With one billion more people globally by 2040 and growing sustainability challenges, diversification in food ingredients has become key. Food businesses need to address deepening nutritional imbalances with more varied, nutrient-dense, plant-based ingredients, and deliver gut-organ health benefits. Upstream, more local, climate-smart crops and food bioengineering must be sought, while working with policymakers. The future is less about meat, corn or cocoa and more about millets, fungi and algae.
Delivery
This report comes in PPT.
Health and nutrition traits are close to becoming consumers’ top priority in foods, along with affordability. However, consumers in low-income brackets particularly lack micronutrients, leading to conditions like blindness and anaemia, whilst more mature markets see excessive consumption of sugar, salt, fat and protein, and struggle with rising obesity.
Gut health will take more centre stage, notably through its interactions with the brain and other organs. Probiotics, especially through bacteria and fungi fermented foods, but also algae in the longer term, hold promise in addressing these consumer needs. This must, however, increasingly be targeted to consumers’ gender, life stage and desired health benefits.
Food insecurity and nutritional gaps are largely caused by dominant agribusiness models, whereby ingredient sourcing is based on a few widely produced, resource-intensive commodities. The future must entail less meat consumption and a greater diversity of plant-based foods to reduce nutritional gaps.
Disruptions to food supply, driven by global warming and related severe weather events, have become much more frequent. A more local and seasonal approach to ingredient sourcing will not only help to boost countries’ self-sufficiency in essential food supply but will also make food production more climate resilient.
Beyond reducing sugar, salt and fat, controlling a product’s food matrix will become key amid the ultra-processed food debate. On the sustainability front, the EU’s Deforestation Regulation will be among the most influential laws on food production systems.
Health and Wellness encompasses a number of key claims made on a food or drink products that suggest a health and/or wellness positioning. It comprises positionings relating to better for you, dietary and free from, fortified/functional, health benefit, natural and organic. Please note that data is not available at this level or other aggregated claim levels.
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