Institute For The Future

IFTF’s Food Futures Lab identifies and catalyzes the innovations that have the potential to reinvent our global food system. We help stakeholders—multinational food companies, farmers, chefs, entrepreneurs, and more—make sense of emerging technologies, social behaviors, and scientific breakthroughs and take action toward a more resilient, equitable, and delicious future of food. Our research explores the motivations, drivers, and impacts of food innovation. We take the long-term view—one that encompasses multiple scales, uncertainties, and radically different possibilities for the future of food. We leverage foresight frameworks and processes to enable groups to imagine—and create—the futures they want for their organizations, their communities, and the world.

What We Do

• MAP new technologies, social behaviors, and scientific breakthroughs that will transform the global food system.

• DEVELOP FORESIGHT based on research and futures thinking methodologies.

• IMMERSE stakeholders in possible futures through maps, videos, artifacts from the future, and in-person workshops and conferences. 

• BRIDGE community initiatives, leading-edge innovators, and large organizations for robust research and collaboration.

• CATALYZE ACTION to make the future today.

Public Research

View all publicly-available research »         

Current and Past Partners

Foresight for Global Food Innovators

In addition to our research and projects with food brands, we catalyze long-term futures thinking across a global network of food innovators to help expand their impact. Our foresight inspires people around the world to build new solutions for urgent food futures.

• We're a co-founder of the Food Innovation Program—a first-of-its-kind graduate degree that combines classroom learning with prototyping and a global exploration of food innovation hubs—with Italy's University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Future Food Institute. 
• We shaped challenges at the Food Hackathon: Nutrition for All, and designed Rethink Food to Remake the World, an ideation framework for the Bimbimbap Hackathon.
• IFTF taught a "Thinking Like a Food Futurist" master class to students and young entrepreneurs at the 2017 global Thought for Food Summit, held in Amsterdam.
• We partnered with Meat and Livestock Australia's Young Value Chain Innovators program to create a three-day Future Food Experiences design workshop with farmers and food technologists from across the region.

Contact us at foodfutures@iftf.org to learn more about our special projects and how to collaborate with us.

Partner with us Today!

The Food Futures Lab is supported in part by IFTF’s Future 50 partnership—a circle of future-smart organizations that think strategically about near-term choices to reshape the long-term future. Future 50 draws on a half century of futures research from our labs focusing on society and technology, the economy and the environment, food and health. Its goal is to create the perspectives and expert viewpoints, the signals and the data, to make sense out of disruptive forces in the present. Grounded in a framework of Foresight-Insight-Action, the Future 50 partnership invests in critical research, boundary-stretching conversations, and strategic experiments that will shape the business, social, and civil landscapes of tomorrow. 

The Food Futures Lab conducts custom research, immersive experiences, and collaborative visioning workshops for organizations across the global food supply chain. For more information about working with us, contact:

Sean Ness | 650-233-9517 | sness@iftf.org

Food Futures Lab | foodfutures@iftf.org