Forward Focus

Throughout his career, food scientist and futurist Tony Hunter has been fascinated by systems. From his early days overseeing quality assurance and new product development as technical manager for several Australian meat processors, Hunter demonstrated an ability to think beyond conventional methods, obvious solutions, and traditional sources of insight and inspiration.

An offer by his company to spearhead a new facility in Brisbane spurred an opportunity to create a new model of efficiency and innovation. After a couple of years at the new facility, “We were making pizza toppings and hamburger patties, but I got bored,” Hunter recalls. This boredom fueled his drive to expand the business.

The company acquired a business that made meat pizza toppings, and Hunter’s team scoured the globe, sourcing best practices in operations, plant design, and technology from a wide range of food processing suppliers and facilities. “My engineer was from the sugar industry,” Hunter says. “My plant manager was from the toppings and syrups industry. My R&D manager was from the fats and oils industry. And I had one other person who was from the traditional small goods and meat industry. So, my people had a whole different approach: They were not thinking inside the box. Our approach was, we don’t need to worry about how other people have always done it. Let’s just go out and do it the way that we think will work the best.”

Their reconnaissance paid off: The Brisbane plant incorporated all-in-one rooms for pepperoni processing, cutting labor costs significantly, and became an early adopter of immersion liquid nitrogen systems for freezing meat pizza toppings like diced ham, bacon, and sliced cabanossi and pepperoni.

The effort to identify and embrace systemic change foreshadowed Hunter’s later work as a futurist and consultant. He was curious to learn more about the emerging cultivated and plant-based meat segment, and a 2018 trip to a Good Food Institute conference, made soon after he founded his own consultancy, was an epiphany.

“I came back convinced the world of food would never be the same again,” Hunter says. “It was fundamentally changing with these new technologies coming into food. And so that’s when it reinforced my interest in the futurist space.”

These days, Hunter is more likely to be on an international speaking circuit than at his office in Brisbane, where Food Technology caught up with him to discuss the science, technologies, and consumer trends likely to impact food system innovation in the coming decades.

Let’s start with a basic question: What exactly is a food futurist?

Well, I’m not a fortune teller, and anyone who says they can predict the exact future, I say, is either a fool or a liar, and they’re probably just trying to make money.

No one knows the exact future, so what we need to do is be prepared for various alternative futures. We need to be agile, adaptable, and flexible enough to take advantage of whatever future becomes reality.

By exploring and understanding the future we can backcast to ask ourselves, ‘what do I need to do today?’ If I’ve got $100 million today, do I spend it on that new factory or do I spend it on recruitment in the new R&D center? Once I’ve made that decision, it’s gone, so I need to be very careful today, because current decisions limit future actions.

Food and technology are inextricably linked. You cannot talk about one without talking about the other.

In your presentations, you say that “food is technology.” What do you mean by that?

In today’s world, food and technology are inextricably linked. You cannot talk about one without talking about the other. And one thing we know about technologies is that they advance exponentially. That makes it dangerous to live linearly in an exponential world.

You cite five technologies that are going to fundamentally change the food system.
What are they?

They are alternative proteins, cellular agriculture—and that’s both animal and plant cellular agriculture—genomics, the microbiome, and synthetic biology, aka precision fermentation, among other things.

Those five technologies are going to drive the future of food. And we’ve seen in the last 12 or 18 months how AI (artificial intelligence), sensors, and quantum computing are going to accelerate each of those technologies.

What do these technologies mean? What do they mean for consumers? What do they mean for industry? They all overlap to an extent because what affects the consumer affects what they want from food companies. What food companies offer affects what consumers will eat, so it’s that cycle of innovation.

You have degrees in food science and microbiology. How does your scientific training coupled with industrial experience inform your work?

The line separating threats and opportunities depends on who you’re talking to. Many of the food technologies we talk about these days could be pretty disruptive.

I think the worst thing in the world we could do is disrupt the current global food system. The current global food system, with all its problems, does a really good job of feeding people. And if we stop raising animals for food tomorrow, in about two months, no chickens; six or seven months, no pigs; a couple of years, no cattle. Where are we going to get the protein from? Show me how we can scale any other source of protein fast enough to feed the global population healthily. We can’t do that.

That’s why I call it reimagining the global food system because we reimagine how it works, and we add new parts on top of it. We’re adding to the current global food system.

Give an example of how you draw these connection points.

Now, I’m not an academically qualified futurist, but what I’m doing is using all my background of food science and technology, general management, and a futurist perspective to say, look, this is what the future could hold.

I look at what, as a futurist, I call “signals of change.” These are things that 99.999% of people have never heard of but are out there. What do these indicate? What do they show about a potential future? One of those technologies that I came across recently was the cyborg computer chip where they’ve put mouse neurons onto a computer chip and the chip can smell better than a dog’s nose.

Now, think about what if you were to use that to digitize taste? What if you could smell a food, match it to a consumer database of a particular country that likes a particular flavor profile, and say, from smelling this product, it will meet that consumer’s needs?

And if you combine that in the long-term future with things like generative AI, then that leads to what I call an alternative future. What we then do is we look at that long-term future and then we backcast and say, ‘okay, I don’t know if this future is going to eventuate, but how do I have sufficient strategies in place that I can be flexible, agile, and adaptable if it does?’

Given that, how do you discern a fad from a trend? How do you decide which data points
are worthy of attention?

I don’t have a problem with that because I’m not concerned with fads or trends. I’m concerned with the long term. A fad isn’t leading you into the future. It’s just a manifestation of what’s happening, what’s here today. But that fad can lead to a trend and still be part in a general way of a long-term future.

It’s not linear.

No, it’s not linear. Some trends you can rely upon; for instance, unless we have a dramatic event, we’re going to have more people on the planet and a growing middle class. The long-term future is more people on the planet to feed, so you can take that to the bank.

And then you need to look at how consumer trends are developing, and that’s when you look to say, ‘okay, this is potentially the long-term future for consumers. What trends am I seeing that are either pointing in this particular direction or perhaps pointing me in a different direction, and what new technologies are coming up?’

As a futurist, I’m looking at what all these signals mean, which is different from looking at the short term. Oh yes, this Tex-Mex sushi fusion trend is coming up. That’s great. Let’s get into that for the next 12 or 18 months. But what does that mean for the future? Is that something that’s having an effect on the long-term future, or is it just something in the marketplace that will come and go, like so many things?

How do you use technology as a litmus test?

If we look at our lives, technology is everywhere. We don’t even think about it anymore. Streaming videos, audio, private companies shooting rockets into space, mRNA vaccines etc. Our future, including food, is inextricably linked with technology.

And that’s why when I look at these things, I talk about Gen Alpha, born 2010 to 2024; forget Gen Z. The long-term future of food will be driven by Gen Alpha. By the end of 2024, there’ll be two billion Gen Alphas on the planet, the largest generation the planet has ever seen.

People talk about Gen Alpha being digital natives. I say, no, no, no ... They’re technology natives. They’ve grown up with a smartphone in hand, streaming video, streaming audio. They expect technology in everything they do. And that’s why I say a future where these Gen Alphas say, “I want technology in everything I do, but not food,” is an unlikely scenario.

You can’t do much research on Gen Alpha because they’re children. But you can look at previous generations and recent research has shown that of Gen Z, 77% of them said they’re comfortable with technology being used in their food; Gen Y, 67%; boomers and Gen X, 58%. If you take some extrapolation, the indications are that they [Gen Alpha] are going to be very comfortable with technology, particularly the technology that meets their other needs like sustainability.

That’s where we’re going to see that long-term future, because by 2030, the first of the Gen Alphas are going to be 20 years old. By 2050, the youngest are going to be 26, and they’re already influencing purchasing. In the United States, 81% of millennial parents said their child had influenced their last purchase. They’re affecting an enormous amount of purchasing power now, even though they don’t have a lot of their own.

Any company that thinks they should wait until 2028 when the first Gen Alphas are 18, forget it. They’ve already made up their minds because Gen Alphas overage dramatically on information, so by age eight or 10, they know more than previous generations knew at 18 or 28.

They’ll take that messaging to each other. They’re so well-networked that the concept of word of mouth is exponentially higher with them.

And if you look where those Gen Alphas are, they’re down through India, Asia, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. That means anyone sitting in their comfortable offices in Australia or the United States who thinks that they only need to worry about trends in the United States or Australia is sadly mistaken.

And the best examples are K-pop and K-beauty and the way they’ve hit the world. What one Gen Alpha loves virally affects every Gen Alpha across the entire planet, the butterfly effect. Gen Alpha consumers in the United States and Australia will be just as receptive to a whole new trend that comes up out of Korea or the Philippines or China, India, or anywhere else. These trends are going to be far more global than we’ve ever seen before. As you point out, the interconnectivity is just enormous.

What’s another consumer-tech innovation that you see significantly impacting food?

Personalization. If you look at advances in genomics, and advances in the microbiome in particular, they are going to have massive impacts on consumer personalization because we’re realizing just how individual people are. When I was a microbiologist back in the old days, the only good microbe was a dead microbe. Now we know that if we killed all of our gut microbiome, we could only extract a minute amount of the nutrition that we currently extract from our food. The understanding of the role of the gut microbiome is the biggest impact on food and nutrition we have ever seen.

That ability to look at how we react to our food is advancing all the time. Technologies like sensors—one in four people in the United States have something like an Apple Watch, smartwatch, or a Fitbit—are already measuring a lot of our reactions to food. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg; we’ll soon be able to measure far more metabolic indicators.

At the cutting edge, we are now seeing the development of “smart skin.” It’s a flexible patch you can apply to your skin, it’s self-powered and it measures blood glucose, it measures your heart rate, sleep habits, temperature, all sorts of other things and feeds the information back to your smart device. We’re seeing people being able to measure more and more of the impact of food on their body. We’re realizing that we’re all highly individual in our reaction to food.

And sequencing our genome is becoming cheaper and more common. It’s now heading towards US$100, at which point it’s a case of what will I do? Maybe I’ll sacrifice a coffee every day this month to pay for having my genome sequenced. When you think about it, it’s mind blowing. But I can go and have that done and combine a DNA analysis with a microbiome analysis, then combine that with all my reactions to food, and pair it with a generative AI that can interpret this information to optimize my health and nutrition.

The idea of personalization sounds great to me as a consumer. To a commercial food company that is, by definition, trying to produce at scale, this is daunting.

It is, but that's the thing—we’ve concentrated on making one formulation of one product and making lots and lots and lots of it very cheaply. Can that continue? I don't know.

Or are companies going to say with, for instance tomato soup, no, based on people’s metabolomes, I actually need five different tomato soups if they’re going to capture the whole market or maybe they’ll concentrate on one particular metabolome and market their product that way.

Again, what's the alternative future? Will a big company say, I'm now going to go out and I'm going to make five different tomato soups. I'm going to capture every single market? Or are they going to find the formulation that is best for the majority of people and then leave the consumer with their AI and everything else to add the other nutrients they need that the company can't incorporate.

When we look at all the emerging food technologies—AI, personalization, CRISPR, cultivated meat—what rises to the top of the priority list for you, near term?

I think the number one thing to focus on is the microbiome, because since 2012, research has gone exponential, but we are still barely scratching the surface. What we have are a lot of correlations, but not a lot of causality. And I think in the next 10 years, we’re going to see a lot more causality. We will know that if we promote this microbiome or prevent this microbiome from occurring, we will affect this disease or people’s likelihood of getting that disease. I don’t know how you can overestimate its impact. And companies need to be looking at that and saying, ‘how do my products affect the human microbiome?’

I think if you look at the other great technology we’ve talked about, you mentioned CRISPR, and gene editing generally. I don’t know whether CRISPR will even be around in 10 years’ time or something else will have taken its place. But gene editing is going to be essential for many reasons. One is that with climate change and the changing climatic patterns for our growing seasons and growing geographies, we are going to need to adapt our plants far quicker than we can do otherwise.

Technology excites some people, but spurs fear and anxiety in others, especially in the context of food. How do you navigate that conflict?

A favorite story I tell at some conferences is to ask, who here likes cheese? Hands go up. Let me tell you how cheese was [historically] made … And I go into using the fourth stomach of a two-day old dead calf. And a lot of people go, "Ugh." No, no. Don’t worry. We've now put the gene for chymosin, the primary enzyme from the calf stomach, into a microorganism. And since the 1990s, cheese has been made by using this fermentation-produced chymosin. If you've eaten hard cheese or a soft cheese in an industrialized country like Australia, the United States or Europe, you have eaten a food made with a product of a genetically modified organism. Are you now going to stop eating cheese?

As a speaker I’ve told thousands of people this story and asked that question. Not one audience member has ever said, "My gosh, it's made with a product of a genetically modified organism. I'm going to stop eating cheese now." Why? Because there's something in it for me. I want to keep eating cheese because I love it and it doesn’t seem to have hurt me for the last 10, 20, 30, however many years I’ve been eating it.

Let’s close out with the opposite of my earlier question: What technologies are we focusing too much on?

I think the whole ultra-processed discussion. The NOVA system, in my opinion, is a socio-political classification of food. It is not 100% scientifically based. And I think that the categories, a lot of them don’t make sense.

I checked one of the food retailers with a major processor in the United States of  ham. It has 10 ingredients. I look over here in Australia, I have 13 ingredients. And according to the NOVA system, these hams are better than a plant-based burger? And you’re telling me that it’s all right to use salt and butter as a culinary ingredient, but if I put that in a food from a major CPG company that that’s no good anymore. Have you seen the amount of salt and butter chefs put in their food, and you’re telling me that’s good?

Again, [there are] a lot of correlations between ultra-processed foods and diseases. But where’s the causality? The whole thing is diverting us from looking at the true nutritional value of the foods and looking at the macro and micronutrients in there and saying, how do they affect human nutrition? And again, how do they affect our microbiome? I think that it is diverting resources and taking up a lot of attention.

If you don’t have a generative AI new product development strategy by the end of this year … you’re at risk of being so far behind the curve, you may never catch up.

So focus less on the process, and more on the food itself?

Absolutely. When you ask a food technologist to go and formulate a product, they’ve got a list of ingredients. They go down the list, use their experience and they find the best combination they can. They know what price point they’ve got to make and that the consumer’s got to like it, and they do that, and they come up with a product.

But that goes back to our generative AI and our models of human nutrition and understanding the microbiome. We can give that AI, instead of the food technologist with 20 ingredients, how about 20,000 ingredients, and tell the AI what you want, optimized for sustainability of the ingredients, flavor, nutrition, cost, supply chain, the whole lot.

Generative AI is simply the most impactful technology in the last 20 years. If you don’t have a generative AI new product development strategy in your organization by the end of this year or early next year, you’re at risk of being so far behind the curve, you may never catch up.ft