Blog post
Sustainable Food: What’s in it for me?
'The consumer doesn't seem to be part of the picture,' sighed a company director recently. We were in a meeting about initiatives to revamp the food sector and an innovative idea had just been presented. I shared the director's frustration. I often see how companies work on innovations with the best of intentions without investigating whether their product will appeal to consumers.
Short-term advantages
In that sense sustainability is a pitfall. It is often assumed that sustainability is high on consumers' priority list. However, a great deal of consumer research shows that 'ego' often comes before 'eco': Consumers choose products more because of short-term personal advantages than because of aspects such as long-term environmental advantages. This means that a sustainable food product is not commercially interesting until it also offers the consumer short-term advantages such as improved taste, freshness or health. 'What's in it for me?' I often hear from consumers in my research.
Technology
Short-term advantages become even more important when using technology for a sustainable product. Many consumers react negatively to the use of technology. In their opinion, there had better be very good reasons for meddling in natural processes. If you only use technology to deal with issues which are not important to consumers, you will primarily meet with resistance. If you utilise technology to confer short-term advantages such as improved taste, freshness, or health, consumers are more likely to react positively.
The problem is that technology is sometimes necessary to produce food in more sustainable ways. But if you say that products cultivated on substrate, for instance, are healthier for consumers because substrate-based cultivation reduces the chance of disease, consumers are more likely to accept the use of technology. The fact that the product is sustainable and therefore better not just for them but also for the environment is an added benefit.
Successful
Sustainable food products can be commercially successful and increase our planet's sustainability as long as you take short-term advantages for consumers into account. Then you will truly be meeting the needs of consumers - and probably those of company directors, too.