Recipe for the Future of Eating
Meet Jessie and James. They’ve been married for over 3 years now and neither of them will hesitate to say that this has been some of the most wonderful time in their lives. Just as long as you don’t mention cooking.
"What should we eat tonight?"
"Who's cooking?"
"Can you do the dishes?"
"I told you not to buy so much, now they are all going to waste!"
The lovebirds were both laughing with a hint of embarrassment as they recounted things that could have potentially "sabotaged" their marriage.
For a lot of people, cooking isn't an easy or pleasant experience when you have to do it every day. It can be the most stressful moment of the day, and it isn't hard to imagine how it could strain a marriage or family relationship. And it isn't just about the time pressure that 77% of Americans feel when rushing to cook a meal in less than an hour after a long day of work. Even experienced home chefs can get burnt out by the mental stress involved in figuring out what to serve on the dinner table every week, while trying to keep meals interesting, on budget, and with minimal waste.
Unlike many other families that cook to save money, eating out is an option for Jessie and James. The millennial couple make enough money to eat, travel, and enjoy the finer things in life from time to time.
"It’s hard to eat out and stay healthy. Do you know how much a quinoa salad with a little bit of chicken costs?", James joked, "Anything that sounds healthy are expensive, I guess there’s no traveling for us or we can't pay our rent!"
Humor aside, cooking is essential for many. Whether it's to sustain a balanced millennial lifestyle or keep the family sane and healthy, the benefits come with a substantial time and psychological expense for those who take on the responsibility in the household.
But wherever there's a problem, there's also opportunity for enterprising individuals.
Food channels, recipe websites, and food bloggers have all raced to rescue. There are certainly no shortage of recipe ideas on the Internet that attempt to inspire people with great dinner ideas., But choosing the right ones can be overwhelming. Content companies like Tasty are trying to make cooking seem less stressful by capitalising on our desire for simple and practical dinner ideas. Traditional media too, Jamie Oliver' "30 Minute Meals" ("15 Minute Meals" more recently) and other cookbooks that appeal to busy would-be home cooks constantly make the bestselling list.
But when it comes to actually saving people time and stress, the real game-changers came from several slick mobile apps.
Does this sound familiar to you?
You wake up late on Saturday morning with an empty fridge because you have had a busy week. You open Instacart, select what you want, and they will get all the ingredients you need for brunch within an hour. You don’t even have to get out of bed. Feeling even lazier? Place an order at your favorite breakfast place using UberEats or DoorDash. You can order whatever you want in a few taps.
The latest invention certainly counts meal kits. Anyone can order everything they need for a few specific recipes and have a box of ingredients in the exact amounts delivered to their home. The initial excitement among time-strapped consumers who still aspire to cook have successfully propelled leading companies like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh to IPO. But these companies can only continue to remain successful if the meal kit subscribers don’t cancel their services within a year - Most of them do.
Why is this happening? A lot of it has to do with the fact that meal kits are expensive, and people are certainly not thrilled by the excessive amount of tiny bottles and boxes that are used to transport the ingredients.
While all these advances in the food space certainly have made feeding ourselves and our families easier, consumers are still constantly making trade-offs between time, cost, health, and taste.
Eating tasty and healthy meals require either time or money, sometimes both. And there’s a real need to solve this problem, despite an incredibly challenging one. But as Jeff Bezos put it, if it’s a need that is not going away in the next 10 years, it’s a good problem to focus on.
Luckily, now we really have the opportunity to not just solve this problem, but to go about it in a way that’s actually good for our planet.
Here are couple personal predictions that, if all come true, will completely re-shape the economy of eating.
1. Robot
Eating at restaurants is more expensive than cooking, of course. When we eat at restaurants or order take-out, we outsource the labor of cooking by paying nearly 20% of the price of the meal.
Can robots replace chefs? Probably not anytime soon if we're talking about Michelin star chefs. But we can certainly expect to see robot chefs getting adopted in commercial kitchens, and they will be versatile enough to cook (or assist the preparation and cooking of) 90% of everyday dishes.
We have already seen fully automated restaurants serving customers, and pizza robots that bake the pizza while delivering it to you.
What about cooking at home? My first prediction is that the future of eating will involve minimal cooking at home. We will "liberate" ourselves from the time and stress spent planning and cooking meals.
But having robots cook for us is only the beginning.
2. Data
On average, up to 34% of the food in a restaurant is wasted. And in some cases, they are wasted before they even reach a customer’s plate.
If a restaurant know exactly who will come and what they will order, zero waste would not be just a dream, and the savings can certainly be passed onto the customers.
However, most restaurants today can't even make personalized recommendations to impress their customers. And even if a restaurant does a fantastic job tracking and making use of data, it can hardly predict the diverse and constantly shifting tastes of the entire population. Unless a restaurant (or chain) serves a significant amount of the population.
Don't be surprised though, some companies already have this capability. Companies like Grubhub and DoorDash have been collecting data at scale that they can tell you a particular customer is likely to order Vietnamese Pho next week because he loves Asian cuisine with noodles being his go-to option, but he has just grown tired of Japanese udon.
Two things may happen in the future:
Data will be shared among restaurants to better predict demand and preference
A single gigantic restaurant chain that serves a large portion of the population will also come to own a significant amount of the data about our eating habits and preferences.
Personally? I’m betting on the emergence of a big restaurant chain, but it won’t be anything like the restaurants we know today. For now, let's just call it "Big Food". It certainly will serve fresh, healthy food that’s highly customised to people's individual taste preferences, and possibly body conditions.
3. Supply Chain
When we buy groceries at supermarkets, we certainly don't enjoy the wholesales discounts that restaurants receive. And even if we want to buy in bulk, it's simply not realistic to store fresh ingredients in large quantities.
With a deep understanding of what people want to eat and what’s good for them, "Big Food" can accurately predict the demand for every ingredient and source ingredients very effectively at scale.
That's hardly where "Big Food" will stop. When it gets to serve millions of meals daily, owning the source is the only logical thing to do to enjoy maximum cost savings.
So, my third prediction is that, those who cook for us will also own the farms. But it would be a complete disappointment if it's all about chasing higher profitability. The significance of owning the sources of food is that, a forward-thinking (and ethical) "Big Food" that understands consumers' growing concerns about health and the environment can invest in developing sustainable farming that yield safer and more nutritious ingredients at much lower costs.
4. Logistics, Packaging, and Storage
Is cooking at home, eating at restaurants, or ordering take-out more environmentally friendly? This is a tough question to answer.
Besides food waste, there’s also packaging, disposable utensils, gas, electricity, and more.
Let's start with energy consumption.
Most of us likely believe that cooking at home should be more energy efficient. And for the most part, that’s true. Restaurants consume significantly more electricity keeping their lights, air-conditioning, and equipment running. This becomes an even larger problem when ordering takeout because of the gasoline burned to deliver your food. But when you count the round-trip required to pick up groceries, which are shipped in bulk to a restaurant in one truck load, the equation becomes complicated. That's also without considering the packaging and plastic bags that come with our grocery shopping.
As far as packaging waste is concerned, some studies even claim that the disturbing amount of packaging in meal kits cause less of an environmental impact than the food wasted due to poor grocery planning.
Without delving into every factor of the carbon footprint equation, we can assert that the food of the future needs to be both convenient and enjoyed without guilt.
So, here goes my final prediction.
"Big Food" will ship multiple cooked meals contained in environmentally-friendly containers that can stay fresh for an extended period of time, in a single delivery. It will leverage data to optimize its delivery routes for the lowest fuel consumption (thus lowest possible shipping costs too).
This also has significant implications to the roles of kitchen appliances. In the future, perhaps our fridge may exist mainly to keep these pre-cooked meals fresh, intelligent enough to defrost the meal you're going to eat tonight ahead of time, and automatically shrink its size to keep energy usage very efficient as meals are taken out. In any cases, kitchen appliances need to adopt this new way of eating.
Reality
Most of these "predictions" are already happening on their own separate ways. When you put all of them together, it's not hard to see the emergence of super massive centralized cooking facilities, which I refer to as "Big Food" earlier. These companies will develop the capability to:
Cook a wide variety of ready-to-eat dishes and cuisines that cater to a massive amount of the population’s daily meals.
Integrate every component required to produce a meal from farming to the last mile delivery.
And most importantly, produce fresh, nutritious, very affordable, and environmentally-friendly meals.
However, there are many reasons why "Big Food" may go against our interests and bring negative disruption.
Think about the types of companies that are in the best position to define "Big Food". They are the industry leaders in food processing, consumer packaged goods, grocery retail, and even appliance manufacturers, most of whom tend to care more about shareholders' interests. We certainly don't want our food to be filled with unhealthy ingredients and preservatives, or packaged in materials that don’t decompose for the next 1,000 years. But if what they offer is cheap enough, most people will easily give in, predictably.
A lot more ethical questions still need to be answered. One thing I’ve always wondered is: How will we use the time regained when we are freed from cooking? A few more books, or 2 more hours on Youtube?
I do believe that the future of eating is a future without cooking. But for now, cooking is still your best option if you plan well!
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Three More Food For Thought
Cooking will continue to exist and the market around cooking can still continue to be extremely vibrant, but it will likely exist as a hobby.
Food will be the next medicine, or “preventive healthcare” to be exact, and they will be tailored to our genetic makeup and body conditions.
A friend asked me: "If the future of eating is about efficiency, wouldn't the most efficient way to eat be taking pills that supply the optimal level of nutrients?" I do think that these "meal pills" might one day exist in the distant future, but its popularity would depend on the complementary VR experience that delivers a realistic eating environment that is essential to our human experience.
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