Goodbye celebrity chefs, hello celebrity firms

The rise of local produce means that large-scale manufacturing, celebrity chefs and functional foods are on their way out, according to an expert trend consultant.

“I’m sorry for Jamie [Oliver], but his time is over,” Ammerlaan Taste & Trends food consultant Anneke Ammerlaan told delegates at last week’s Food & Drink Innovation Network conference on Breakthrough Innovation in Birmingham.

“Celebrity chefs are making way for celebrity producers,” she said, claiming that locally produced foods were set to become even more popular. She stated that larger manufacturing sites would have to make way for smaller local producers. “The future is in small-scale producing and small-scale deliveries."

Ammerlaan also criticised companies that focused on standardising products to the degree that they became generic. “I found an [food manufacturer] ad showing a beautiful, misshapen Yorkshire pudding, which read: ‘when you have our products, they are all the same’, and I thought: ‘that was yesterday’. Today, the beauty is in the imperfection.”

She also claimed that products that were naturally high in nutrients would become more popular than fortified foods and supplements. “People currently value nutrients, and vitamins and antioxidants isolated from their natural organism are viewed as sacred,” she said.

But in the future, she predicted that consumers would value “real food”, such as meat, vegetables and fish, because of its intrinsic nutrient content. “There will be a growing awareness that organisms are the natural carrier of nutrients and indispensable for the intake of nutrients."

“Umami ingredients” - natural foods that provided particularly strong flavours - would feature heavily in products of the future, claimed Ammerlaan. “There will be a growing importance of umami ingredients, such as old cheese, fermented fish, dried fruits and dried mushrooms,” she said.