The Tastemakers (24 page)

After she burned out on blood-spatter recognition, Badaracco went to culinary school and worked in the research end of the food business for companies such as Nestlé, Mintel, the US Department of Agriculture, and the Japanese food and flavor conglomerate Aginomoto, who put her to work in their global think tank, tracking trends. When she left Aginomoto she felt like a “giraffe in a petting zoo” who didn't fit anywhere, so she founded her own firm, called Culinary Tides, which, along with six colleagues who work remotely around the United States and Japan, she runs out of her
home in Oregon. “What we do is make sense of the chaos,” Badaracco told me.

The information available today that relates to food trends is vast, often contradictory, and largely inaccurate. What Badaracco does at Culinary Tides is aggregate data from thousands of different points, including the industry reports produced by firms like Technomic as well as nearly every published article, government trade report, relevant scientific health study, and seemingly unrelated statistics, like the destinations Americans are buying plane tickets to. All of this adds up to more than fourteen hundred reports a month, which are then fed into a database that analyzes roughly two hundred units of data for each client every month, and this is then used to build an eighteen-month predictive window into the future, tailored to each client's needs. “Maybe they'll be focusing on a particular thing,” said Badaracco, “then we can go and pull out micropatterns. We cross-analyze all of those areas. We deal with white space—things that don't exist. Chaos theory. And we prove it will exist by massive amounts of quantitative data.” Badaracco had no interest in the type of firsthand observations that other forecasters used. She didn't take her clients on taste tours, suggest new products for them to make, or even get excited about a particular food she might happen upon at a restaurant. “In chaos you don't want to do your own field work. It's a dangerous practice. What you're seeing is food trucks in a single city. That's useless. It tells you nothing about the national trend and where it's going. We have to understand on a much larger scale of what something's doing.” The idea is to get out so far head of the trends that they're not even trends yet. “If you can Google a trend, you've completely missed the trend,” she said. “At that point you're not forecasting—you're just tracking.”

Badaracco's presentation to the crowd at the Culinary Institute focused on long-term flavor trends. It was a rapid, whirlwind flood of data, organized into slides jammed end to end with text, charts, and basic diagrams along with the metaphorical buzzwords she uses to define the different stages of a trend's evolution. There are blips, which are noteworthy data points jumping out from the chaos, and shadows, which are pretrend events or precursors to a
trend. Trends have births, and those can be strong births (a breakout, like Greek yogurt), stillbirths, and orphaned births, which is when a trend doesn't have strong parents to champion it. Yes, food trends have parents, and like children, they need support and nourishment or else they'll fail to thrive. They also need advocates and allies. Just as a trend is born, a trend can morph (whole wheat bread to multigrain bread to single-grain bread to ancient-grain bread), crash (the Atkins Diet becomes discredited), redirect (lactose-free moves from the mainstream back to a niche), and be killed by an adversary (GMO foods go from salvation to pariah, thanks to political opposition from the organic movement). Trends also have their own personality. Badaracco described the Greek yogurt trend as “the guy who comes to the party that just everybody likes, everyone chats with, he'll freshen your drink, pat your kids on the head.” He's sweet, he's savory, he's breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert … all of which means that Greek yogurt isn't going anywhere soon as a trend.”

She pulled up a slide on trend births and began talking about where consumers were today, comparing one month's American consumer confidence survey to another, which showed, based on her analysis, that recession signals were ebbing at this point in early 2013. “We are moving slowly, kicking and screaming into a recovery phase,” Badaracco predicted before clicking on to the next slide, which focused on health trends. Seasonal and local-sourcing trends were all about control issues, Badaracco explained with great passion, which are born during recessions as a way to control what food you bring into houses. “I want it,” she said, holding an imaginary organic apple in one hand, and then, turning her attention to the imaginary cheaper apple in the other, “I don't want to pay for it!” Conversely, foraging in the woods for mushrooms, a trend gaining favor with high-end chefs, was recovery behavior, because recovery brings out discovery instincts, and foraging is the ultimate discovery activity. “Because it can kill you,” Badaracco said, noting that the fine line between a delicious morel and a poison fungus was something diners were happy to walk when wallets were flush, but they reverted to sure comforts like hamburgers when things
felt rocky. Anything extreme on the palate—new flavors, textures, experiences—was recovery behavior, not recessionary.

This all led to Badaracco's slide on flavors, which she described in a variety of categories, each with its own personality. Cage-dancers (seasonings) were wild and included the Peruvian herb huacatay (another indication of Zarate's growing influence), Nordic flavors, flowers, ashes, flavored heat, and geranium leaf. Sensuals (fruit/veg) had white strawberries, kimchi, and finger limes; tree-huggers (dairy) would be Lebanese yogurt and paneer; bipolars (protein) had goat and lamb bellies, blood, skin, fin-to-tail seafood eating, and something called “lethal”; interpreters (grains) included not just chia but also faro, grits, and black rice (a Glenn Roberts hat trick); and type-A (beverage) featured barrel-aged cocktails, Vietnamese coffee, and sipping vinegars. Globally, American soul food, regional Mexican, and Peru were already rock stars, but Badaracco predicted, based on travel statistics, that North Africa, Nepal, Laos, and somehow even the Arctic were rising stars to watch. All of this was projected in a sprawling jumble of monochromatic text, with no photos or illustrations, that contained sentences like
Cocktails, craft beer, wine $ ↑, desserts ↑, insect eating = recovery behavior
. The whole presentation was undeniably fascinating but also a bit like stepping into a math class you quickly realize you are vastly unprepared for. The room at the Culinary Institute was full of astonished faces, partly in awe and partly in shock, as Badaracco kept on blazing through her talk.

What Badaracco, Stuckey, Nielsen, Tristano, and others in the trend forecasting business all agree on is that food trends are evolving quicker, with less of a predictable trajectory, and a more rapid evolution from the fringes into the mainstream. More uncertain trends make the need for their predictions even greater, and many people have jumped into the business in recent years, adding their own food trend forecasts to those already out there. Peter Mattson estimated that there were now thousands of people offering up some form of food trend forecasting, though only a hundred or so were actually good at what they did. “You want a trend?” asked Michael Whiteman, the restaurant consultant who has been publicly sharing his previously private trend reports since 2008. “More predictions!”

The future may be even more complicated, as the industry taps into the eyes and ears of amateur trendwatchers, whose passion for food and easy connectivity makes crowdsourcing new trends a possibility. In early 2013 the Spanish company Azti Tecnala, which has a food consulting and research business, launched an online initiative called the Food Mirror Game. Contestants from around the world entered a contest that involved three rounds of identifying different food trends where they lived. These were organized by eight overarching EATrends the company had created, including #foodtelling (food with a message), #slowcal (sustainable and responsible), and #eatertainment (fun on a fork). Over the course of four months over five hundred participants submitted photos, videos, and descriptions of new trends and products that they saw at restaurants, supermarkets, or at pop-ups and in food fairs. These participants were overwhelmingly women, who, for some reason, tend to dominate the food trend forecasting business, though I myself had entered and submitted several trends I'd come across during my research, including upscale Indian dosas, Sriracha-flavored products, and branded fruits (a trend I explore in the next chapter, about how an apple is marketed).

The Food Mirror Game's grand prize was an all-expense-paid trip to Bilbao, Spain, but the contest tapped into something deeper than the urge to travel. For every one of the hundreds of thousands of reviews posted on Yelp each day or the millions of cupcake photos shared on blogs and uploaded to social networks, there's a desire from these obsessive eaters to be recognized for their sense of taste. The Food Mirror Game indulged that, and in the process it built a global network of amateur trendhunters that the company could call on in the future. “We see the contestants like correspondents or antennas or food watchers,” said Sonia Riesco, who headed up the project for Azti. “We could have one in Japan, one in the United States, one in South Africa, and so on.” The idea for the contest actually came a few years earlier, when Azti would deploy their own staff around the world for months at a time to research trends. It was exhausting, logistically daunting, and terribly expensive. “Now, when we do a project with a company we have people all over the world who can look at the types of canned fish in the United States,
for example. We'll have a network of people, so that if Nestlé wants to look at chocolates in some country, we can tap into that person so they can look at it.” Imagine an ever-growing army of food trend scouts, motivated by the potential for some reward but also their passion for the newest item on the menu—not just the buttery embrace of a sweet cupcake or the feeling of well-being from eating chia but also the rush that comes from discovering something that you just know will be the next big taste and being the first to tell the world about that.

I never asked Badaracco and the other trend forecasters what they thought of crowdsourced competition, but I imagine they weren't too worried. “Neither love nor hate a trend,” Badaracco advised the crowd when concluding her presentation. “Emotions will fog the trend's true pattern, and it will shift.”

The weight of Badaracco's logic is hard to ignore. For all the hate snobby eaters and even well-published critics poured onto cupcakes, the cupcake economy continued to grow apace. But her data-driven approach also ignored something that another approach might capture: the importance of driven, food-loving people committed to making a trend happen and selling it to the public. You could see its value in the hands of Glenn Roberts or Ricardo Zarate. And, as it turned out, you could see it not far from my home in Canada.

T
hornbury, Ontario, is a small, pretty town two hours northwest of Toronto, where the Beaver River flows into Georgian Bay, the giant backside of Lake Huron. The water in Georgian Bay is cold, clear, and remarkably clean, making it a coveted spot for weekend cottages and beachfront vacation homes. Just a few miles away from Thornbury are some of Ontario's best ski hills—a bit of an oxymoron, sadly—that drop down from the top of the Niagara Escarpment to the shore of the lake. My family has had a house five minutes outside Thornbury since I was a teenager, and we spend most weekends and holidays there.

In the summers my dad does a lot of bicycling and occasionally drags me out first thing on a Saturday morning to cycle thirty or forty miles with other baby boomers on their $9,000 carbon fiber stallions. A few years ago we left our house in the morning and rode up into the farmland beyond the vacation houses and golf courses along the shore. Within a few minutes the landscape opened up to rolling fields of canola, wheat, grazing sheep, and apple orchards. Thornbury is apple country and has been for well over a century. Lake air is held over the orchards by the heights of the nearby hills, creating a microclimate that's temperate and ideally suited for apple growing, with plenty of moisture and good frost protection.
Thick-trunked apple trees with drooping, snarled limbs are everywhere, and you can't drive three minutes in the fall without coming across a stand selling bushels of apples or a bakery selling apple pies. There are apple vinegars and jams for sale at the supermarket and apple cider on tap in Thornbury's bars. On the back roads, giant trucks roll by carrying presliced and packaged apples for Walmart and McDonald's as well as tankers of apple juice destined for Tropicana.

Five minutes into the ride that day we rode past a farm that looked completely different from all the others. Instead of knotty old trees around high grasses, there were tight, precise rows of wires affixed to wooden posts. The trees were growing vertically through these, kept in place by the wires, the same way that high-end vineyards grow their grapes. Along the fence were prominent signs aimed at drivers, so they'd know exactly what was there: