Keep an Eye on These Food Industry Trends and Ensure Your Spot on the Top

Differentiating from the competition and ensuring the future business with retailers and consumers requires food producers to be always on top of their game. However, identifying the current trends and finding ways to keep up with them can be challenging.

In this blog, we’ve gathered the most prominent trends that every food company should implement into their operations to strengthen their brand and place in the market.

Communicate with Consumers and Gain Advantage

Most of the new trends emerge directly from consumers and their desires. They expect food companies to communicate openly about new advances in sustainability, strategy, and product development with them. This is based on Innova Market Insights’ Top Ten Trends for 2022 report, in which 75% of the survey responders said that food companies should listen to consumers when e.g., expanding their product offering.

One of the ways to keep up with consumers and stay connected with them is through social media. Especially with the younger generation, it’s crucial to establish personal connections between the consumer and the brand. Increasingly, consumers are looking for brands that share their social, ethical, and even political values, and communicating about these values, promoting transparency, and engaging with the audience in social media can help your brand to ensure its place in the highly competitive industry. Behind the scenes, it’s also vital for food companies to choose partners and suppliers that share the same values and goals.

Adopt Sustainable Mindset to Ensure Growth

Constant attention to climate change and added weight on the sustainable choices that consumers can make in their daily lives also affect the food producers and their operations. Consumers are more likely to support brands and companies that have adopted sustainable values and are transparent about them.

This is supported by the findings in Lux Research’s report “The Food Company of 2050”, where sustainability was listed as a critical factor for food companies to grow their market share and enhance brand awareness over the next 30 years. Meaning that disregarding sustainability and its importance in the food production setting now, can – and most likely will – come back to bite you.

Sustainability is a broad theme and sometimes it can be difficult to identify the places for improvement. For food companies, these could include e.g., material suppliers, ingredients, packaging materials, energy consumption, transportation, and distribution. All these need to be carefully examined and evaluated to recognize where there’s room for improvement.

For many food companies, the start of their sustainability journey is reducing food waste. Companies have created innovative ways to transform the waste into something profitable e.g., by launching new products that utilize the materials that would have otherwise been wasted. For consumers, this shows how committed and innovative the food companies are to reducing waste.

Achieve All This with Advanced Automation

While certain parts of the food industry have adopted automation as an integral part of the operations, there are still areas where automation can bring huge advantages, especially when keeping in mind the prevalent trends.

With advanced automation, food companies can:

• Enhance traceability by gathering data to pinpoint possible flaws, develop production efficiency and avoid costly product recalls
• Improve sustainability by optimizing production equipment performance to save energy and reduce food waste
• Exceed consumer expectations by reducing the risks of human errors and deviations in the production process and delivering safe, ethically made, and high-quality products

Choosing equipment that gathers data and introducing newer technologies such as AI to analyze this data can open completely new possibilities for production optimization, efficiency, and traceability.