Ian Proudfoot, KPMG’s global lead partner for agribusiness and food, used the example of the wool industry which had said no one would buy a man-made carpet made from oil.
“It is really important to get our minds around this,” he told the recent Beyond the Line of Sight Conference in Auckland.
The dairy industry needed to be aware of Fairlife, a United States company recently bought by Coca Cola, which has a process for ultra-filtrating milk to take out the lactose and sugars, but also add in protein and calcium. There were predictions it would “rain money” for the international brand.
“It is a game-changer for the dairy sector,” he said.
Other companies to keep an eye on were Moo Free, based in the United Kingdom, which produced dairy-free and vegan chocolates using rice milk; Thinksect, an edible powder made from crickets; and Philly CowShare where consumers paid farmers upfront to deliver to them selected cuts from an animal they were farming. A PigShare option was also offered.
“There will be natural and novel parts of food supply in the future,” he said.
“We are very good natural food producers and there are always celebrations and people will want something to enhance the occasion. But we have got to play in both parts of the industry.”
Proudfoot said moving towards a totally personalised food experience was only a short time away. This was already being seen in the service offered by US company Sprig, which delivered healthy, organic meals to consumers in compostable containers in 15 minutes.
“We really need to understand consumers and walk in their shoes,” he said.
The dairy industry was still selling a lot of milk powder to shoppers without a lot of access to water. But agriculture as a whole needed to look to exporting food’s intellectual property in the future as well as a wider basket of products than it did at present.
Proudfoot said New Zealand would
face challenges over the next 25-30
years with constant, unprecedented change having an impact on the only developed country in the world to rely on agriculture to give it its present standard of living.
There were strengths such as a good geographic position, low corruption, ease of doing business, high education participation and a high-quality of life.
But NZ had a weak innovation system that he described as “the curse of number 8 wire”, and no truly international city. Educational attainment was 32nd out of the 35 countries in the OECD, there were low incomes and also a lack of scale for businesses to deal with overseas companies.
NZ agriculture had to work out how to make itself relevant to 800 million consumers at the high value end of the market. It needed to change its perspective away from looking at an entire market to concentrating on niches it could win in. Australia had recognised the role agriculture had to play in the future and understood its strategic importance.
Proudfoot said thinking about protecting the environment had changed over the past two years to it being the right thing to do, not because it was legislated.
“It’s a great story for consumers,” he said.
The internet could be harnessed to tell this story and then distribute products quickly.
There were two key groups to sell to that were growing rapidly – urban dwellers and those over 65.
The first group wanted solutions when it came to their desire to eat what they wanted while on the go, while 85% of the second group were managing chronic health conditions.
When it came to genetically modified food, Proudfoot said NZ’s position needed to be the same as that of consumers.
“We need to do the right thing and what we feel comfortable with.”
Bradley Kreit, from the Institute for the Future, which was founded in Silicon Valley in 1968, said there was a massive market opportunity in making things easy to do rather than giving consumers high motivation to do them.
“New kitchen appliances will lower the time and skill barriers to cooking,” he said.
An example was an appliance that could be used for sous vide cooking, making this method used by restaurant chefs as easy as using a microwave. Hand-held nutrition scanners would also show the ripeness of food such as a tomato and give instructions on when and how it should be used.
“Convenience is just a starting point,” he said.
There would be a shift in values and culture around what was natural, organic and sustainable. And new distribution companies such as the US-based Food Hub, which already had more than 6000 members on the US’s west coast, made it very easy for producer and consumer to find each other online.
