future of food businesses

Change is here, change is everywhere and our food business industry will change and even needs to change, to be able to be just as successful in the "New Normal" as it was in the pre COVID-19 era.

We are all expecting that the future of our food business will undergo various impactful changes which are difficult to already determine at this moment in time. What is the food industry doing to implement possible changes into new successful food concepts and approaches for the future. What will the food business look like in the future? What will change? and how can we make the best out of the unprecedented inevitable changes due to COVID-19, that lie in front of us.

Lets start with some changing factors that can be identified for having a possible high impact, influencing the changing future of our food business and customer behaviour

• Safety

Personal and family health and safety will be the number one priority for all consumers and will influence their choices on how and where they will return to eating out of home. This will force all food businesses to come up with transparent, thrustful concepts of high integrity and competence. Besides the offer, which still plays a very important part of every successful concept, safe social distancing engagement and merchandising will have a much higher impact on customer decisions in the future.

• Work / Life Balance

On one side, the extended time people spend at home directed them into increased enjoyment of family time and a much more balanced work / life situation, but on the other side the increasing pressure and insecurity of employment and income also puts a bigger burden on al people. Taking this into consideration, the possibility of people, our customers, spending the same amount of money, ore possibly more, for out of home eating and other activities, compared to the pre COVID-19 era, are very difficult to predict and to estimate. Consumption behaviour has definitely changed and will continue to change in the future.

• Health & Wellbeing

As a result of the pandemic, we have seen a high increase in the consumption of foods and beverages that build immune systems and resilience and the focus on healthy diets. Next to that a changed lifestyle towards new working habits and free time habits, have been identified, so also here we are seeing many changes in personal and consumption behaviour.

Healthy comfort-mood food is definitely an identified trend that will accompany us for a long time to come.

• Sustainability

Less economic activity during the COVID-19 lockdown in almost all parts of the globe has delivered an unexpected positive impact on our environment. Right now we are seeing decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, less pollution, a heightened awareness of responsible use of resources and food waste, and an increase in using local and seasonal products due to global supply chain challenges. This we should, not to say we have to, take as an opportunity to make the necessary impactful changes towards a much more sustainable food business industry. We need to take all learnings from this crisis, to make sure we can come out of it even stronger, for a better future for us all.

---

Now it is essential to take all these points into consideration whilst creating and changing our food concepts, our food businesses and if possible our whole food industry. This change has to be done now, right now, during the current situation of slowly reopening, so we can create and develop the "new Normal" Post COVID-19 future for our food businesses and the food industry.

Change safety

Making People feel safe but also creating an atmosphere of wellbeing has to be one of the major priorities we need to change to get consumers to return to eating out again.

A change towards a “new normal” in a completely different and much more safer environment as to the pre-COVID situation. For all hotel and restaurant business as well as for the business catering industry it needs a professional and well thought through approach. This approach is facing our industry with some extensive, complex, perplexing and uncomfortable challenges. We need more focus on "Safety First" for a successful future.

Change balance

Focussing on the new healthy Work / Life balance approach of many consumers, its very likely this will incorporate an additional challenge to our industry in creating concepts to attract old and new customers back into our businesses. With social distancing still in place for a much longer time to come, the well being factor in out of home eating is undergoing ongoing changes and needs getting used to. Many customers are nor willing, or not jet ready for such impactful changes, as they still have the pre COVID-19 situation in their minds. Most customers don't really like change and their thoughts will always go back to positive experience they have stored in their memories. So here the challenge will be to create a new social distancing, engaging look and feel, that adapts to these personal memories to create a “New Normal”, safe, well being, trendy and still familiar environment.

Professional creativity will be the driving success factor.

Change Sustainability

Finally, and in my opinion the most impactful change we need to implement in our future food businesses is the food itself , the food we put on offer and its sustainable approach.

Seeing the increased positive impact on the environment, during lockdown, we should be obliged to create a new food approach from this point onwards that will keep on supporting the environment the same way as we have done over the last few months during the COVID-19 lockdown.

This means creating healthy, local, seasonal and sustainable food offers as being the future "New Normal". Accelerating towards plant focused diets, that not only support our personal health and safety, wellbeing and work/life balance, but also the overall health of our planet.

As many of us have experienced an increased interest in healthy home cooking during lockdown, and with social media being full of creative ideas for cooking and producing healthy regional foods at home without industrial additives, focussed on regional and seasonal available foods, this approach should be the main focus point for all food concepts under construction or being developed at this moment in time, in our food businesses.

We have the momentum and the audience to turn this into many successful concepts that can change our business and change our planet.