The Next Hot Trends in Food
Author: Julie Jargon and Annie Gasparro| Published: October 16, 2016
Not too far in the future, when you reach for a healthy drink, it might be full of water from a cactus.
Your main course at dinner might be a pear-like fruit from Southeast Asia that does a remarkable job of imitating meat. The next candy bar your children bite into might be infused with mushrooms that help cut down on the sugar needed to sweeten the treat. And their breakfast cereal might be colored with algae instead of chemicals.
Why the wave of exotic delights? Nutrition science—and customers’ rapidly changing tastes—are forcing the food business to search ever farther afield for new edibles.
Everybody knows standards change—fat was bad, for instance, until the big no-nos became carbs and gluten—and each time they do, a rash of new products appear that claim to be packed with good stuff and free of things that cause harm.
But now it’s no longer enough to claim a product is simply free of something that’s frowned upon. Consumers want to know that the bad ingredient hasn’t been replaced with something equally bad or worse. And they want to know the story behind their food—how it was grown or raised, and whether its production and distribution was kind to the environment. The less processed and simpler the ingredients, the better. That has left food and restaurant companies rushing to clean up their labels with ingredients derived from natural sources consumers can understand and pronounce.
For a trend to go mainstream, it has to provide health benefits, be easily comprehensible, make economic sense for the manufacturer, and of course taste good, says David Garfield,food-industry consultant at AlixPartners. It’s even better if the product tells a story and has third-party verification, such as a certified-organic label.