The Future of Snacking: Harnessing AI to Predict Trends
What is the role of market intelligence in predicting food trends, particularly using AI to enhance the accuracy of these predictions? How do we understand consumer behavior, preferences, and trends in the snacking industry? By leveraging AI, we can make more objective and data-driven predictions about future trends, such as the growing popularity of umami flavors across different European markets.
By Alex Skidmore
Predicting the next big trend in snacking is both an art and a science. As the head of market intelligence for Griffith Foods in Europe, I have the privilege of steering our efforts in product intelligence, where we merge the sensory elements of food—taste, texture, smell—with deep consumer insights to understand their motivations, behaviors, and purchasing patterns. Our ultimate goal is to create products that are not only delicious but also nutritious and sustainable. Today, I want to share how we are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to predict future food trends and revolutionize the snacking industry.
The Complexity of Predicting Trends
At Griffith Foods, we face the constant challenge of anticipating the next big thing in food. My team and I are frequently asked, “What’s the next bestseller? What’s the next fantastic flavor?” This question arises three to five times a week across various categories and countries. Despite the abundance of data at our disposal, predicting the next big trend remains a complex task fraught with subjectivity.
Consumers today navigate a world marked by significant upheavals—geopolitical tensions, a global pandemic, a cost of living crisis, and ongoing climate challenges. These stressors profoundly impact their purchasing decisions, making traditional methods of trend prediction increasingly unreliable. Consumers often express preferences that do not align with their actual buying behaviors. For instance, while approximately 50% of European consumers claim to read nutritional labels on snacks, real-world observations suggest otherwise. Similarly, although four in ten consumers profess to seek healthy snacks, sales data indicates a different reality. Furthermore, one in three consumers consider themselves trendsetters, yet the bestsellers consistently remain core, traditional flavors. This disconnect complicates our ability to predict trends accurately.
Understanding Consumer Behavior
To address these challenges, we have turned to AI, developing bespoke databases over the past couple of years that scrape vast amounts of data from diverse sources. These sources include online stores, delivery aggregators, Google, YouTube, food blogs, and social media platforms. By analyzing this data, we can gain a more accurate understanding of consumer behavior without relying solely on what they tell us.
AI helps us in three critical areas: sentiment, growth, and engagement. Sentiment analysis allows us to gauge consumer attitudes towards specific ingredients or flavors. Growth analysis tracks the rise or decline in popularity of these elements over time. Engagement analysis measures how actively consumers interact with content related to these trends. By combining these insights, we can identify emerging trends more objectively and tailor our product offerings accordingly.
The Role of AI in Trend Prediction
AI’s role in predicting food trends cannot be overstated. It allows us to process enormous amounts of data quickly and efficiently, providing insights that would be impossible to obtain through traditional methods. This technology enables us to identify patterns and correlations that may not be immediately apparent, helping us to stay ahead of consumer preferences.
One of the key advantages of using AI is its ability to integrate data from multiple sources. For example, we can analyze social media posts to understand how consumers are discussing certain ingredients or flavors. We can also examine search engine trends to see what people are looking for online. By combining these insights with sales data and other metrics, we can build a comprehensive picture of consumer behavior and preferences.
Case Study: The Rise of Umami
One of the trends our AI identified is umami, known as the fifth taste. Originating from Japan, umami represents richness and savoriness, which are core to many snacking products. Our data shows that umami has consistently performed well, with strong growth in consumer understanding and engagement.
In the UK, umami has seen significant growth over the past four years, particularly in the last two. In Germany and France, the trend is also growing, albeit at different rates. By analyzing these trends, we can tailor our product offerings to different markets, ensuring we stay ahead of consumer preferences.