Chicago / IL. (tni) Today´s major foodservice and retail food brands, along with their suppliers, face increasing challenges in recognizing and responding to ever-more-diverse consumers and their rapidly changing expectations. At the same time, companies must remake their businesses to leverage emerging channels and technology platforms. According to «Food Industry Transformation: The Next Decade», a groundbreaking report from Technomic Inc., the developing upheaval in the food industry will affect every aspect of the business from farm to fork, including sourcing processing, distribution, operations and marketing.
Technomic, the leading food research and consulting firm, has analyzed these complex challenges in order to visualize the coming decade in the food industry, which is projected to grow by more than 700 billion USD to reach more than two trillion USD in annual sales by 2025. In the Food Industry Transformation report, Technomic experts forecast the myriad ways the industry will shift over the next decade and offer a detailed roadmap for industry players to navigate the future. Technomic breaks out new «FIT Models» to help brands reinvent themselves in response to the challenges of labor, food production and distribution, consumer psychographics and demographics and the economy in the years to 2025.
«To grow their share of industry sales, food providers need to continually reimagine, reinvent, and reallocate resources to align their offerings with the evolving technology-enabled supply chain and the changing needs of consumers», said Technomic Executive Vice President Bob Goldin. «Technomic´s detailed projections pinpoint food industry opportunities and imperatives for the upcoming decade». Findings of the Food Industry Transformation report include:
- Traditional retailers, such as supermarkets and supercenters, will lose ten points of market share to nontraditional retail channels by 2025.
- Consumer trends over the next decade will be less favourable to the largest restaurant chains. Technomic projects a compound annual growth rate of five percent for independent restaurants and small chains, compared with 3.5 percent for large chains. Significant expansion will also be seen for fresh prepared foods at supermarkets, a segment expected to grow at 7.5 percent annually.
- The entire supply chain must be re-tooled to respond to or pre-empt consumer and regulatory demands for foods that are good for people and the planet. The winning products of 2025 will include not only those that can legitimately be labelled as «natural» or «local», but also those with «clean» labels, fewer ingredients, less processing and a favourable carbon footprint.
