View Research Topics | View Complete Article List | Visit the Library
Food Production for the Global Consumer
2007-11-04
Presentation at the 1999 Trade and Transportation in Sioux Falls, SD
Chris Wolf
VP & Managing Director, Strategic Food Resources, Noble & Associates
What I want to focus on today is that word, “consumer,” because obviously it's very important to keep in mind and keep an eye on the person who's ultimately consuming the goods that all of you are producing or helping to produce. So I'm going to walk you through a lot of trends going on. And in “global” I will be talking about other countries because obviously that's relevant to what you do. There is a primary American focus, and so I'm also loosely defining the term "global" to mean beyond strictly food itself but taking a global macro perspective on consumer trends.
How do we track consumer trends? How do we know wraps are coming up? I'm going to have to look back at the issues of the Food Channel. I've never looked back to see if what we were saying actually ever comes true, but we try. We look at the world in a lot of different kind of boxes, and what you see here are some kinds of paraphrased titles from magazines and newspapers and the Internet and papers from the government. We break them into areas like politics, technology, economy, demography, socioculture, and environment. By keeping in touch with all those different areas and obviously having a focus, which is on the consumer and their needs as they relate to food, we are able to find the patterns and trends I want to talk about today.
The first area I want to talk about -- we recently did a big global search on consumer trends, and we ended up breaking those trends into the three areas of consumer behavior, consumer environment, and consumer demographics. And so this is brand-new information that I want to share with you. I probably could have gotten away with doing my presentation from a few years ago, but I did absolutely change it for this conference. The trends we identified are based on the research that we did do recently. Looking at consumer behavior and where we're going in the future, what we're finding is that there are a lot of fundamental shifts going on -- kind of where we've been in the past century and where we're going in the new millennium.
