"New food trends are popping up quicker, spreading more widely, and flaming out faster than ever before, which makes the food industry's job of appropriating them much more difficult. By the time a fast food chain has test marketed its line of Cronut knockoffs, the wave of public interest has already passed. Figuring out what the next food trends will be, and strategizing how to capitalize on them, has become that much more important. This has been a boon for the world of food trend predictions and forecasting, a small, highly influential subset of the food industry that has grown alongside the prominence of food trends. [..] for companies like Pepsico or Denny's, the innovation cycle takes years. Ideas are brainstormed, prototyped, kitchen tested, debated within dozens of boardrooms, tested in select markets, subjected to refinements and focus groups, prepared for a launch, advertised to the public, and slowly rolled out store by store, state by state, and country by country. The time line from the initial idea for a food to a consumer's first bite can be months in the quickest-moving companies and years for the largest ones, with the whole process costing many millions of dollars. [..] This is where food trend forecasting comes in. It 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 20-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. [..] 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. [..] 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. [..] 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. [..] 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." [..] 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. [..] In order to be successful, a forecasted flavor needs to be versatile. It has to hit multiple places along the food chain, working within at least three categories, such as a savory main, snack food, and a cocktail. [..] In many ways the McCormick Flavor Forecast is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they call something a trend and then use that prediction to sell those flavors up and down the food chain, it's like Goldman Sachs putting a buy rating on a stock they're promoting and then profiting when the stock's price inevitably goes up in reaction to that rating. [..] As the value changes, our needs change — "I need local food" — and an opportunity arises to serve that change: "My company needs to sell local food." [..] Nielsen draws a clear distinction between trends, which are slower-paced evolutions with deep cultural roots, and fads, which are superficial manifestations of those trends. A fad is something like the Paleo diet, which first came into fashion in 1975 for its focus on an abundance of raw protein. But a trend is the astronomical growth of Greek yogurt, which drew one of its strengths from the rising interest in high-protein foods but also had a number of other factors going for it."
