Emerging Technology in Foodservice

frog — 2022

Project Summary

Background

frog is a global research and design consultancy.

Our client was an innovation team within a 125-year-old foodservice distribution company that serves restaurants in the Midwest region of the United States. They hired frog to conduct a foundational study on emerging technology and its impact on the foodservice value chain, to help the company determine where to invest and to prepare for transformation.

We set out to tackle the following (big!) questions with our research:

  • Which trends and technologies are most impacting the foodservice industry today, and which will have the biggest impact in the next 20 years?

  • Based on these technologies, in 20 years, how will people consume food, and how will the foodservice industry operate?

This project overview shows how we used the frog research and synthesis methodology to answer big-picture, ambiguous strategy questions like these. In particular, it shows how we used different activities to generate and make sense of large amounts of data.

TIMELINE

10 weeks (6 weeks research)

THE TEAM

  • 1 program manager (me)

  • 1 strategist

  • 1 technologist

  • 1 visual designer

  • 3 leads (strategy, technology, design)

MY ROLE

The expectation at frog is that every team member participates in planning and conducting research activities. So in addition to my role as program manager responsible for the budget and client relationship, I was also a hands-on researcher on this project. I created the project timeline and milestones, wrote the first draft of the research plan, managed the recruitment vendor, facilitated research activities with participants, contributed to synthesis and helped author and present the final client report.

Laying the Foundation

Vision-casting and predicting the future are tall orders, so it was important the team begin by laying a strong foundation for our research. At the beginning of the project, we spent a week immersed in desktop research, scouring online publications and AlphaSense, a market research platform, to identify a wide range of technology and foodservice trends.

As important topics began to emerge, we noted them in a shared Miro board and began to organize them in categories. Once the team felt we had reached saturation with our secondary research, I worked with our technologist to discuss, debate and draft an affinity map of our findings. This visual landscape of the industry ("or “foodservice technology ecosystem” as we began to call it) became the team’s backbone for defining research participant recruitment criteria, writing interview questions, evaluating research findings, and ultimately, presenting our findings to the client.

Work-in-progress of foodservice technology ecosystem

Early draft of foodservice technology ecosystem, eventually leading to the final vision deliverable (shown below)

Going Deeper

To check our understanding of the areas of interest discovered in the initial research and begin imagining the future of foodservice, we recruited 7 participants to our study from organizations such as Planet, Dairy Farmers of America, the United States Senate, Welbilt Inc. and Beyond Meat. The range of industries, organizations and roles among participants was intended to give both a breadth and depth of insight in the areas of technology, food, distribution and the future.

We scheduled a 90-minute session with each research participant, starting with an in-depth interview of their particular area of expertise and closing with a participatory design workshops.

Excerpt from Research Plan

During the workshop portion of each session, we showed the participant a series of “magazine covers from the year 2040” in Miro. Each cover included an image and some sample provocative headlines, to spur discussion about likely and unlikely outcomes in foodservice over the next 20 years:

Relish - SME.png

Making Sense of the Data

Predicting the future is no small task, and we found ourselves with a huge amount of data and ideas from the interviews and workshops. To make sense of the vast amount of information, we used a tried-and-true frog method for affinity mapping.

It begins with dumping all the raw data from secondary and primary research into Miro as sticky notes and then reviewing every piece one-by-one. All team members participate in this process, and we progressively form smaller, more meaningful groups of data. Each level of synthesis is represented by a different color sticky in Miro, to ensure consistent understanding across team members.

Definitions for each layer of the frog synthesis method. Colors coordinate to the stickies used in Miro.

Research synthesis in progress, prior to themes being written

The observations and learnings began to form meaningful groups, and the team eventually settled on the following list of 7 themes that summarized the data. Each theme’s title pointed to a possible future for the foodservice industry, while its detailed description showed the key technologies that would enable that future:

  • Collaborative Supply Chain

  • Social Markets

  • Open Economies

  • Service Acceleration

  • Resilient Production

  • Reinvented Food Sources

  • Diverging Diets

Example theme description

Presenting the Findings

As we considered and discussed these themes as a team, we noticed that the implications for each of them centered around bringing people closer to their food in some way — gaps in time, distance, knowledge, nutrition, value and principles, specifically. That is how the 2040 vision statement emerged:

Over the next 20 years, technology will close the gap between consumers and their food.

To show how this would happen in the various stages of the foodservice value chain, we mapped the 7 research themes across food production, distribution and consumption. The resulting visual was our answer to one of the original research questions: In 20 years, how will people consume food, and how will the foodservice industry operate?

The future of the foodservice industry

At this point, we returned to our draft of the foodservice technology ecosystem, to answer the second research question: Which trends and technologies are most impacting the foodservice industry today, and which will have the biggest impact in the next 20 years?

We compared our early hypotheses to our primary research findings and found that many of the technologies and trends we had discovered in the beginning were indeed relevant. However, they were more highly interrelated than we had realized. This insight led to a circular design to visualize the technology ecosystem, centered around the 2040 Vision:

Final version of the foodservice technology ecosystem

Putting it into Action

The next phase of this project involved identifying and prioritizing potential implications for foodservice distributors. Through a series of internal workshops, we described in detail a list of 33 implications for our client to consider. They were prioritized on a 2x2 matrix of tech maturity and business impact.

After presenting this work and the resulting implications to leadership, the client signed on for additional contract to define the Future of Work in Foodservice (e.g. organizational design), based on these findings. The client specifically asked I help lead this new track of work.

“This is the visionary work we need to convince our executives and Board to make the right investments and stay ahead of the curve. It exceeds our expectations.”

— Head of client Innovation Lab