Institute for the Food (IFTF) Futures50 Lab Subscription 2019

Summary

Institute for the Future (IFTF) is an organisation that supports businesses, governments and social impact organisations to create custom research and foresight training to navigate complex changes and develop world-ready strategies.

This project funded MLA's engagement with IFTF to gain access to the Food Futures Lab, which provides global foresights on food trends and threats. These global foresights help support MLA's decision making and processes regarding product innovation and development for the Australian red meat industry.

Key findings

In 2019, the key theme of 'trust' was considered - providence, sustainability, clean label foods with applications to animal husbandry, natural meat and threats of plant-proteins explored.

MLA was able to procure IFTF database to complete several in-house workshops with the insights team to un-pack this trend.

Benefits to industry

MLA's subscription to IFTF services provides access to research, up-to-date forecasts, cross-industry research events & workshops and global food innovation networks.

This subscription makes sure that MLA is across new developments in global innovation to ensure Australia's red meat industry stays relevant on a global scale.

MLA action

• The MLA 2025 Strategy and MISP2030 contains references to 'Our Customers, Consumers and Communities' with consumer sentiments towards trust a key imperative. Applying the learnings from IFTF's subscription along with wider understanding of foresight signals, future state scenario planning to translate trends into opportunity spaces and research focus areas has been the legacy of MLA-IFTF Future50 collaboration in 2019.
• The MLA Food Innovation program is now pursuing opportunities in 'clean label' food technology platforms that align with 'trust' to underpin 'True Aussie clean and green' in various value added formats.
• MLA continues to explore various insight providers and subscription services on a needs basis.