Bord Bia followed the recent XIX Food and Drink Encounter, which was organized by IESE Business School and Deloitte in Barcelona. The aim of the meeting was to establish “how will we live and what will we eat in 2025, and what role will the food and drink sector play…”
In this ten-year horizon Daphne Kasriel-Alexander, Euromonitor Consumer Trends consultant, identified some trends in global consumption:
1. Purchase of convenience and value: search for formats and products that are committed to comfort, flexibility, saving time and energy
2. ‘Top-up shopping’: most shopping in the supermarket for the basics, but supplemented with fresher, local, organic, value added products at convenience/gourmet stores or food markets.
3. Consumption that supports sustainable development: our acts of consumption are an effective tool to influence the policies of brands and companies to contribute to sustainability.
4. Normal people are now the influencers: prescribers are ordinary people that share their experiences on blogs or social networks.
5. Shopping Centers´ ‘community mode’: physical stores will be smaller and richer in sensations, complementing the ‘e-commerce’. They will become the focus of trends, testbed for new experiences and a social meeting point.
6. Shopping around the world: brands have become global and can sell in any country thanks to online shopping sites.
7. From virtual to real and back again: the consumer matter-of-factly passes from one channel to another. The future is definitely multi and omnichannel and each plays a different role.
8. Online and healthy: connected devices and applications to monitor and process information about our habits and routines that also tell us what´s good for us.
Could you make your product more convenient? Can you communicate your engagement with sustainability? Do you have somebody praising it on social media channels? Would you consider carrying out tastings, using pop ups stalls at POS? Are you exporting B2B online?
Thinking that some of these are not fundamental for your core business is a mistake… this is the new marketplace.
For more information please contact cecilia.ruiz@bordbia.ie.