[One step at a time]
Making predictions when you're young in your career is great because no one cares about your reputation, status or impact. When you get older, people might bash you on twitter or make a reverse index fund about how wrong you are.
Anyways, I'm not sure if I'm old or wise but predicitons are fun mainly because it allows me to make a bet and pay attention to things happening in the world, It takes past insights to focus on future bets. Here are mine for 2025. A core theme this year is not just food innovation, but more-so, the other innovation trends that will affect food.
More Safe Sequels
Money talks when it comes to predictions, Disney has validated a thesis: sequels sell. Inside Out 2, Deadpool and Wolverine, Moana 2, were 3 of the 5 highest grossing films in 2024. What do they have in common? Disney owns them and they are all sequels.
Safe sequels are coming back to food too. Entrepreneurs in food who’ve made exits are coming back with more money and more celebrities, CEO’s in quick serve restaurants are jumping in and asking for an unrealistic amount of money to fix their company. Trends old as time such as protein are now getting even more focus as they shove the macromolecule in literally anything.
The zeitgeist is shifting to where something completely new is very risky and most do not find the risk of seeing it be profitable worth it. It makes sense. In the current year of 2025, we are focused much more on profitability than shots in the dark. What is already working, we should do it again, right?
We notice this is happening mainly on the consumer side. Entertainment is focusing much more on rehashing old favorites and food in general, has had some very boring innovations this last year.
I myself am going back into My Food Job Rocks instead of creating something new because I feel I have a safer bet on making money doing this than something new.
Reactive To Other Innovation Triggers
We can’t deny 2024 wasn’t the year of innovation. The issue was that it wasn’t the food industry that was doing it. It was Eli Lily with Ozempic, Open AI with ChatGPT and Donald Trump winning the USA election with the richest man in the world helping him. In my book, these things have the chance to trigger innovation.
More innovation is being consolidated to the top players as we’ve changed the dynamics of how we present making the world better. Because these big players have a surplus of capital, have the ability to cut down costs, and now have political power, this will cause a high ceiling for smaller
players to breakthrough. This is sad, but it’s happening.
With this, food is not part of this innovative set and despite how much we talk about our small pond of innovative food products and technology, it shadows the ocean that Ozempic, AI and policy can fundamentally shift our seas. Therefore, expect more reactivity to these mega-innovations.
Food companies should play offense and play in speed by focusing on using AI to
speed up development, and prepare for the possible reformulation of their
beloved products.
Prepare to see a lot of failures due to either rushing in or in-action. I do think we are going to see a lot of bad AI generated products hit the market this year (you will be able to tell), big food’s stock prices tanking (if people don’t eat addictive products, they lose money) and a possible reshaping of what we consider harmful ingredients in our food system.
Companies that turn a blind eye to these trends are at risk of getting stomped.
Might write more about it. Each of these three innovation triggers are interesting.
Branding is Dead
Long live bad design and reactions to memes. There has been a tremendous amount of branding flops this year and it has become this double edged sword. See Jaguar.
The big thing is with AI making brands and stale content, there is an even bigger gap on authenticity and most customers can recognize it when an influencer doesn’t care about the product, or if a brand is branding for branding sakes. Customers sniff this out and crave authenticity. It seems the best way to get authenticity is through either personal stories, divisive
viewpoints, or reaction to trends (memes, news, etc)
Reactions to memes also seems to get a huge amount of push. Anyone who runs their socials know that reacting to these brands is literally a full time job. I believe the Harris campaign had 6 overworked and most likely underpaid social media experts post reactionary tiktoks to get millions of views. Most likely, the person running your social media (or yourself) is severely underpaid and underappreciated.
But we don’t completely understand the ROI when it comes to posting memes (after all, Harris did lose the election). Would love to understand it a little more. I do think there has to be some sinew of brand design when it comes to this. If you just care about eyeballs as a metric, it’ll make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But it might not pay the bills.
One can argue the landscape is shifting to focus on people. Though this is very difficult to do, i think it's very impactful to hear more from founders in less-polished formats.
Regenerative Rising
California is generally where trends happen and even the smallest trends like Regenerative Agriculture begin to pop up and are being put more emphasis on things. The two conferences I've went to, Naturally Bay Area and Food Funded, had a heavy emphasis on Regenrative Agriculture.
For Sobo Foods, we entered the Naturally Bay Area Pitch Slam and won second place. The first prize as a phenomenal bootstrapped company called Philosopher Foods with a badass product called Gut Nuts. After a speech about regenerative agriculture from Patagonia, this symbolizes something trending. Something that is getting pushed hard.
How is this going to play? It is trending the same way as Organic, Non-GMO and Plant-based. Basically, there’s interest and a lot of greenwashing and the next five years we will struggle to answer what is truly Regenerative, some opportunistic entrepreneur will find some way to monetize it via certification, and the cycle of life continues.
If you are planning to enter the regenerative space, it’s important to research how these cycles rise and fall and how many successes, and years it takes to build up movements like this. It’s important to not get caught up in the hype and focus on the everlasting benefits of things like these.
Alternative Protein's Hurricane-Tsunami Situation
As a sector, we are facing gigantic headwinds and suffering from a destructive tide set to destroy all ships. For alternative protein companies, they are in a rough spot and in my opinion, the next five years will be very difficult for food tech unless a crisis happens where the technology is needed.
Right now, it’s not needed and I suggest that we go back to the drawing board and really figure out the science behind improving the products. The stories I’ve heard from laid off scientists working in these food tech companies have been disappointing in a technology point of view.
We have to give props when it comes to what we’ve built in this space and it has been very fun learning about pushing food forward. It’s also been very fun being in the thick of it where we choose growth at all cost, pay frivolously for bad services, and overpay bad people. The great news about science is that it keeps evolving. The lessons you learned here, whether it was success or failure will help in other areas in food.
A current auction of Motif Foodworks and Meati equipment shares a stainless steel orphanage and a reminder of frivolous spending in a more prosperous time. I enjoyed my time in this sector and it made me financially well off so I can’t complain.
Right now, it is wise to hunker down and research. If the volitility of cocoa and eggs is any indicator that the current supply chain is stressful, these tehcnologies will have their place in the future.
Bonus Prediction
Unrelated to food, I think KATSEYE will be the biggest musical influence in 2025 and is a statement about how national players are starting to globailize everything. The parent company behind KATSEYE took their K-pop success model and are going for the global throat. Specifically, global brands should pay attention to how Hybe Group did this with an extreme amount of detail and apply it to how they market their products.
