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The Future of our Food System whitepaper is now live!

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Our Food System in Review

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The HealthTech Brand Check: Part 2

The future of our food system is at stake

Global warming is threatening food and water supply, there is a need to produce more food for a growing population, but with less natural resources and economic and political volatility is putting a strain on our food system. Beyond that, there are growing health inequalities (both hunger and obesity are rampant) and food insecurity is increasingly becoming an issue and the number of families going hungry is growing rapidly month on month. 

We’ve been analysing global trends and carrying out interviews with experts across the food system, to understand the macro themes that we believe will shape the food system in the future. Our hope is that this will empower brands to take advantage of the transformations impacting the sector, as well as inspire meaningful change in support of a more sustainable food system. 

We've surfaced the following 7 macro themes:

1. Sustainability: A requirement for system wide sustainability.

2. Diversity: Moving from dietary monotony to diversified diets.

3. Innovations: A new breed of lab grown protein and plant-based foods. 

4. Transparency: A demand for transparency across the supply chain.

5. Cost: The trade off of affordability vs accessibility.

6. Wellbeing: Using food to power our health and longevity.

7. Experimentation: A mixing of food customs, categories and flavours. 

Everyone in the food system is under huge pressure to evolve and we'll continue to see a boom in innovations that will change the way we source, produce and consume food.This is just the beginning of our Food System in Review Campaign.

Look out for our whitepaper which we'll be launching in January 2023.

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I’m not sure exactly what it was that got the creative juices flowing. I clocked off at 5.30pm, went for a run, cooked dinner (Korean tacos) with my fiancé (Carley), watched my footy team lose, and did the dishes. At some point between filling the rinse aid and stacking the plates, I got the urge to create something. So, I started writing.

Not that I’ve asked everyone I’ve ever met, but I think all of us get this feeling in our own unique way. It’s a sort of sudden mental momentum, or energy – it could almost be described as creative adrenaline. Still, to this day, I’m not 100% sold on where it comes from, if we can control when we feel it, and why it can be so fleeting. But I do have some thoughts on the matter. Bear with me.

For most of my life I’ve leaned pretty heavily on sudden surges in creativity – or lightning strikes – to get me by. See, I used to be a singer/songwriter. And even though I still sing, and I still write songs, I don’t consider myself a singer/songwriter anymore (it’s a long story). But my justification for why I could come up with music and lyrics was that every now and then something in my head just clicks. I feel something, and I write it, or sing it, or move my body a certain way to express it (for transparency’s sake, I’ve always been really bad at the latter).

There have been plenty of times throughout my life when I’ve chalked my creativity up to one of these lightning strikes. Take September 2015, for example. I was ‘living’ (sleeping on a friend’s futon) in New York City, playing open mics and working coat check at Webster Hall. My family were all back home in Australia, I was running out of money, and our family dog had died while I was over there. Not trying to paint too sad a picture for you, but for a while I was going through a bit of a down phase. I missed home, and I had started writing a song for my sister about how, while I was living far away, I felt like I hadn’t been there for her. 

The song was half-finished in late September. I was walking up an East Village street as a pile of leaves got swept into the air by an autumn breeze. Lightning struck, and I took out my phone to tap some lines into Notes. All of a sudden I had a bridge for this song:

All at once you’ll see colour
Finally the leaves are letting go
Of the year they’ve seen
Of what they used to be

It felt like it came out of nowhere. But it’s kind of obvious when you think about it, right? I was an emotional wreck! And the more I look back on the times that I’ve had a lightning strike, the more I realise they came from a really emotional place. If I was jealous, or missing someone, or stoked to be alive, my first instinct would be to pick up the guitar and jot a few lines down.

Since I’ve transitioned from the recording studio to the creative studio, it’s taken some time to adapt my creativity to the 9-5. As a copywriter, there are deadlines and collaborations that can’t afford the time for the right lightning strike. So I’ve really had to work on my ability to flick the inspiration switch on and off, and turn the emotional dial up and down whenever necessary. And you’ll be happy to hear that I’m proud of the work I’ve been doing, even if my approach to creativity is a little different now from what it used to be.

Still, every now and then when I’m in the office, I’ll look around at my coworkers who I think the world of. Or hear a song that makes me wish I had written it. Or I’ll get a message from Carley that makes me miss her. Then something in my head will just click, and I’ll start typing.

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Mind Blown_2.mp4

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Here’s to the Lightning Strikes: Thoughts on Creative Inspiration

His football team lost, he stacked the dishwasher and then – inspiration struck. In his quest to understand why, Re writer Jack Anderson delves into the mystery that is the urge to create.