Institute For The Future

  • What We Do
    • Who We Are
    • Foresight Tools
    • Events
    • In the News
    • Media Center
    • Gallery
    • History of the Future
  • Our Work
    • Featured Projects
    • Global Landscape
    • People + Technology
    • Health + Self
  • Partner with IFTF
    • Foresight Training
    • Research Labs
    • Partners
    • Jobs
    • Donate
    • Contact Us
    • Privacy Policy
  • Future Now
  • Donate
Facebook Page Twitter Page RSS Page
  • Global Landscape
  • People + Technology
  • Health + Self

Partner with IFTF

  • Foresight Training
  • Research Labs

    • Digital Intelligence Lab

    • Emerging Media Lab

      • ONVR

    • Equitable Futures Lab

    • Food Futures Lab

    • Governance Futures Lab

    • Health Futures Lab

    • Tech Futures Lab

    • Work + Learn Futures Lab

    • Workable Futures

  • Partners
  • Jobs
    • Sales & Business Development Director, Future 50 Partnership

    • Futures Lab Director

  • Donate
  • Contact Us
    • Visit Us

  • Privacy Policy
INTERESTED IN THE FOOD FUTURES LAB?

Find out more today »

Core Team

  • Rebecca Chesney
  • Quinalt Childs
  • Max Elder
  • Namsah Kargbo

Future NOW Blog

Teaching Robots How to Work Together

Feb 13, 2019

New Policy Platform Outlines Solutions to Address Deceptive Digital Politics

Feb 11, 2019

The Rise of Computational Propaganda

Feb 08, 2019

Who's in Control?

Jan 31, 2019

Rewriting the Rules of Reality

Jan 09, 2019

Black Twitter and the Future of Digital Disobedience

Jan 08, 2019

See All »

Events

Feb

21

For Future Reference: A Few Thousand Dollars with Robert E. Friedman

February 21 • 6:00–8:00pm

Mar

02

Afrofutures Festival—Intersections of Futures Thinking Afrofuturist Visioning

March 02 • 1:00pm—7:00pm

Mar

14

For Future Reference: Bellwether with Sam Greenspan

March 14 • 6:00—8:00pm

Mar

19

Foresight Talks: A Webinar Series, co-hosted by Microsoft Envisioning Team's Ming-Li Chai and Harald Becker

March 19 • 9:00am REGISTER TODAY!

See All »

Food Futures Lab

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 »         

Media

Six Artifacts
from the Future of Food
 in Fast Company

 

The simple change you can make
to stop wasting food
 in Quartz

 

Kitchen of the Future: Smart and Fast but Not Much Fun in The New York Times

 

Three strategies for
designing kitchens of the future
 in MOLD

 

Imagine a better future of food now-
or be shocked by what we get
 in Fast Company

 

Food Innovation:
Recipes for the next decade
 in Global Action Report

Hear Us Speak

[Video] Sarah Smith on Artifacts from the Future of Food at 2017 National Restaurant Association Innovation Summit

 

[Video] Rebecca Chesney on Imagining a Smart Kitchen Future at 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit

 

[Podcast] Max Elder on The Climate Change Diet on Why We Eat What We Eat

 

[Radio] Sarah Smith on how the Internet of Things might change cooking on NPR's Air Talk with Larry Mantle

 

[Podcast] Ep. 33: From Steak to Insects – The Future of Food – with guest Max Elder

 

[Television] Rebecca Chesney on CNN Technology—Cooking dinner when your kitchen thinks for itself

Current and Past Partners

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 has ties to other innovation hubs in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Some of our partners, both present and former, include:

  • AB InBev
  • Air Liquide
  • Barilla
  • Beam Global Spirits
  • Big Heart Pet Brands
  • Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  • Campbell's Soup Company
  • Coca Cola
  • Future Food Institute
  • General Mills
  • Givaudan
  • Google
  • Hershey's
  • Ingredion
  • Institute of Food Technologists
  • MARS
  • MLA Donor Company
  • National Restaurant Association
  • Nestlé
  • Newman's Own Foundation
  • PepsiCo
  • Sanitarium Health & Wellbeing Company
  • Syngenta
  • Tetra Pak
  • The University of California, Davis
  • The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia: UNIMORE

 

 

 

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

  • Institute for the Future

  • 201 Hamilton Avenue
  • Palo Alto, CA 94301
  • 650.854.6322
  • info@iftf.org

  • © 2019 Institute for the Future

    What We Do

  • Who We Are
  • Foresight Tools
  • Events
  • In the News
  • Media Center
  • Gallery
  • History of the Future

    Our Work

  • Featured Projects
  • Global Landscape
  • People + Technology
  • Health + Self

    Partner with IFTF

  • Foresight Training
  • Research Labs
  • Partners
  • Jobs
  • Donate
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy

    Future Now

    Donate