Hybrid work will upend our food habits (again)

Food itself serves physical as well as emotional needs for humans. Our food purchases do too, as we try to balance a desire for sustainability with the reality of how most foods are produced. A futurist for Mars Wrigley, and host of a pair of podcasts including “The Future Imagined,” Joanna Lepore studies the contradictions we face as people, consumers and foodies. 

Matt Carmichael: What changes have you seen in terms of our work life balance and what that means for when and how we eat? 

Joanna Lepore: We’ve been talking about the “blurring of occasion” for five or 10 years. Like everything else in the pandemic, that accelerated. A lot of people created new habits of working from home or having childcare from home or studying from home, and their snacking and eating occasions started to become more blurred and less structured. 

Carmichael: People are thinking more about how food makes them feel, too, right? 

Lepore: Yes. We’re thinking about whether food fulfills a role that allows you to have more energy or more sustenance emotionally to get through what you’re getting through, and then really rethinking the moments of rewards. We saw a big shift toward how dessert, after a very long working day, plays a critical role to close off the hours of blending your job inside of your life.

Carmichael: How does food help with that?

Lepore: Foods now can contain mood modulation ingredients that help calm you, or ingredients that help boost performance cognitively, like nootropics, or ingredients that are a little bit more experimental. There is a greater openness for the food industry to think differently about how food is composed so it can deliver on those same needs that consumers have, but in a slightly different way. That goes for not only what we’re adding into the food, but also what we’re taking out.

Carmichael: Will these changing attitudes stick?

Lepore: I think the thing that will likely stick is the ability to reset between the different parts of my life and the roles that I play within them. There’s a lot of opportunity with food that allows you to reset.

Carmichael: The shift from in-store shopping to online and delivery must be especially important for a snack-food brand to think about. 

Lepore: We will see more startups where you can buy directly from the seller online or even from the producer. What comes with that is choice paralysis. So how do we help them to navigate toward products that are more personally beneficial or meaningful to them?

Carmichael: We’ve talked a bit about work from home, but food can also play a role in getting us back to the office.

Lepore: Yeah. One of the biggest things that brings people back into the office is free donuts. Food is a great motivator, and it's a great enabler for people to connect.

Carmichael: Hybrid work feels like one of those human contradictions, similar to the tensions we talk about in this issue. We want flexibility, but we also want connection.

Lepore: There are a lot of contradictions inside of human behavior that are quite natural and quite constant. Like your core value system around buying more planet-friendly, eating less meat or eating less dairy, or trying to reduce your sugar intake can coexist with the fact that you need emotional rewards. You need that piece of chocolate that will get you through at the end of the day. That’s OK. I think that the recognition that consumers have dual and sometimes contradictory needs is even more present now.

Carmichael: What’s another example?

Lepore: Synthetic biology and fermentation links back to our core human need to progress and leverage the latest technology to make ourselves better. But that’s contradictory to that the values around retaining our heritage and retaining our culture and the way that things have always been. But those things can coexist. Or people want to have the comfort food that they've always had, but also want a more sustainable option that’s not always available. So how do we think about designing product solutions and commitments around making it easier for [people] to shift their behavior? How can we create simpler solutions that enable people to be empowered to change the rituals in their lives to help with this big, overwhelmingly complex topic?