Exploring the future of Taste
What is around the corner for the world of food and drink brands? Is our health and that of society our most sought after wealth? Have we turned our backs on the perfection offered by industrialization? How are we gaining unadulterated pleasure through food?
We all need food and drink and these things should be a basic, nurturing pleasure. But when it comes to our health and the depletion of the world's resources, food and drink become a contentious and serious topic for debate by governments, brands and businesses.
Our transatlantic Pearlfisher insight program focuses on four basic areas that underline the needs and wants of human behavior and is therefore most relevant to brands and business. These four areas are Taste, Body, Connection, and Luxury. Taste Insight: the future of food and drink; Body: the future ways in which we will view our bodies; Connection Insight: the structures and rules that will guide the future of our relationships and way of life, and Luxury: the future world of aspiration and its evolving expressions.
We explore the big shifts that are happening in each of these areas, defining the leading edge by speaking to experts and opinion makers who are in the best position to shape the future. We combine this knowledge with our own explorations into the cultural and categorical changes happening around us to create blue-sky design concepts that build a rich picture of the future for brands.
Today, we want to share some of our Taste Insight. This explores how our relationship with food is changing, what this will mean for food and drink brands moving into the future, and how this will effect us all on a personal, social and commercial level.
Our most recent Taste report identified 3 key shifts. Below is a brief synopsis of our findings and one of the blue-sky concepts that we created.
1) Shift: Fake to Alive - Our personal health and that of society and our environment. How can we create a world that makes the best of all the natural goodness available to us?
Understanding our individual health should be instinctual but the commercialization and changing nature of food has distracted us from our natural instincts of what to eat. In the future we will look to brands that can help simplify and enhance our choices, creating a new world that makes the best of the natural goodness available to us.
Concept: Dirty Food; a brand that reinvigorates children's relationships with food and educates them about the origins of their food.
2) Shift: Easy to Enduring - Our interest in the cultural, communal and educative value of food production and our desire for real gestures that feel natural and instinctual.
We are looking more deeply into the sources of our food. We no longer desire the perfection offered by industrialization, with highly processed and preservative-laden products. We want to embrace the rich, intense and time-honored experiences that center us and give our food real substance.
Concept: Preserve; a brand that draws attention to the natural history of our food; the beauty of methods passed-on, of secret recipes and traditional cooking.
3) Shift: Indulged to Inspired - Our wish to escape through extreme fantasy, where creative direction in food opens up new worlds of delight.
Food is experiencing a renaissance of creativity - a return to both art and unadulterated pleasure. We explore this new creative direction in food, and the aspiration, fantasy and exciting symbolic worlds that this movement is opening up.
Concept: Seasonaire; a brand that provides as much specialness and glamor in gourmet food as is found in exclusive boutiques and the iconic fashion houses.
Next week we will share our Luxury Insight and the exciting blue-sky brand concepts that have arisen from shifts that highlight the future of the luxury world. To find out more about Insight at Pearlfisher please email jessica@pearlfisher.com
Jonathan Ford, Creative Partner, Pearlfisher will be presenting "Pearlfisher Insight: Seeing the Future" at the upcoming World Future Trends Summit. To learn more about the event, visit the website here. Readers of our blog can save 15% off the registration price with code FT12BLOG.