3 #FutureOfFood Trends in 2017

10,000 years in the remaking, the food industry is now one of the fastest changing industries in 2017.

Over the last few decades, we’ve seen very little innovation in the food industry, an industry often seen as stagnant and conservative, innovating on brands but still basically made serving up the same raw ingredients our grandparents ate.

Here are three trends transforming how we eat today and the accelerating trends happening within the next few years.

1. Plant Powered

Re-imagined plant proteins, from soy, to pea protein are being deployed to transform the foods we know and love for the better by companies like Beyond Meat (with alternatives for both chicken and burgers), Tofurky (bringing new deli-slice options to our sandwiches), Miyoko's Cheeses (making cheeses the old fashioned way, except using nut milk instead of Dairy), The NotCo (rebuilding conventional egg and dairy based foods using a deep machine learning driven understanding of each proteins properties like Mayo, Milk and Yogurt) and New Wave Foods with POP! Shrimp that are indistinguishable from the real thing, except without the deep environmental impact!

With sales of many plant based products growing over 30% year on year and the purchase of some of one of the biggest producers, white wave foods by Dannon for $10.4B last year, plant based foods are now a big and high growth business globally!

2. Cultured Meat

Over the last two years, Lab Grown meat (often called Cultured or Clean meat) has moved from being a science fiction concept into a reality driven by companies like Memphis Meats, which made the first lab grown pork meat ball, beef fajita, chicken strip and Duck l'orange and Mosa Meats, which made the first lab grown hamburger, real meat, grown from animal muscle cells.

Last week, Hampton Creek's announcement that they’ll be selling cultured (lab grown) meat within a year (2018) to consumers, following fast on the heels of pioneers like Memphis Meats, Mosa Meats and Finless Foods (who grow cultured fish meat). The race is now on to be the first to company to bring cultured meat to market, as early as next year!

The speed of disruption to the massive $500B+ meat market is likely to catch companies like Tyson and countries like New Zealand and Brazil totally by surprise, turning large industries and countries into the next Detroit's unless they adapt and quickly!

3. GMO everything

Companies like Impossible Foods and Soylent are transforming the way that GMO foods are viewed, once seen from the tarnished lens of Monsanto’s bad business practices. Today’s GMO’s are being produced and brought to the public by trailblazing new and cool startups that are making products millennials LOVE.

The impossible burger uses engineered (GMO derived) plant heme to give their burgers the metallic taste and smell of blood and Soylent, shouts loudly its love for it's GMO derived ingredients, including placing prominent billboards on LA freeways.

Expect to see more of this embrace of GMOs as the big food giants begin to realize that GMOs are no longer a swear word but with the right mission, positively impacting the environment, produced ethically and openly, something to be embraced and supported!

Today, the future of food is clearly being driven by re-imagined plant proteins, Cultured Meat and GMO's. Over the next couple of years, the food on our plate will be transformed as much as it has been over the last 10,000, we'll need it to meet the needs of the next 2 billion humans joining us on this planet.