Seeds of Disruption: How Technology is Remaking the Future of Food (Map)

In 2013, IFTF’s food futures lab undertook a yearlong exploration into the ways that emerging technologies and sciences are reshaping the global food web. Along the way, we explored how several core strategies radically transformed, and continue to shape, our food system. Production aims for intensification. Distribution requires efficiency. Manufacturing is standardized for scalability. Shopping centralizes food in a common marketplace. And when it comes to eating, convenience and affordability still trump all else.
But it’s not clear that these strategies will work for future generations—they’re encountering limits. Today’s planetary challenges such as widespread food waste and the rise of chronic disease present a call to rethink the food system that we cannot ignore. Across this cycle of human food experiences—production, distribution, manufacturing, shopping, and eating—emerging technologies are poised to take us beyond those limits and transform our food experience.

We created Seeds of Disruption: How Technology is Remaking the Future of Food, a forecast map and set of four perspectives and Artifacts from the Future, to tell the story of how emerging information technology will reshape every step of the food system.

Publication Date: October 2013