Institute For The Future

The global food system is reaching human and planetary limits. Chronic disease, rampant food waste, and environmental degradation are creating unprecedented constraints. However, over the next decade, entrepreneurs, farmers, chefs, and eaters will seize new opportunities to respond to these challenges.

IFTF’s Food Futures Lab identifies and catalyzes the innovations that have the potential to reinvent our global food system. Positioned at the center of Silicon Valley, California’s agricultural powerhouses, and the Bay Area’s dynamic food culture, IFTF's Food Futures Lab is embedded in an epicenter of food innovation and have ties to other innovation hubs in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. From this ideal location, we seek to understand the motivations, drivers, and impacts of food innovation, and to align the minds and resources shaping the future of food. We impart a shared understanding of how to take the long-term view—one that encompasses multiple scales, uncertainties, and radically different possibilities for the future of food.

Join us as we collaboratively forecast the future of food.

When you become a member of the Food Futures Lab, we help you make sense of emerging technologies, social behaviors, and scientific breakthroughs that will transform the global food system—and we help you take action toward a more resilient, equitable, and delicious future of food.

The IFTF Food Futures Lab:

• Maps new technologies, social behaviors, and scientific breakthroughs that will transform the global food system.
• Develops foresight based on research and futures thinking methodologies.
• Immerses stakeholders in possible futures through maps, videos, and artifacts from the future.
• Convenes multi-stakeholder exchanges and facilitates creative thinking about the future of food.
• Bridges community initiatives, leading-edge innovators, and large organizations for robust research and collaboration.
• Catalyzes action to make the future today.