemical’ and ‘not-natural’ and this all makes us longing for pure, real products of high quality produced in a transparent chain. This offers opportunities for West European companies in Asia for example.

9.      Taste and experience – In the end in the food sector, apart from mentioned trends, it is all about taste. A product can be very healthy, produced in a responsible way, can tell a great story, but if it is not tasty (enough), consumers will not buy it again. A good concept and storytelling has become more and more important, in the end it is about the total experience you can offer.   

10.  Food in the picture – the huge attention for food and nutrition has grown enormously over the last 10 years. We need food to survive, but food is also emotion and everybody has his/her own opinion about it that can also vary quite a bit from region to region. All this makes the international food world a complex, but very interesting sphere of action.  

Could we predict the impact of these developments 10 years ago? Do we know what the coming 10 years will bring? Definitely not. What we do know is that we will keep on following closely everything that is happening in the international food world to be able to find the right opportunities in the right markets for our principals. On to the next TEN years, cheers! 

TEN advises and supports food companies that are aiming to broaden their horizons. We co-ordinate food export activities, encourage business development projects, and create new international links. We also help improve the standard of existing export activities, and we operate as SIB advisor (Starters International Business, an initiative of the Dutch government) to SMEs. For more information www.theexportnetwork.nlor contact us for a first meeting without any obligations: http://www.theexportnetwork.nl/contact/.