by David Sax
Real trend forecasting happens behind the scenes, in detailed reports and presentations that the public rarely sees. It is a discipline that combines culinary obsession and food knowledge with economics, data aggregation, sociology, and anthropological field research. This is the intelligence wing of the food industry, its field agents and quants gathering info about what we are eating and what we’d like to be eating, and then pulling trends from that data. For the companies in the food industry, from the publicly traded behemoths like Dole to medium-sized firms such as POM, the forecasters are the equivalent of their CIA and Wall Street analysts, armed with twenty-page reports on the long-term viability of chia seeds as a food additive. They are the ones who shepherd food trends from the niche world of foodies to the mass market consumer.
Many in the field credit the modern business of trend forecasting to a woman named Faith Popcorn. Born in New York to the less delicious name of Faith Plotkin, Popcorn initially worked as a creative director in Madison Avenue advertising firms but noticed that what her clients really needed was someone to tell them where the market was moving in the future. In 1974 she opened her own strategic marketing company called Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve, which quickly became a success despite sounding like a snack food for chess players. Popcorn gathered data by interviewing people from around the world, reading widely about culture in different languages, and collecting standard consumer research surveys. She organized these into seventeen overarching behavioral trends that were present in society, including cocooning (the need to protect yourself from the outside world), down-aging (Baby Boomers find comfort in pursuits and products from their youth), and small indulgences (stressed-out consumers treat themselves in moderate ways). Popcorn characterized the specific foods that came out of these greater trends as “fads.” In the case of cupcakes, for instance, down-aging baby boomers sought small indulgences that reminded them of their youth. “None of those foods were the trend,” Popcorn told me. “They were manifestations of the trend.”
Popcorn is a masterful self-promoter and unashamedly boastful. She claims a 95 percent success rate in predicting trends, and though the robotic hugging booths and food replacement nutrition pills she forecast years back have yet to emerge (they eventually will, she believes), her firm has identified several key food trends ahead of time. Cocooning was Popcorn’s first big theory in the late 1970s, based around a growing fear of the polluted environment and safety in urban areas as well as the hangover effect of the late-night disco era, when people basically curled up in bed the next day nursing physical and emotional hangovers. In moments like these people gravitated toward comforting foods, available at home but without the need for preparation, and Popcorn forecast this would give rise to ready-to-eat meals, which became one of the fastest growing segments of the supermarket business. Cocooning’s safety driver led the way to Popcorn’s recommendation to Coca-Cola in 1981 that they needed to get into bottled water, which has since proven to be one of their most profitable divisions. Currently Popcorn believes that the trend “99 lives,” in which one has too much to do and too little time, causing a sort of schizophrenia, would lead to the rise of “clean energy” foods that will deliver sustained boosts of energy without the adverse health effects of caffeine, sugar, or products like Red Bull. “I think the future of food tells you how society’s going to be shaped,” Popcorn said. “Is it going to be a healthy society, a single society? If you want to understand a household, go and look through their garbage. That’s what we’re doing. We are analyzing future garbage.”
Since Popcorn’s start, the business of food trend forecasting has grown increasingly sophisticated, and the field falls into a number of different categories, separated by their goals and methodology. The most straightforward are the data-driven market research shops, which use publicly available sales figures, consumer surveys, and their own quantitative research to identify trends and advise their clients on how to best capitalize on them. These include companies such as Chicago’s Technomic, whose foodservice research is headed up by Darren Tristano, a native of the city who met me in Toronto one winter day dressed in a Bears baseball hat and sweatshirt. Tristano’s focus is the restaurant world, which includes everything from regional sandwich chains to catering companies like Sodexo that operate cafeterias and household names like McDonald’s. Technomic’s research covers nearly twenty markets around the world, and Tristano, who has a background in accounting, is constantly mining data to track food trends and divine where they are heading. “It’s easier to define what a trend isn’t,” Tristano said as we sat down for a coffee in a hip new restaurant where he commented on how the Edison-style filament lightbulbs they used were now starting to pop up in upscale fast casual chains (such as Chipotle or Panera Bread) around the United States. “A trend is an area where there’s growth and use.… You have to start with a food [or] flavor’s life cycle,” he said. “There’s a ground zero for it, where you can see where it is happening.”
The core of Tristano’s methodology lies in the company’s menu-tracking database, which monitors over two thousand menus and LTOs (a.k.a., limited time offers or “specials,” to you and me). The database covers a wide range of the dining world, from independent fine dining restaurants in major cities like Chicago and Miami to pizza chains in Calgary, providing a representative sample of what the market is eating right now. That data is backed up with consumer research and sales figures to provide an accurate look at what food is being ordered and what isn’t. Then Tristano and his team hit the road and complement their data with hundreds of field visits a year. Although being a restaurant tester sounds like a dream job, it’s an incredibly arduous task. “Every experience at a restaurant is a laboratory experiment,” said Tristano. “I’m ruined. I can’t go out and have a meal without thinking about what’s around me.” In a typical visit Tristano will look at a concept’s service format, decor, ambiance, price point, music, menu, service quality, presentation, taste, and many more factors. “We get really deep into the specific concept to see if it hits on a list of winning restaurant attributes. Within a study I’ll go to sixty restaurants, dine at twenty-five, and you’ve got to go through with that meal whether it’s a winner or not.” Some days he’ll check out twenty small chains, back to back to back.
For Tristano, trends can emerge out of several different areas. There are global-flavor trends, like chipotle peppers or harissa hot sauce that start in specialized markets and immigrant communities and then organically grow into the mainstream appetite over the course of decades. Forward thinking restaurant brands, such as the Cheesecake Factory, will send scouts around the world to look for dishes and flavors that they can eventually adapt and sell back in North America. There are supplier-originated trends, backed by branding campaigns, like the POM-driven pomegranate craze, and the recent upswing in avocado use, pushed by the Avocado Board, which has helped chains such as Subway develop a popular avocado sub for their menu. Fine dining trends continue to hold sway and trickle down from chefs to the mainstream market, though Tristano also acknowledges that the cycle is happening faster today, with chef-driven trends emerging quicker and dying sooner. Then there are the trends that come out of left field. One of Tristano’s favorite examples came around 2010 from a San Francisco McDonald’s, which was drawing a large crowd at 10:35 in the morning, when the restaurant switched over from their breakfast menu to the lunch menu. At that time there were still leftover breakfast sandwiches, and customers began ordering an Egg McMuffin along with a McDouble hamburger, combining the two of them to create a frankenburger McBrunch mashup that doesn’t appear on any menus, but online the chain’s fans have nicknamed it the Mc10:35, and discerning McDonald’s fans coast to coast are now ordering it. One day soon it will probably migrate to the official menu.
“I’m much more interested in what’s happening on menus at McDonald’s, Applebee’s, and Cheesecake Factory, because that’s where real people eat,” said Nancy Kruse, a former colleague of Tristan
o’s who now tracks trends for Nation’s Restaurant News, the magazine of the National Restaurant Association. “It’s not the super-rarified high-end Alain Ducasse in New York or the down-and-dirty mom-and-pop stuff. It may bubble up or trickle down from the independents, but until it starts appearing on chain menus, especially early adopters like California Pizza Kitchen or Cheesecake Factory, it’s hard for me to call it a trend.” Like Technomic, Kruse relies heavily on menu data from the industry, and she does not consider herself a futurist or trend predictor. She has been successful in calling some trends, but she fell short with others she believed were around the corner, such as the mainstream crossover of Indian food in America. Predicting trends is hardly an exact science, and it is getting trickier. Twenty years ago the path that trends followed from the niche to the mainstream flowed down vertically, from high-end kitchens to restaurant chains and eventually to supermarket products. Today trends are flying in from all directions, emerging from sideways influences, bottom-up tastemakers, and landing without warning from way out beyond the periphery. “I could say I take a look at all these factors and lay out an algorithm,” said Kruse, “but yes, to me, what it frequently comes down to is gut instinct. It’s very risky to set yourself up as the sort of last word on what’s going to be happening on menus because there’s so much room for surprise. The best any of us can do is take a commonsense approach, one would hope rooted by history in experience with trends, and then have some expectations. I can’t point you to one single reliable tool. We’re like Wall Street analysts with less data and money.”
Several food companies produce their own trend predictions that they either use as internal research or as a sales and marketing tool. One of the most high-profile is put out each year by McCormick, the Baltimore corporation that is the largest spice dealer in the world. In 2000, led by a recently appointed executive chef named Kevan Vetter, McCormick put together its first Flavor Forecast. The idea was to leverage the company’s advanced product knowledge, both from what McCormick’s divisions were working on and also what they were observing in the food world, and then use that knowledge to drive demand into new product categories by making their customers, particularly in the food industry, think about the possibilities around these trending flavors. Vetter’s team solicited information and opinions from across the company and emerged with the prediction that bold flavors would rule in the coming years. This was distilled down into a top-ten list of flavors, which included cinnamon, cumin, dill, and fennel as hot flavors to watch. “What was big was using sweet spices in main dishes, and savory spices in desserts,” Vetter told me, in an interview a few years back. “[We were] supporting trends with flavors we felt make sense.”
The Flavor Forecast became a tremendous hit with McCormick’s clients, and it grew from there. Each spring Vetter assembles his internal team, which includes members from McCormick’s kitchens, their sensory science group, marketing and customer research, and an outside panel of culinary influencers and tastemakers ranging from well-known chefs and bakers to food bloggers and cocktail mixologists. Similar reports in Europe and China are prepared with local chefs, with the flavors reflecting the tastes of those markets. The whole process begins five to six months before the report is released, with the team brainstorming flavor ideas on a big white board at McCormick headquarters. Along with input on culinary trends, economic indicators factor into the list. One year a statistical increase in sales of ball jars, which are used for home preserving, was interpreted as a sign that America was ready for more exposure to pickling spices. Hundreds of possible flavor combinations are suggested and then whittled down over the course of a week to twenty or so final contenders.
Because of its association with Thanksgiving, pumpkin spice mix entered the 2010 holiday forecast early on. The team quickly thought beyond pie, breaking down the ingredients of the mix (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice) to reveal flavors that often appear in Latin American and Caribbean dishes, such as jerk chicken. Often those same dishes require coconut milk, inspiring a potential pairing. Next, Vetter’s team headed to the test kitchen to develop and test recipes based on pumpkin pie spices and coconut. In order to be successful, a forecasted flavor needs to be versatile. It has to hit multiple places along the food chain, working within at least three categories, such as a savory main, snack food, and a cocktail. Pumpkin pie spice and coconut milk–rubbed short ribs, pumpkin-spiced coconut fudge, and a pumpkin whoopee pie with coconut cream filling were just three of the dozen or so recipes Vetter tested for that one flavor prediction. After recipe testing, Vetter’s team reconvenes to discuss what worked, what flopped, and which flavors will have the best impact with consumers, before settling on the final ten flavor combinations. The marketing department starts writing up the report, coordinating with McCormick product development to begin work on new industrial or consumer products that the flavor pairings may inspire, including the jars of McCormick spices you can buy at the supermarket. A few years ago, an entire line of toasted spices came out of one Flavor Forecast and have been one of the company’s better-selling products in recent years.
The Flavor Forecast is released to the public at year’s end, and over the next few months Vetter and the McCormick marketing team present its results to over a hundred major customers while the company’s distributors give hundreds more presentations to smaller clients. Each talk is tailored to the customer, so one to TGI Friday’s will be quite different from one at Nabisco. Sample foods are always provided, like cayenne and tart cherry brownies (2009), to suggest how McCormick’s customers might integrate these new pairings in their particular products. “Within a matter of a couple of months [of the report’s release] we’ll get orders,” said Alan Wilson, chairman, president, and CEO of McCormick & Company. “We’ll turn [a pairing] into specific products quickly on an industrial standpoint.… A chipotle idea becomes a sandwich sauce for a quick-service restaurant, a frozen dinner for another customer, and an ingredient for another customer.” In many ways the McCormick Flavor Forecast is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they call something a trend and then use that prediction to sell those flavors up and down the food chain, it’s like Goldman Sachs putting a buy rating on a stock they’re promoting and then profiting when the stock’s price inevitably goes up in reaction to that rating.
When food companies don’t have their own trend forecasting units—and most don’t—they often turn to two firms based around San Francisco who specialize in forecasting and responding to trends: CCD Innovations, where Kara Nielsen worked when I met her, and Mattson. A few mornings after the trend session at the Fancy Food Show I met Nielsen at CCD’s downtown offices near the city’s waterfront. A formally trained pastry chef, Nielsen found the CCD job on Craigslist a decade back and has since become one of the better-known trend experts in the business. Food trends, according to her, represented the evolving needs of people around eating, including economic needs, health needs, social needs, and political needs. A greater societal trend, such as green living, will emerge—that is, “I need to be better for the earth.” It will exert pressure and change our value as consumers (“I need to eat local”). As the value changes, our needs change—“I need local food”—and an opportunity arises to serve that change: “My company needs to sell local food.” Nielsen’s job is to identify trends at various points of their development, a process she classifies into five stages, and then write reports on those trends, a task she does over a dozen times a year. Then she will work with food companies to understand the opportunities associated with those trends and help CCD’s product development team create a packaged food product or menu item that brings that trend to their client’s target market.
CCD’s trend reports can focus on flavors, such as heat and spice, which may involve smoke-infused drinks found at cutting-edge cocktail bars at stage one of their development and something like Buffalo hot sauce–flavored ketchup at a stage five, when it is at its most accessible in the mass market. Nielsen remarked that I’d eve
n factored into one of the company’s trend reports, pulling up the company’s sixty-eight-page 2010 sandwich report, which cited the reinvented Jewish deli as a stage-two sandwich trend. I read through, astonished, as the report quoted extensively from my book on the subject along with several articles I had written. A surge of pride shot through me—that I had played a role in turning the nascent artisan Jewish deli scene into a mainstream food trend—but it also unnerved me a little to know that my work had been used, without my knowledge, to sell the corporate food world on appropriating the handmade pastrami I loved so dearly.
Nielsen draws a clear distinction between trends, which are slower-paced evolutions with deep cultural roots, and fads, which are superficial manifestations of those trends. A fad is something like the Paleo diet, which first came into fashion in 1975 for its focus on an abundance of raw protein, but a trend is the astronomical growth of Greek yogurt, which drew one of its strengths from the rising interest in high-protein foods but also had a number of other factors going for it. When Nielsen first wrote about Greek yogurt in 2007, she talked about its American arrival via Greek grocery stores in New York and its rapid adoption through tastemaking retailers like Trader Joe’s and Gristedes. “It was pushing a lot of buttons,” recalled Neilsen, “it was natural, pure, wholesome, strained, simple, and old world.” Other factors she identified in Greek yogurt’s imminent rise was its combination of high-protein, low-fat, and cultured probiotics, which were all in line with diet trends globally. Greek yogurt also benefited from a rising appreciation of tart dairy flavors, thanks to the popular Korean-style frozen yogurt chains, such as Pinkberry and Menchie’s, which were spreading from the West Coast across North America. And it was a continuation of a much longer lasting yogurt trend, which had begun in the 1970s with sour yogurts, evolved into the chunky FroYo of the 1980s, and hit Nielsen’s stage five in the 1990s when companies like Dannon and Yoplait added tons of flavorings and sugar to yogurt, to the point at which it lost its healthy image. Greek yogurt was a reset, a return to Yogurt 101, and now the cycle was ramping up again.