The Tastemakers (23 page)

Because of its association with Thanksgiving, pumpkin spice mix entered the 2010 holiday forecast early on. The team quickly thought beyond pie, breaking down the ingredients of the mix (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice) to reveal flavors that often appear in Latin American and Caribbean dishes, such as jerk chicken. Often those same dishes require coconut milk, inspiring a potential pairing. Next, Vetter's team headed to the test kitchen to develop and test recipes based on pumpkin pie spices and coconut. In order to be successful, a forecasted flavor needs to be versatile. It has to hit multiple places along the food chain, working within at least three categories, such as a savory main, snack food, and a cocktail. Pumpkin pie spice and coconut milk–rubbed short ribs, pumpkin-spiced coconut fudge, and a pumpkin whoopee pie with coconut cream filling were just three of the dozen or so recipes Vetter tested for that one flavor prediction. After recipe testing, Vetter's team reconvenes to discuss what worked, what flopped, and which flavors will have the best impact with consumers, before settling on the final ten flavor combinations. The marketing department starts writing up the report, coordinating with McCormick product development to begin work on new industrial or consumer products that the flavor pairings may inspire, including the jars of McCormick spices you can buy at the supermarket. A few years ago, an entire
line of toasted spices came out of one Flavor Forecast and have been one of the company's better-selling products in recent years.

The Flavor Forecast is released to the public at year's end, and over the next few months Vetter and the McCormick marketing team present its results to over a hundred major customers while the company's distributors give hundreds more presentations to smaller clients. Each talk is tailored to the customer, so one to TGI Friday's will be quite different from one at Nabisco. Sample foods are always provided, like cayenne and tart cherry brownies (2009), to suggest how McCormick's customers might integrate these new pairings in their particular products. “Within a matter of a couple of months [of the report's release] we'll get orders,” said Alan Wilson, chairman, president, and CEO of McCormick & Company. “We'll turn [a pairing] into specific products quickly on an industrial standpoint.… A chipotle idea becomes a sandwich sauce for a quick-service restaurant, a frozen dinner for another customer, and an ingredient for another customer.” In many ways the McCormick Flavor Forecast is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they call something a trend and then use that prediction to sell those flavors up and down the food chain, it's like Goldman Sachs putting a buy rating on a stock they're promoting and then profiting when the stock's price inevitably goes up in reaction to that rating.

When food companies don't have their own trend forecasting units—and most don't—they often turn to two firms based around San Francisco who specialize in forecasting and responding to trends: CCD Innovations, where Kara Nielsen worked when I met her, and Mattson. A few mornings after the trend session at the Fancy Food Show I met Nielsen at CCD's downtown offices near the city's waterfront. A formally trained pastry chef, Nielsen found the CCD job on Craigslist a decade back and has since become one of the better-known trend experts in the business. Food trends, according to her, represented the evolving needs of people around eating, including economic needs, health needs, social needs, and political needs. A greater societal trend, such as green living, will emerge—that is, “I need to be better for the earth.” It will exert pressure and change our value as consumers (“I need to eat local”).
As the value changes, our needs change—“I need local food”—and an opportunity arises to serve that change: “My company needs to sell local food.” Nielsen's job is to identify trends at various points of their development, a process she classifies into five stages, and then write reports on those trends, a task she does over a dozen times a year. Then she will work with food companies to understand the opportunities associated with those trends and help CCD's product development team create a packaged food product or menu item that brings that trend to their client's target market.

CCD's trend reports can focus on flavors, such as heat and spice, which may involve smoke-infused drinks found at cutting-edge cocktail bars at stage one of their development and something like Buffalo hot sauce–flavored ketchup at a stage five, when it is at its most accessible in the mass market. Nielsen remarked that I'd even factored into one of the company's trend reports, pulling up the company's sixty-eight-page 2010 sandwich report, which cited the reinvented Jewish deli as a stage-two sandwich trend. I read through, astonished, as the report quoted extensively from my book on the subject along with several articles I had written. A surge of pride shot through me—that I had played a role in turning the nascent artisan Jewish deli scene into a mainstream food trend—but it also unnerved me a little to know that my work had been used, without my knowledge, to sell the corporate food world on appropriating the handmade pastrami I loved so dearly.

Nielsen draws a clear distinction between trends, which are slower-paced evolutions with deep cultural roots, and fads, which are superficial manifestations of those trends. A fad is something like the Paleo diet, which first came into fashion in 1975 for its focus on an abundance of raw protein, but a trend is the astronomical growth of Greek yogurt, which drew one of its strengths from the rising interest in high-protein foods but also had a number of other factors going for it. When Nielsen first wrote about Greek yogurt in 2007, she talked about its American arrival via Greek grocery stores in New York and its rapid adoption through tastemaking retailers like Trader Joe's and Gristedes. “It was pushing a lot of buttons,” recalled Neilsen, “it was natural, pure, wholesome, strained, simple,
and old world.” Other factors she identified in Greek yogurt's imminent rise was its combination of high-protein, low-fat, and cultured probiotics, which were all in line with diet trends globally. Greek yogurt also benefited from a rising appreciation of tart dairy flavors, thanks to the popular Korean-style frozen yogurt chains, such as Pinkberry and Menchie's, which were spreading from the West Coast across North America. And it was a continuation of a much longer lasting yogurt trend, which had begun in the 1970s with sour yogurts, evolved into the chunky FroYo of the 1980s, and hit Nielsen's stage five in the 1990s when companies like Dannon and Yoplait added tons of flavorings and sugar to yogurt, to the point at which it lost its healthy image. Greek yogurt was a reset, a return to Yogurt 101, and now the cycle was ramping up again.

I asked Nielsen where Greek yogurt was today on its evolutionary journey as a trend, and she handed me a Greek yogurt–flavored snack bar from the conference table, which was piled with products. “This is what stage five of a trend looks like,” she said, pointing out several other Greek yogurt–flavored products, which were now flooding the market. “There is a Greek yogurt flavor of Honey Bunches of Oats cereal. It has thirty-seven ounces of fat in each cup. Are there any probiotics in Honey Bunches of Oats?” she asked, rhetorically. “Greek Yogurt has become a health halo. What's left once it's in Honey Bunches of Oats?”

This line between trends like Greek yogurt and fads like the Paleo diet can be perilously thin. In fact, the evangelists for most any fad are probably hard at work trying to convince you that it is, instead, a trend. The best advice I can offer is Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous line about what constitutes pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

One of CCD's main competitors is Mattson, located about forty minutes south, across the Bay from Silicon Valley. Peter Mattson founded his eponymous company shortly after Faith Popcorn hung out her shingle, though he focused exclusively on food. Mattson's first food trend forecast came out in 1979, and it predicted the rise of Mexican food, convenience cooking (one-pan dinners), and bake–in-bag technology. At the time consumer-packaged goods
companies were growing into massive, unwieldy bureaucracies, and they were becoming increasingly insulated from the reality on the street. “Corporations are terrible at identifying trends,” Mattson told me. “The food industry moves at the most glacial speed, and it's a risk-averse industry.”

Though Mattson is best known as a prototype shop and science-heavy kitchen laboratory, credited with developing POM Wonderful and the Starbucks Frappuccino among other hit products, its work in trend predictions lies at the core of this, and the company has a staff of individuals who aid in putting together the forecasts that drive those innovations. “We don't want to hire anybody unless they're obsessed with food,” Mattson told me when I asked what made a great food trend forecaster. “It's not a life-sustaining thing … you need to have an irrational obsession with food. Those are the kind of people who'll go where others won't go.” These individuals need to be creative, intellectual, and able to substantiate and rationalize hypotheses about potential trends, the core of all food trend forecasting.

One of the best in the company is Barb Stuckey, a fit, fast-talking woman with a background in food science who first gained experience at Kraft, Chili's, and Whole Foods and has been developing foods at Mattson for well over a decade. Stuckey is an expert on the physiology of taste and wrote a fascinating book several years back simply called
Taste
, which is the best explanation I have ever read on how our body responds when we eat something. The day before I met Nielsen I drove up through the pouring rain to meet Stuckey for lunch at French Blue, a lovely whitewashed restaurant in the Napa Valley. “We see our role as translating trends,” she told me after ordering a kale salad. “We are putting ideas in front of consumers that are both appropriate and challenging. We're here to test that line.” When a company comes to Mattson with a need—“We want a drink for the urban market” or “we need a new sandwich that'll appeal to teenagers”—Stuckey will compile the market research and begin looking into related trends in that space. Five times a month she will organize on-the-ground eating tours for her clients so they can experience those trends “the
way they're meant to be experienced.” Recently, she led clients on a barbecue-eating tour of Austin, Texas, and a food truck tour in Portland, Oregon. One restaurant chain spent eight hours in Los Angeles on a breakneck ethnic food tour that covered nearly every neighborhood and culture of the vast city in order to experience tastes as diverse as prepared foods in a Japanese supermarket, tamales in a Mexican community-funded restaurant, and, to my delight, pastrami in a Jewish delicatessen. Each of these tours are carefully planned by Stuckey and her team of scouts, who hit the ground up to two months ahead of time to curate the essential trend safari. The Mattson company also puts on an annual trend lunch for all their clients, an eight-course meal that's a sit-down version of a national trend tour, where clients might be served something like a hot drink brewed from coffee leaves, instead of beans, to cite a recent example.

“It's never a straight line between a trend and what ends up in the market,” Stuckey said, admiring the kale salad when it finally arrived and then using it to illustrate her point. “There's so many twists and turns along the way. The value, though, is that someday your restaurant will just
have
to have a kale salad. You need to have it in the pipeline for when that day comes.” The kale salad, in her opinion, was the twenty-first century's Caesar salad, an international staple that began in the 1920s in a Tijuana hotel and snowballed into the most popular salad trend the world has ever known. “Slowly but surely, the kale salad will make its way to TGI Friday's menu, then McDonald's, Kraft, and, eventually, as a Doritos flavor.”

After lunch I followed Stuckey to the nearby campus of the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, which is an imposing former stone winery that is built like a castle. Inside, as young student chefs in towering white toques scurried up and down the large staircases, several dozen executives from across the food industry gathered around wine, appetizers, and several jugs of what was labeled “Mexican Lime with Chia Seed Water”—basically a chia fresca. The group covered a wide swath of the food industry: from Dow Agro Sciences and the Soybean, Mushroom, and Peanut Boards;
doctors from the Cleveland Clinic and professors from Harvard Business School; to representatives from Butterball, Dunkin Donuts, Chobani Yogurt, Wonderful Brands (the company behind POM), and McDonald's corporate dietician. They'd all gathered here for the opening session of the Worlds of Healthy Flavors retreat, put on by the Culinary Institute of America and Harvard University with a focus on how to make American food healthier. Everyone filed into an auditorium with steep stadium-style seating and a huge demonstration kitchen for a stage. After an introductory presentation by Dr. Eric Rimm of the Harvard School of Public Health, who warned of the dangers posed by diet trends, superfoods, and gluten-free celebrities, the host introduced Suzy Badaracco, one of the most interesting trend forecasters working today.

Badaracco, who has curly reddish-brown hair and speaks incredibly quickly, is a bit of an enigma in the food world. From the time she was nineteen until her midtwenties Badaracco worked for the Orange County Sheriff's Department as a forensic photographer and criminalist, covering hundreds of crime scenes, where she profiled criminals based on the available evidence. She is trained in military-grade intelligence and chaos theory with an expertise in pattern recognition, and she employs the same methodology developed by the US Marines, FBI, and Scotland Yard to predict military strikes, terrorist attacks, and murder sprees. If you married the quirky lab genius from
CSI
with the gastronomic curiosity of Anthony Bourdain, you'd get Suzy Badaracco. “I went from tracking serial killers to cereal bars,” she joked to the room as she began her presentation.