Emerging Foods New Zealand

Food futurist and keynote speaker at E Tipu New Zealand Future Food and Fibre Summit, Jack Bobo, argues the food system’s hardest problem is social. When no one can trust what you say, why would they buy your product? He argues framing and language can determine whether industry and advocates collaborate or reach a deadlock. In a wide-ranging conversation, FoodHQ asks Jack to reflect on the future of food to 2100.

Seen the latest fad diet? Following a new food guru? Confused about what to eat? You’re not alone. Nutritional advice is the biggest source of misinformation online. For consumers, it’s a mess of conflicting fads and facts. For producers, it’s walking a minefield of science and marketing hype. How can Kiwi producers build trust in a world of nutritional noise?

New Zealand’s next phase of growth will depend on pairing quality with curiosity, but are we ready? Our production mindset has long focused on scale, but success now depends on how well we understand our consumers. IKEA’s painstaking study of Kiwi homes before opening here showed what empathy in action looks like: listening before selling, designing before assuming. As India’s vast, complex market edges within reach through a free trade deal, the burning question is whether New Zealand can make that same shift, or whether we’ll cling to old habits and discover, too late, that the world has moved on.

It’s already New Zealand’s biggest industry-what more can it do? If New Zealand is to double the value of exports by 2035, dairy must surely do a lot of the heavy lifting. But how much more growth and innovation can we expect to see? With so much pressure facing the sector from both home and abroad, where does sustainable growth come from? And without dairy, can New Zealand do it?

A new class of weight loss drugs called GLP-1 agonists is driving down consumers’ appetites at an unprecedented scale, forcing the food industry to reconsider long-established assumptions about what we eat – and how much. As GLP 1’s popularity booms, experts are asking, is this a fad or a fundamental shift for the food and beverage industry?

With a vast, untapped resource lapping our shores, the ocean may provide the largest opportunity for the primary sector since the Dunedin first set off with frozen carcasses in 1882. But after 20 years of flat lining can the aquaculture sector perform a miracle and treble in value to reach $3 billion in just 10 years, as the government wants?

New Zealand has a great history of food innovation and was often referred to as a ‘petri dish of possibility’, but it feels like we have lost our imagination and growth mindset over recent years. As our food producers are challenged to contribute to the government’s ‘double export value’ policy, we need to regain the innovation momentum to become a food superpower. How can that happen and what’s stopping us from getting there as soon as possible?

Sheep and beef farming were once the core of the New Zealand economy. In 1920 they helped make New Zealand the richest country, per capita, in the world. But as dry-stock farms struggle for profitability, and parts of the world reach ‘peak meat’, can the industry recover past glories? What is required to thrive? We look at the threats and the opportunities ahead.

As the growth in the consumption of protein increases, the ‘race’ is on to find the next scalable source of sustainable protein. New Zealand needs to take a good hard look at the role it wants to play in this rapidly expanding market.

An explosion in the number of small food brands in the last 20 years hints at where New Zealand’s future food opportunities exist: in global niches.

New Zealand’s food and fibre industry is built on generations of selective breeding – from ryegrass and cows to kiwifruit and apples. But recent improvements in gene technologies offer a step-change in how we can create new resilient and productive varieties. Will New Zealand seize the opportunity or be left flatfooted in a race to the future?

The intention of this report is to help New Zealand accelerate its decision-making regarding how (or if) it chooses to take part in this rapidly moving novel agrifood sector.

This report provides a summary of what governments in ten countries are doing to support the development of their alternative proteins sectors, and use this information to evaluate their overall level of commitment and the key drivers behind this.

This report summarises key observations and opportunities arising from discussions with 185 people from throughout the emerging proteins sector.  It concludes with some recommendations for what is required for this sector to thrive, and some principles upon which we believe activity in this sector should be based.