Speculative
Futures Research
FoodTech
2021
The Future of Food Technology
A futurecasting engagement for a major integrated food & beverage company — mapping 22 ideas across six FoodTech lenses, prioritising through future cones, and charting the path from near-term recipe boxes to 2035's food-printed personalised nutrition.
Futures Design
Strategic Foresight
Workshop Facilitation
Technology Roadmapping
Moonshot Thinking
Post-Covid Eating Had Changed Everything
The pandemic accelerated a decade of change in food behaviour into eighteen months. Ordering from the couch became the default. Consumers developed new anxieties about food waste, supply chain opacity, and the provenance of what they ate. The restaurant industry convulsed. Ghost kitchens appeared. Grocery delivery normalised. And somewhere in the gap between what food companies had built and what consumers now expected, a set of entirely new business opportunities emerged.
A major integrated food & beverage company engaged ThoughtWorks to answer a question they were finding difficult to hold in one frame: across all of the disruption, what were the most strategically significant futures we should be designing towards — and what would it take to get there from where we are today?
This was not a brief for incremental improvement. It was an invitation to futurecast.
Six Lenses on a Changing Industry
Before generating ideas, we needed a shared framework for what 'FoodTech' actually meant — a term capacious enough to include farming drones and food printer apps without becoming meaningless. We settled on six lenses that mapped the full journey from field to fork, each representing a distinct innovation space:
AgTech
Technology applied to agriculture — autonomous farming machines, precision irrigation, crop genetics, and the management of farms as data-rich systems rather than weather-dependent gambles.
Food Science
The research and creation of new food forms — lab-grown meat, plant-based proteins, nutraceuticals, and the emerging science of designing food for specific health outcomes.
Food Service
The restaurant and hospitality layer — digitising operations, deriving intelligence from social media and customer behaviour, enabling ghost kitchens, and connecting home chefs to food delivery markets.
Coaching & Advisory
Personalised guidance across the full food cycle — dietary recommendations, nutritional transparency, culinary recipes, and health-data-driven consumption advice.
Delivery
Ready-to-eat meals, groceries, and meal kits — and the logistics, last-mile infrastructure, and consumer experience design that determine whether people actually trust the service.
Retail & Food Distribution
The supply chain layer — from end-to-end traceability and real-time inventory tracking to intelligent distribution of ingredients and the reimagination of the food retail store itself.
Three Exercises to Generate 22 Ideas
The workshop methodology combined three distinct exercises, each designed to dislodge different kinds of thinking.
01
Future Headlines
Participants imagined the company in the news in 2040. What had it done to earn that headline? Going for wild ideas — and then asking what had to be true for each headline to exist — is a fast route to plausible innovation territory.
02
Past, Future, Present
Participants came prepared with research on food and FoodTech trends. Reviewing signals from across the timeline — what's fading, what's emerging, what's accelerating — built a shared vocabulary and prevented the workshop from reinventing known territory.
03
Moonshot & Retrocast
We selected priority future ideas and worked backwards — identifying the stepping stones, the enabling technologies, and the market conditions required for each moonshot to become reachable. The retrocast is what turns a vision into a roadmap.
[ Workshop synthesis — 22 ideas mapped across the FoodTech idea spectrum ]
From Possible to Preferable — Sorting 22 Ideas Through Future Cones
Not all futures deserve equal investment. Future cones give a structure for distinguishing between what is merely possible, what is plausible, what is probable, and what is actually preferable — the place where strategic bets should be placed.
Possible
Crop-growing machines and super crops, cloud and ghost kitchens, food malls with no human contact. Technically conceivable but dependent on social and regulatory shifts that are not yet underway at scale.
Plausible
3D-printed personalised nutrition, spray-on flavours, experience places and cuisines from your living room via AR/VR. The technology exists in prototype form — the question is adoption velocity and cost curves.
Probable
Social media and digital restaurant platform data to derive consumer behaviour, real-time inventory tracking, end-to-end restaurant digitisation, community farms. Following current trajectories, these arrive without requiring category-defining breakthroughs.
Preferable
The food super app, connecting people who share the same food history, vegan and plant-based delivery, home chef food delivery, end-to-end food traceability. These are futures the company should actively build towards — both commercially attractive and culturally aligned.
Six Concepts Worth Building
From 22 ideas, six rose to the top through prioritisation against the axes of impact and feasibility. Each was developed into a detailed concept with a target window and a set of enabling conditions.
Recipes & Ingredients You Can Cook · 2022–24
A recipe box delivery service that sends fresh, portioned ingredients direct to the door — created alongside expert nutritionists for best-in-class combinations. Near-term, proven category with meaningful differentiation opportunity through nutrition expertise and supply chain transparency.
Food Super App · 2022–24
A single platform that cuts across AgTech, Food Science, Food Service, Advisory, Delivery, and Retail — bringing multiple brands and services under one roof. The super app model, well established in Southeast Asia, had not yet been applied coherently to food in this market.
Personalised Food Based on Health Data & Genetics · 2030–35
Food preferences derived from human cDNA and mRNA profiling — identifying disease genes earlier and recommending diets that guarantee longevity based on individual genetic profiles. Longer horizon, but the underlying genomics infrastructure is accelerating.
3D Printed Personalised Nutrition · 2035–40
Food printers using 3D printing technology to produce meals from cloud-stored recipes — enabling consumers to design custom meals that are nutritious, aesthetically considered, and made to order from home. The moonshot concept that the retrocast exercise was built around.
Experience Places & Cuisines from Your Living Room · 2025–26
AR/VR experiences that let users savour cuisines from places around the world while inhabiting the ambience and cultural context of those places. Sits at the intersection of entertainment, travel, and food — a category without a clear owner.
Spray-On Flavours · 2035–38
Taste fusers that mimic the flavours of other foods known to the palate — making anything taste like anything else. Transformative for dietary compliance, food allergies, and the economics of plant-based nutrition at scale.
[ Technology timeline — 22 ideas plotted from 2022 to beyond 2030 ]
The Retrocast: From Food Printer to Today
The moonshot concept — 3D printed personalised nutrition — was put through the retrocast exercise to build a credible path from the current state to the 2035 horizon.
2022
3D printing appliances emerge
Consumers begin experimenting with food printers at home. Food inks become a subscription commodity. Lab-grown meat gains acceptance among environmentally conscious consumers. NASA experiments with printed food normalise the concept.
2024
Tastemakers invent new forms
Food brands launch their own recipe and ink subscriptions. Chefs and nutritionists work together to develop the right recipe mix. Early adopters love cooking and serving printed meals — but 3D printed food fails to get expected mainstream acceptance.
2026
Texture and flavour solved
Tastemakers crack the texture problem — inventing ways to mimic flavours with precision. Food printers become sophisticated enough to produce meals indistinguishable from hand-prepared versions. Consumer confidence shifts.
2029+
Mainstream personalised nutrition
People start consuming 3D-printed personalised nutrition as a daily habit. The concept that seemed speculative in 2022 is now embedded in daily food culture — enabled step-by-step through the retrocast pathway.
A Framework for Sustained Innovation
The engagement produced a four-stage process that the client could continue to run internally — not a one-time deliverable, but a repeatable muscle for futures thinking.
01
Research
Domain understanding, trend analysis, secondary research, SME discussion.
02
Workshop
Visioning exercises, futurecasting facilitation with all stakeholders, idea brainstorming, deep-diving priority ideas, importance vs. feasibility mapping.
03
Synthesis
Moonshot and retrocast, grouping ideas by future cones, idea prioritisation, validation with SMEs.
04
Future Roadmap
Finalising top priority ideas, creating a tentative roadmap with stepping stones, finalising the plan.
"Go for wild ideas and think all aspects of food — past, future, present. Then work backwards until you can see the first step from where you're standing now."
— Workshop facilitation principle, Future Headlines exercise
The most durable outcome of this engagement wasn't any individual concept — it was a shared vocabulary and a shared method. Participants left knowing how to hold a 2035 ambition and a 2023 roadmap in the same conversation. That's the real value of structured futures work: not predicting what will happen, but building the organisational capacity to shape it.