In the fall of 2023, our Day 2 keynote speaker at FA&M, Suzy Badaracco, shared with the audience the ways in which food and beverage manufacturers can create products that consumers want to buy. Central to this idea was seeing how technology is evolving and how consumers are responding to those changes in technology with regard to their consumption habits.

The biggest difference between what her company, Culinary Tides, does versus other research-type firms is that most other firms simply identify current trends to make their recommendations. Culinary Tides, however, separates itself by predicting what those trends will be by using vast amounts of data from all sorts of areas, no matter how influential they may be on food and beverage specifically. So while other companies can only identify trends as they emerge, Culinary Tides is able to predict those trends using other data points long before they begin to emerge. 

We at FE felt that the presentation was so enlightening, we asked her to record her presentation so we could share it with our greater audience. We’ve broken up the keynote into three logical parts for the sake of time.

In the first part of this three part series, Badaracco introduced us to drivers that influence consumer behavior and how they drive trends, such as technology. This second part of that series goes into what those technology drivers are and why they’re impactful on consumer thought processes.