FutureLens: Feeding tomorrow by navigating the future

Room 4 | 3:15 pm - 3:45 pm | Thursday, May 9, 2024

Our world is changing in both clear and uncertain ways and we must think differently. Global food company Kerry Taste & Nutrition partnered with Kantar Futures to explore the scenarios that may shape the future.

Born from nearly a thousand hours of analysis and exploration, Kerry FutureLens is a dynamic foresight framework, developed to identify arising opportunities and consumer needs. This framework led us to Future Scenarios, set in 2030 and beyond, to explore how plausible future shifts might shape our food landscape. Now the team is delving into what that means for science-backed sustainable nutrition in different categories.

Normality is not real. Consumer behavior keeps changing, black swans and grey rhinos disrupt more than ever, marketers need to equip their businesses to anticipate and deliver change. Kerry partnered with Kantar Futures to inspire future thinking by investigating the future, understanding and delivering change through future scenarios that provide flexibility.

Leveraging informed foresight to inspire our teams enabled us to promote long-term thinking and lead a forward-looking culture within Kerry to act on shaping our future. With over 900 hours of horizon-scanning and analysis, 40 hours of co-creation sessions and more than 30 hours of expert engagement, we worked as a client-agency team to move from trends-based forecasts to scenario planning – exploring a range of potential outcomes and impacts. There are many possible futures, each encompassing a multitude of different scenarios and worlds such as, Vitality Unlocked and 4K Experiential Living.

From this stimulating thought leadership, we can inspire mind-set change internally and become more future-fit but also focused on categories and topics that help our customers achieve their goals.

We are bringing these scenarios closer to our customers through applying them to specific food and beverage categories. A prevailing example of this is Plates of Progress, which applies this scenario-thinking framework to the prepared meals, soups and sauces category to inspire next-generation innovation. This involved hundreds of hours of exploratory research, consultations with industry experts and futurists and workshop sessions, allowing us to explore how potential future scenarios will affect how consumers cook and eat and their expectations for products on the market.

This journey led us to a range of key implications and opportunities for the future of the meals, soups and sauces categories, including multiple future innovation platforms, designed to empower our teams and our customers to translate emerging consumer needs into future-focused NPD.

“If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.” – Eric Shinseki

Key takeaways:

1. Scenario planning has changed people’s thinking to be more open-minded, change-ready, dynamic and future-focused. It has allowed insights to open doors within our business and that of our customers.
2. Thought leadership can be commercial and lead to more meaningful customer relationships; it cuts through the day-to-day and it enables differentiating conversations.
3. You must start big to make change. FutureLens and its scenarios require you first to open your mind and think big. When we start too closed-in, there is no space to grow and evolve.

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