Research Program

Future of Food and Beverage

How will the “the new music” change your business?

During the long industrial revolution, people lost contact with their earlier natural relation to food and cooking. Food came wrapped in plastic film, pre-processed and ready-to-eat.
Since several years this is changing. The interest in cooking, and not only as entertainment, has increased dramatically. Chefs are rock stars and the general public envies the amateur chefs in TV shows like Masterchef.

Food is the new music. (The Ridderheim report)

But knowing food and how to cook is also becoming part of the identity project, as well as the more general health trend. Among cultural elites knowing food is even more important than knowing music, fashion or literature. And even the young generation born around 1990 is eager to learn how to cook from ground, and what to eat and drink. In terms of cooking, the lost generations are the first post-war generations that never learnt what to do with chuck.

For more than a fifteen years, research in the field of food, beverage and cooking have been one of our main research areas. Together with clients we’ve been studying long-term trends and short-term fashion in the field, and dug deep into the behaviors of individual as well as families to understand the importance of food in every day life, as well as a tangible representation of experience and togetherness. We’ve worked together with farmers, food producers, governments and regions, retailers, airlines, hotels and restaurants, and producers of kitchenware and furniture. We’ve studied cooking as well as shopping, indulgence as well as health trends, corporate as well as national brands. And we are planning to continue this research journey for many years.

The question is: How will the “the new music” change your business?

Did you know that in 2008, that Swedish families experienced a wide gap between ambition and reality in terms of dinner cooking? They were unable to embrace inspiration on new things in store. This frustration might have cleared the way for the now so popular home-delivered “food bags”. Research from Kairos Future’s study “Hell Hour” from 2008