Have you ever wondered what the future of food will look like? If you’re anything like Mike Lee, founder and CEO of Studio Industries and creator of The Future Market, a forward-thinking exhibit that will take place at the Winter Fancy Food Show next week, it may look a lot like the past.
Inspired by the auto industry’s practice of creating concept cars (read: they don't currently exist) to stimulate innovation, concept food products similarly provide space for manufacturers, consumers and designers to imagine; they're a permission slip to dream about a better, tastier future.
To craft the following concept products, Lee and his team identify current trends in the food industry and expand upon them as much as possible. “We take a trend and extrapolate it. We make assumptions about what could happen to the trend years in the future,” says Lee, who adds that maintaining a familiar package design aesthetic was paramount to creating the product concepts. “For us, product concepts are a valuable creative exercise that fosters a vision for the future and reframes how we look at creating products for today.”
The Future Market’s newest crop of products have a particular focus on biodiversity, an issue that Lee says is a fresh look at the idea of sustainability. In the following concept products, you’ll see different varietals of legumes, grains and produce presented in easy-to-consume formats. “Biodiversity is the perfect union of sustainable practices and the discovery of new foods,” says Lee. “Even if you don’t care about the benefits of sustainability, you probably care about finding new nutritious, functional and delicious foods.”
