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The food and beverage industry is constantly progressing, shaped by everything from geopolitical shifts to environmental pressures as it adapts to the rapidly changing world. Mimi Morley, senior recipe development manager at HelloFresh UK, explores what the nation’s dinner tables will look like in years to come as we work toward a sustainable future.

When people talk to me about the future of food, it’s often tinged with pessimism – I hear concerns that our favourite foods will disappear, or that we’ll replace real food with daily pills in order to save the planet.

My anecdotal experiences were backed up by a new HelloFresh poll, which found that more than half (57%) of Brits are worried about a sustainable future of food, with more than a third (37%) believing that the foods they’ll be eating will be bland and tasteless.

We wanted to show people that sustainable eating can be exciting, tasty and healthy, so we teamed up with Dr Morgaine Gaye, food futurologist, and Dr Joseph Poore, climate scientist at Oxford University, to predict what mealtimes will really look in a sustainable food system.

The findings offer a positive and inspiring alternative to the pessimism. Rather than restricting our diets, a sustainable future for food could mean embracing a far more diverse diet than we enjoy today – offering consumers a broader range of fresh, tasty, personalised meals, with minimal effort and reduced food waste.

According to the experts, some of the foods we can expect to become staples on our dinner tables in the next 25 years include:

• New locals: Even in optimistic scenarios, global warming will result in crop shifts as growing conditions change. The UK is becoming more suitable for growing our beloved avocado, along with durum wheat, soya beans, chickpeas, okra and citrus fruits.

• Native UK crops: We’ll see a return to forgotten heritage crops that were once part of our traditional diet. In the UK, we can expect to see salad leaves and flowers such as sorrell, ribwort and fat hen alongside grains and seeds like buckwheat, rye, sorghum and camelina.

• Ingredients that absorb greenhouse gases: Tree crops such as nuts, citrus fruits and olives remove greenhouse gases from the air, as do mussels and oysters, which absorb carbon in their shells. Other carbon absorbing ingredients that will become more common in our diets include seaweed, a staple in many Asian cuisines, and edible cacti, which can be used in everything from tacos to jam.

• Andean and African crops: Many Andean and African crops are ideally suited to an unpredictable climate and will become regulars on our dinner plates in the years ahead. Kiwicha and kañihua, two Andean relatives of quinoa; and teff and fonio, both African ‘millet’ grains, are likely to become the new ‘supergrains’. Meanwhile, the Bambara and marama bean could soon compete with lentils and chickpeas.

As a recipe developer these predictions immediately got my mind whirring with new meal ideas. But I was also fascinated to learn that it’s not just what we what eat that will look different in a sustainable future – the way we grow, buy and prepare our food will be pretty different too.

• The end of the weekly shop: By 2050, AI will have taken over management of the household and will plan and buy consumers’ meals, ordering personalised meal kits to eliminate food waste and ensure exact nutritional needs are met. That will make the traditional weekly shop obsolete, and supermarkets will reinvent themselves to become destinations to test and trial new foods.

• Clothing that grows food: New innovations in material science will allow people to stay self-sufficient by using their clothing to grow food on the go. Think micro herbs and seeds grown on our jackets!

• The rise of urban agriculture: We can expect to see food production become much more visible in cities, driven by community-led growing as well as a broader shift towards hyperlocal food supply chains, as we strive for self-sufficiency.

• Communal eating: Whilst AI will be able to make all our food for us if we so wish, the sensory and emotional aspects of food will continue to play a key role in our lives. We will place great value on food that is made by humans and there will be a rise in communal meals, with streets and housing blocks gathering to share the results of their collective growing efforts.

  
  

These predictions offer a fascinating insight into how the future food and beverage industry will lean into new technologies and the evolving world around us. The industry is as resilient as it is innovative, poised to address the next big challenges and tap into the budding trends of tomorrow. From supergrains to seaweed, the food staples of the future await…