The Tastemakers (22 page)

This is where food trend forecasting comes in. Each holiday season, as the year ends, food trend predictions seem to rain down on the food media from the heavens like Christmas carols in the shape of top-ten articles and online slide shows telling us that 2015 will be the year for udon soup and pig's feet or other dishes making the rounds at various hot spots. Written by journalists, bloggers, and hospitality consultants, these are almost exclusively based on firsthand observations (i.e., “I went here and I ate this”), culled from the most widely documented chef's creations. In a time when any interested eater can travel to the most talked about restaurants, read local blogs, and buy the best-selling cookbooks, putting together an educated amateur's roundup of the trends that culinary tastemakers are talking about is a fun, reasonably accurate reflection of what is happening in the world of food today. Some of those ideas may eventually end up as frozen entrees or soda flavors in your shopping cart, but most won't.

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.

M
any 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 Tristano'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.