Last week, I was asked to talk at a conference about the culture of pleasure around food and how FoodTech is contributing to it. I thought it would be really easy, but actually, it was pretty hard to connect culture, pleasure and FoodTech. Indeed, most startups think about food innovation in terms of economic opportunities (such as the $1.7T meat market or the huge grocery retail market), health, or environmental impact (with animal food responsible for around 20% of the global greenhouse emissions). Do entrepreneurs think about taste and the culture around food?
I shared (the video is here) some of my unhappy experiences with meat, cheese, fish or milk alternatives that were great on paper (for the planet and your health at least) but tasted so bad that I don’t think anyone sane enough would buy them again. These (mostly) fun moments are only glitches and reminders that the taste can’t be an afterthought to create substitutes (as for any food products). Food products should taste good, and then, you can talk about their other attributes.
So, please, create the food of the future, but make it good.
