Jasmine Dadlani (McKinney) on Food Trends — Our Plates as a Mirror of the World Around Us
What we can learn from looking at the food sector and the trends the pandemic has revealed.
Jasmine Dadlani, Director of Strategy, McKinney New York
What does our relationship with food reveal about us? What can we learn from studying the food sector? And how has all of this changed during the pandemic?
Jasmine Dadlani, Director of Strategy at McKinney, has been studying trends in the food sector for more than a decade. She recently published a Food Trends Report in which she identified four trends at the intersection of food with technology, culture, wellness, and social responsibility. Trends the pandemic has either brought about or accelerated.
As part of the interview series Strategic Minds, we spoke about what’s going on in the food industry and beyond, cognitive dissonance during the pandemic, and trying to make sense of the world as a strategist right now.
Why is it so interesting to look at the food sector, especially from the perspective of a strategist? What does it reveal about us?
I’ve been tracking food trends now for 10 or 11 years, and the thesis has remained the same. In fact, I would say it is stronger now than it’s ever been, which is simply put, our plates are a mirror, a reflection of what’s happening in the world around us. Our thoughts, our feelings, our attitudes, our values, our behaviors are very much reflected in our food and beverage choices. And that’s because food is so central to our lives.
Particularly here in the US, in the 60s and 70s, food became very processed and functional. People had lost the connection to food. In the past 10 years, we’ve started to remember what real food is, and why it’s important. But also, as we’ve started to lose a sense of community, and families getting very splintered in terms of time, everyone’s on the go and all of that, literally bringing people together over a meal is such a powerful emotional draw.
The reason why I’m fascinated as a strategist by looking at the world of food is by understanding what is happening in the food space, it helps me understand what’s happening in every other industry. We have been looking at food trends for the past few years through four specific lenses — technology, social responsibility, culture, and wellness. If you look at the advances that are happening in those four areas, and you look at what’s happening in food, you can get a pretty good picture of where the world is going. So that’s why I find the world of food so fascinating.
Even just the things that get attention in the world of marketing, if you look at, for example, QSR Brands — Popeyes, Burger King, Wendy’s — the brands that are really breakthrough culturally where people become very aware of what they’re doing, they’re in the food space. 10 years ago, fast-food marketing was all about what toys can you give to the children or what can you do on your value menu. And now they’re doing some very provocative marketing activations that permeate from a cultural standpoint.
How has this evolved or changed during the pandemic?
The pandemic has been tough because so many people had to take a big pause, screeching brakes or a left turn and pivot. KFC, for example, having to get rid of their tagline “Finger Lickin’ Good”. A lot of people had to first figure out, “where do we need to make those turns, those pauses? Where do we need to reassure our consumers around safety and the basic fundamentals?” And now that this phase has passed, we’re hopefully starting to see a return to very interesting marketing.
I’m really curious about what happens with this holiday season. I hope it’s not all emotional, like, “even if you can’t be together, you’re still together”. Let’s remember that humor, and being silly, and all these other emotions also play a role during the holiday season too. That’s one thing we lean into a lot with our client Little Caesars.
There’s a lot that’s going to be hard about this holiday season. But I also believe you can find many insightful moments and ways to connect with people and it doesn’t always have to be so Hallmark warm and fuzzy. Although, for the right brands, it certainly can be.
I’ve been reading about how the UK agencies have been struggling to figure out the right balance in terms of holiday messaging. Because that’s their version of Superbowl, they will sort of set the stage and we’ll see what happens.
You’ve looked at food trends for more than a decade. Is this the first time you see such fundamental shifts? Does the pandemic really stand out from everything else we’ve seen?
What we saw happen with the pandemic was what we call the Great Acceleration. Trends that had already started to take route just turbocharged. Take, for example, e-commerce in the online grocery space. For years, grocers were trying to get consumers to buy groceries online. But consumers were very reticent. It was, “I will get my staples, packaged goods, toilet paper. But no one is picking my apples the way I can pick my apples.” So you went from an industry where you maybe had three to 10% of Americans who online grocery shopped regularly. Now you’re looking at numbers that are 40 and 50%. That is unbelievable in terms of disruption and acceleration.
It’s been steadily growing over the years, little by little, curbside pickup and these omnichannel offerings. But to see it become so accelerated in the past year — I’ve been very impressed with how a lot of businesses, whether it’s your local restaurant down the street, or whether it’s a national grocery store chain, have figured out how to implement e-commerce omnichannel offerings so quickly. All these barriers, all these regulations, all the logistics. It used to be, “well, it’s going to take us a couple of years before we can figure it out.” Suddenly, it truly was “evolve or die”, you either had to figure it out or that was it, your business was over. So what we saw were trends that already started to take root become so much more accelerated.
As a strategist, how do you make sense of what you see now? There are things we see temporarily but we don’t really know whether they will last. How do you go about that, have you changed any of your approaches?
Early on in the pandemic, a lot of our clients were asking us to make predictions about what happens next. And we had a nickname for them, we called them “crystal ball decks”. All of our clients needed a crystal ball deck. One thing is you can look at past history. So we’ve looked at, especially for our brands that play in value spaces, what has happened in previous recessions? Other moments of national crisis, for example, post 9/11, how did people rally around causes, and what happened there?
You can look at those historical analogs to get some clues. But the truth is, there is no analog that’s exactly what we’re going through because this is hitting us on all fronts. It’s a health issue. It’s an economic issue. We’re still coming out of the most politically divisive election that we’ve ever had, as a country — at least, as far as all of us have been alive. So there is no analog.
All you can do is try to understand, what is that truth that is going on for consumers? We have a belief that it always comes down to a simple human insight. And how can brands be more empathetic towards that? So we talk a lot about brands understanding where consumers are at right now and trying to work through not just ads, but actions. Make it 10% better for consumers. If you can make it 10% better, that’s all people are looking for right now because it is such a struggle. I firmly believe that every little bit helps. So that’s what we’re asking all of our clients to think about: if you could make things 10% better for people, what would you do? Not just what would you say, what would you do?
How are brands in the food space moving from ads to action?
In this realm of corporate social responsibility, a few years ago, one example is when #MeToo took hold in the food space, you saw this cleansing happening across restaurants because it is such a male-dominated career. It finally became revealed just how problematic that was in this industry. But it was really focused around that one issue.
Now, this year, food brands are tackling it from a lot of different angles. So you have a brand like Zomato in India, which is trying to help women navigate negative stereotypes and cultural baggage around having their periods. You have all the brands here in the US that are having a reckoning around their portrayal of Black Americans and inappropriate imagery from our past, for example, Uncle Ben’s rice or Land O’Lakes.
And of course, sustainability. How can brands do more to be sustainable and less wasteful? So across the board, there’s been a broadening of the different issues that brands feel a responsibility for and expectation that consumers have of them to tackle. And that can’t just be platitudes, that has to be in the form of doing something, that has to be in the form of brand behaviors, because that’s the only place you’re going to make an impact.
One of the most interesting findings in your research is this conflict between trying to eat healthier, more sustainable but then also wanting these cravings, the comfort food. Can you talk a little bit about this?
We talk a lot about how this has been a period of great Cognitive Dissonance, across the board. The idea that I carry two very conflicting thoughts, or that my attitudes and my behaviors are not consistent. That has been the overriding emotion that so many people are experiencing right now. I really want to see my friends, I miss my friends so much, I miss my family, I really want to see my parents and hug them. But I know it would not be safe to do so. But maybe I’ll just go and see them anyway and then quarantine for two weeks after. It’s like we’re constantly struggling.
Rolling Stone Magazine had an article earlier this year where they said every small decision these days feels like a life or death decision. Should I go to that party? Should I have friends over? Is it okay to let the contractor come inside to do some work on the house? We’re all exhausted and we’re all overwhelmed from trying to navigate this in our heads.
And again, it’s all reflected on our plate. Functional beverages, for example, that’s another trend because everybody now is so concerned about immunity and staying healthy at this time. But at the same time, the counter-trend to that is nostalgia and comfort food, which we also started to see bubbling up. And that, too, has exploded. There are some brands in the US, very iconic brands that had become pretty much dinosaurs on the shelf, that skyrocketed again — whether it was through convenience, or the sense of “I want to return back to the notion of childhood, simpler times”, and comfort food. StarKist Tuna, for example, is one.
So you saw both of those things. Super healthy wellness-related trends, plant-based foods, if you just look at the rise of Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat, what they’ve been able to do in terms of innovation and functionality. Foods really giving you more than just your standard vitamin C. And all the way to the countertrend of “I just want to sit on my couch with my box of Cheez-Its and feel that the world is going to be okay.”
Both of those behaviors are equally existent, although not really coexisting, because people recognize that they’re inconsistent, and then they work to try and resolve this dissonance. And that’s where the exhaustion sets in.
Which of the trends you’ve seen go beyond marketing, into fundamental shifts in supply chains, entire business models, the retail experience?
Again, food delivery has skyrocketed, I think it’s up 20%. Here in the US, you see the growth of curbside pickup. It’s funny, Americans like to get in their cars and go places, that behavior is not going to change easily. So even though you can get your groceries delivered, there’s this huge population that says “but I want to feel like I’m going somewhere. Part of my ritual is getting these errands done.” So that’s one of the reasons why it’s psychological, more than it is convenience. And so the question becomes, how do you bring a little bit more of an experience to these types of interactions where you don’t have somebody in your actual physical space for a very long time? Can you still create some semblance of an experience, through technology or through smaller interactions?
The next wave of what we will start to see next year is people ideating around how, through a limited physical interaction, can I bring in more of my retail experience? Some people are still going to stores and still want to go to stores, but many, many people are not. And you’ve lost a lot of what made going to a store fun. My kids, for example, they love to go to Costco to get samples. They’ve tried to bring it back but it doesn’t have the impulse purchase factor anymore because you have to take your sample to go. So if you’re a CPG brand, and you have new flavors to try, how can you figure out different ways of getting that in front of people?
One of the things we’ve seen is that a lot of people have simplified their views and just gone more for their basics and their core products. But people are going to get tired of that over time. We crave novelty. We want new things. So how do you introduce new things to people in a setting where they’re not exploring the shelves, not spending a lot of time in stores? Even if they are going in-store, they’re on a mission. They get in, they’ve got their lists, they get out. They’re not like, “oh, what’s new today?” It doesn’t feel safe to do that. So you have to think about smart ways to introduce your products to people that meet them in the way that they’re interacting.
Is there anything that you are personally missing — a change the pandemic has brought that you don’t like? Or something that you’re excited about?
I miss restaurants, I really do. We have done outdoor dining. And again, I just have to say I’m so impressed with how quickly especially these small local restaurants have pivoted in order to somehow offer patio furniture and umbrellas and heat lamps. And they’ve set up beautiful outdoor spaces. I live in Princeton, New Jersey, and if you walk in downtown Princeton now you feel almost like you’re in Europe. It’s that feeling of sidewalk cafes, and it’s so lovely. And it’s really kind of brought people out in a way that Americans never used to dine before. The problem is that’s going to be unsustainable from a weather standpoint. So I worry about what happens in the winter months.
I don’t want the face of our communities to change. And it’s already started happening in places like New York City, they say one out of three small businesses might not survive. And that’s the thing that I feel is very sad. It changes the fabric, the culture of a neighborhood, of a community, when these types of businesses no longer exist. And something I guess will come in to replace it. That’s evolution that happens, but something is lost.
I am very glad that we don’t have to wipe down our groceries anymore. Those couple of months where we were doing that was such a pain. And then it was “well, maybe I’ll leave it in the garage for three days, then bring it in.” It felt like going to the grocery store was like a battle. I don’t miss any of that. It’s great the scientific consensus on this has evolved and we’ve understood that that was maybe a little extreme.
Where do you see all of this going?
I think it’s going to be really fascinating what happens in the second round because I think this year was all about the pivots and pauses and turns and reacting. Next year is going to be, how do we get ahead of the thing a little bit? We have enough knowledge to know that it’s going to be with us for some time.
I don’t know that consumers are going to expect or are going to accept any more reactionary behavior. They’re going to want to see brands try to be a little more proactive and try to get ahead of it. So the pressure is on, it always is.
Especially as pandemic fatigue sets in. Again, coming back to the idea of how do you make people feel 10% better? How do you bring a little bit of joy, and try to solve for a little bit of that fatigue, that overwhelmingness, that feeling of conflict? If you can solve for this just a little bit, you’re going to win.
Thank you so much for taking the time to provide these insights, Jasmine.
An interesting article Jasmine recently came across:
New York Times — ‘Just Because I Have a Car Doesn’t Mean I Have Enough Money to Buy Food’ (by Tim Arango)
“This article and sadly, so many others like it recently have been incredibly eye-opening to me in terms of being more empathetic as a strategist. Yes, food can be a fun, inspiring thing to study but it’s also critical to life and when that’s increasingly threatened for people as it has been during the pandemic, it takes on much greater importance. This is one reason why we were excited to be part of an initiative like Pie it Forward for Little Caesars.”
If you enjoyed reading this, have a look at some other interviews in the series Strategic Minds: Conversations with strategists across different disciplines.
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