Mintel have released their top five food and drink trend predictions for 2018. They are:

• Full Disclosure – transparency and traceability for all
• Self Fulfilling practices – balanced diets as a part of self-care
• New Sensations – texture, sound and feel!
• Preferential Treatment – home delivery, subscriptions, automatic replenish
• Science Fare – can laboratories replace farms and factories?

Here at JWE we would very much welcome a focus on full disclosure and fervently hope that Mintel is correct in predicting this as a trend. We believe it is extremely important that consumers know where their food and drink is grown, how it is harvested and the chain of sale if they so wish too. Consumers should be safe in the knowledge that product from supermarkets is from controlled, audited and known supply.

In these times of price challenges as the pound falls and inflation rises it is important that we do not sacrifice food security and traceability as we fight the price war. The UK grocery sector has worked hard to put leading standards in place and regain consumer trust after the horse meat scandal, we should all work together to make sure 2018 is not the year we undermine that.

We are already well on the way to balanced diets being seen as an important part of self care and these diets definitely involve a lot of plant based foods with all their nutritional goodness. I think ‘Preferential Treatment’ is also an established idea. I personally haven’t done a UK weekly supermarket shop in an actual supermarket since 2010 (unfortunately in Italy it had to return to the weekly to do list!).

So ‘New sensations’ and ‘Science Fare’ are the other two to pique our interest. We started looking into crispy babyleaf varieties a few years ago and will continue to do so (and to think even harder about the  texture and feel of our products) . As for ‘Science Fare’, whilst we are not looking to move off our farms anytime soon we could not be bigger advocates for the place of science and innovation in our industry.

Mintel’s 2017 trends were on point, veganism did become bigger and plant based so called ‘clean’ diets became even more popular than in 2016. We did see the start of some interesting new ingredients and spices and with ‘New Sensations’ that looks set to continue in 2018. So cheers to 2018 and growing our fully traceable, highly textured and nutritious food in laboratories?!