"We predict more people will call out & question the necessity of processing & a return to more natural foods."
Anishya Kumar
As a forward thinking food manufacturer we have to look ahead to what people will be eating in the coming years and what will be on supermarket shelves. At Zinda Foods we know that many "trends" will actually become enforced as laws, but others will be as a reaction to growing consumer awareness and interest in "ethical eating".
Here are our top five predictions:
1. Food security - we predict an ever growing demand for tighter labelling on products beyond supermarkets to protect people with allergens as witnessed in the FSA's recent proposals. Chairwoman Heather Hancock said the FSA had chosen the strictest of the options they had under discussion because "ultimately this is a life-threatening issue for a proportion of the population".
2. Rise and rise of sustainable eating - buying environmentally packaged food is not good enough any more. People are becoming increasingly conscious of how food is produced and what that does to the environment - witnessed by Selfridges recent move to have no palm oil in their own brand products and Virgin moving to sustainable only palm oil in-flights. We predict a very big growth in ethical eating over the next 5 years
3. Coupled with this is the desire for food to be less processed and for "healthy foods" to actually be more healthy - Author Bee Wilson has a Twitter campaign calling out foods which are "BerryWashed" - or to give it a more scientific term shed light on foods which suffer the "health halo effect" .This is where foods which are high in sugar, salt and additives are given the appearance of being healthy. We wrote an opinion piece on the same topic. We predict more people will call out & question the "necessity" of processing & see a return to more natural foods in the same way that people are calling out the validity of "clean eating" & faddy diets like "rainbow eating".
4. Greater awareness of what we eat and how this effects climate change - we believe this is becoming a growing concern. However we predict that individuals will recognise more and more that what they do has an effect on a larger global problem. The Committee on Climate Change released a large report on 2nd May about how the UK can phase out Carbon emissions & Green house gases by 2050 to help phase out global warming.
5. Finally from the supply chain perspective we predict much more accountability as to what is on food labels. We believe consumers will demand greater awareness on GMO food & greater transparency on what is in the food on our supermarket shelves.
