Trends Fueling Innovation in the Food & Beverage Industry in 2021
A Review of NBT’s First F&B Innovation Workshop
🌮 Food for Thought
On the 6th of December 2021, Next Big Thing AG (NBT) hosted its first installment of Brains & Burgers, a new ideation workshop initiative for experts to exchange ideas, network, and unleash cross-industry collaborations.
Built on the principles of open innovation, NBT decided to launch this ideation workshop to explore how different stakeholders in the F&B ecosystem identify various pain points in the industry as a first step in coming up with creative digital solutions.
Essentially, NBT acts as the glue in bringing together different stakeholder perspectives to deliver exceptional ideas through diverse insights. These peer learnings form the foundation of potential F&B business models that: (a) the industry currently lacks, (b) NBT may explore as part of its growing venture portfolio and, (c) highlights collaboration opportunities with industry experts to co-create solutions.
💫 F&B Industry Trends
In bringing together some of the F&B industry’s brightest minds, we were thrilled to have Bastian Halecker, Founding Partner of Hungry Ventures, give an introduction to the main trends impacting the F&B industry.
During his presentation, Bastian touched on several valuable findings that are currently dominating the F&B landscape. From a high-level perspective, these are some of the key trends that were identified:
- Currently, the F&B ecosystem is overpopulated with solutions. This means that there’s a surplus of solutions relative to the number of problems in the space.
- The F&B industry needs to find ways of applying digitalization to outdated and traditional processes. Deeptech and AI have the greatest impact potential, especially in food retail.
- The best digital solutions are created as a result of corporate partnerships with startups.
- The push for organizations to become more innovative comes from the customers themselves and this drive is transforming the entire food supply chain, impacting areas of food production, distribution, consumption, and disposal.
- Niche B2B F&B solutions are generally the most successful as B2C requires a lot of resources such as capital and marketing to gain traction in an overly competitive landscape.
- Some of the most popular areas of focus from a B2B perspective include in-store retail tech, e-commerce marketplaces, supply chain and logistics tech, on-demand production, and decentralized food models.
- There’s a significant trend toward developing localized farm-to-consumer(F2C) business models (e.g. blockchain track and trace solutions and urban farming).
- The localization trend stems from several sustainability concerns originating from the consumer and the need for a more eco-friendly supply chain.
🔑 Key Insights
Following a presentation on the macrotrends within the F&B industry, we decided to narrow the general focus of the workshop from three overarching trends — quality assurance, sustainable production, and supply chain— to just one — food distribution.
Currently, the F&B industry is still heavily reliant on outdated practices and analog systems. This is especially true when it comes to small-scale and local food producers. The basic infrastructure (hardware) is there, however, it lacks any sort of smart IoT features (software). This means that there’s no automated way of gathering, storing, and analyzing vital information for these food producers to help them accurately predict sales and size production capacities accordingly.
In the past, small-scale players didn’t take advantage of digital solutions because:
- Solutions were too expensive
- There was missing/unavailable tech
- The competitive landscape was smaller
- Any available tech solutions were too complicated to use
- They maintain their traditional mindset and often try to avoid change
Based on this information, it’s clear that there’s a shortcoming of educational resources and knowledge around how to implement and benefit from digital solutions for small-to-medium-sized organizations (SMEs) in the F&B industry. This presents an incredible opportunity for new F&B solutions to bridge the digital divide between the traditional and modern eras.
📒 Lessons Learned from the Ideation Workshop
Since this was our first attempt at hosting an ideation workshop, we were able to take this as a learning opportunity so that we improve with each new initiative that we plan to undertake in the future.
What we learned:
- We had a great warm-up/ice breaker activity to help make participants feel more comfortable and to give them confidence in actively contributing to the workshop discussions.
- This was a great event to foster collaboration and co-creation because participants had the opportunity to connect and network with other individuals that they wouldn’t ordinarily work with on a day-to-day basis.
- The ideation workshop was done in such a way that it created an open and interactive environment where participants could discuss creative ideas and partake in more out-of-the-box thinking.
- The agile setting of the workshop was structured to facilitate faster feedback and iteration with involvement from all participants. This meant that there were immediate, more tangible, and actionable outputs that would usually take weeks, if not months, in a more corporate environment.
- We were particularly excited by the free-flowing nature of the discussions and were overwhelmed by the level of excitement and ideas from a variety of diverse perspectives.
- In addition, we received good feedback on the chosen topic of the F&B industry. While the industry itself lends itself to several subtopics such as quality assurance, supply chain, and sustainability, our participants were excited to explore an industry that yearns for innovation across the board.
🤔 What Comes Next?
As originally mapped out in our previous article, our ideation workshops will take place every three months in Berlin and focus on these core areas:
- The Food and Beverage (F&B) Industry
- Supply Chain and Logistics
- The Manufacturing Industry
- Climate Change and Sustainability
Since we have now successfully explored the F&B industry, our next ideation workshop will focus on the topic of the manufacturing industry. In the coming weeks, we will present several defined topics within the manufacturing industry that we will aim to explore as part of our next workshop.
While these topics are still a work in progress, we will say that areas of industrial IoT (IIoT), predictive maintenance, digital twin technology, root cause analysis, and asset tracking are of particular interest to us. Watch this space! 👀
🤩 Get Involved
As a leading venture studio and ideation expert, Next Big Thing AG aims to bring unmatched value to SMEs and corporates in coming up with innovative digital solutions to persistent industry challenges. We do this by bringing together our in-house talents and expert network to find the most impactful and value-generating ways that these organizations can become pioneers and disruptors in the space.
If you’d like to take part in one of our upcoming innovation events, please reach out!
If you feel that you, or someone you know of, would bring additional value to ideation sessions, please send a request with the participant’s full name, company, and position to sebastian.blanke@nbt.ag
Curious to know more about NBT? Learn about us here👇
