#Digital Food Trends
The ‘yoga poses’ of amateur food photography are many and varied. There’s the ‘archer’: smartphone clasped at the chest to snap a snack in the other, extended fist. Or ‘candlelight salutations’, which involves careful rearrangement of a sit-down meal so as to achieve the perfect lens flare for a moody composition. Or the drone – a personal favourite of mine to spot in the wild: an aerial shot of the plate, often achieved by standing on a chair.
The casual documentation of what we ingest has become so common that many restaurants now forbid photography at their tables; most famously perhaps New York’s Momofuku Ko. Food is for sharing, but it is unlikely that the developers of Instagram originally anticipated that it would dominate their image-sharing platform.
To many, food is best enjoyed when in company. Eating is intimately connected to our social lives, not to mention that eating out is a sign of prestige for many people – freshly shucked oysters win out over Big Macs. TIME points out that millennials might not buy cars and houses anymore, but they do splurge on food. However, it does ignore that good meals could be a small luxury that fill the gap left when bigger aspirations are not on the menu. It’s no wonder that social networks are full of food: we love talking about it.Like any industry, gastronomy is constantly evolving its production lines and supply chains. Many food chains provide digital menu tablets, and Pizza Hut has floated a concept for an interactive dining table (shown in the above video). But the technology already in the hands of customers has brought significant change, through ‘foodstagramming’ and peer reviews.
Food is for Sharing
The sharing and crowd reviewing culture has put the industry under constant scrutiny – according to audience measurement service Quantcast, review site Yelp.com customarily tops five million unique international visitors per day. It also brought a fresh surge of democratisation to the scene. Atmosphere and presentation still play a large role, but the hotspots of the past few years are often defined by carefully constructed casualness rather than starched tablecloths. One-dish restaurants and the ever-expanding street food culture further perpetuate that taste for simplicity. As a tool for foodie single-mindedness, the app Foodspotter has been around since 2009 to enable its users to globally find, track and share great dishes, and great dishes only – never mind the full menu or the side dishes in between.
Digital hubs like Foodspotter or Urban Spoon have become almost as integral to the dining experience as the tables we gather around. But do those extra presences around the hob spoil the stew? A fully automated machine that can chuck out 400 artisan burgers an hour power-charges supply, but networked eaters have caused restaurants to become considerably more laid back, shaking up ideas of what constitutes value in a dining setting.
Sustainable Sustenance
Networked eaters have impact on the supply because their amplified voices have a lot more leverage on its accountability. As the organic food sector keeps growing and the slow food movement has taken root from Seattle to Shanghai, customers who stock their home pantry from the local farmer’s market want comparable access to information on their lunch breaks and date nights.
Californian restaurant Harney Sushi provides sashimi complete with edible QR codes. These redirect patron’s smartphones to trace the fish’s provenance and sustainability via the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fish watch site. Others lead to YouTube videos of the responsible fishermen at work. The sushi business is struggling with sustainability issues, and open discussion like this is ahead of other high-end establishments. For years, the London branches of international Nobu restaurants washed their chopping boards clean of the questionable serving of endangered bluefin tuna by adding an asterisk on the menu that denoted the item as environmentally challenged – thus holding that they are merely fulfilling orders.
McDonalds, who in all fairness probably don’t brush shoulders with the likes of Nobu on a regular basis, has begun building a better track record of stepping up to the plate. In 2013, McDonalds and DDB released ‘TrackMyMacca’s’ in Australia. By scanning the specially-designed sandwich boxes, the app makes use of the device’s geo tag and McDonald’s’ real time supply chain data to present the origin of some of the ingredients (including the beef or fish of the patties) through an augmented reality interface.Chipotle, a US Mexican fast food chain McDonald’s completely divested itself of in 2006, is certainly seeing healthy international growth alongside its ‘Food with Integrity’ branding. The current public positioning started with the company’s first ever ad film Back to the Start in 2011 (see below), but goes back to a mission statement from 2001, which saw it skew its supply chain towards family farms over concentrated animal feeding operations (or factory farms) under founder Steve Ells’ initiative. As a result, public opinion of Chipotle is very favourable, and further buttressed by one-on-one customer interactions from a dedicated team via its social media accounts (and by gifting the world the cardiac arrest of secret menu items).
Watch the Film Advertising Crafts Yellow Pencil Winner'Back to the Start'
For the global food market, knowledge of the provenance of your meal has become the ultimate luxury food staple. And with a lot of transparency comes a lot of trust and loyalty.
Feeding the People
The remaining question is how these trends benefit those living on tight budgets. The former president of US supermarket chain Trader Joes, Doug Rauch, is working on ‘Daily Table’, a combined supermarket and café, which plans to offer affordable high quality food to an economically challenged neighbourhood in Boston – by applying culinary and food safety expertise to goods that are openly past their sell-by date. The New York Times has a full interview concerning the project with Rauch. The reality is that one-third of edible food becomes refuse across the US and Europe, and commercial best before dates only add to that pile.
If our elaborate information networks can distribute in-depth details on the perfect bowl of ramen, they can be put to work redistributing food and supplying it with a safety layer of information on its lifespan. Grassroots movements like Feeding the 5000 or San Francisco’s Neighborhood Fruit are already doing it. After all, not wasting food is the simplest contribution to sustainability.
This feature was originally published on Brand Perfect.
This feature was originally published on Brand Perfect.
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