Inside the weird and wonderful world of food design

“People not quite understanding what I do is the story of my life,” says Dutch food designer Katja Gruijters. “It’s not easy to explain because it’s so varied, but it’s not about being a chef, or a food stylist. It’s about using design to make the many complex topics around food more approachable. As a discipline it’s only just finding its feet now, but food design is taking off”.

From the universities of Reims in France and Ulster in Ireland, to the Elisava School of Design and Engineering in Barcelona and the Polytechnic School of Design in Milan – where Gruijters teaches – food design is now a hot topic in academia, after two decades of bubbling away in the background.

Businesses as diverse as the accounting giant Deloitte and beauty brand L’Oreal increasingly turn to its practitioners both for fresh ideas and to understand what the next big thing in food could and perhaps should be.

Indeed, if the idea that food isn’t just prepared and packaged but designed – like a chair or a car – sounds fanciful, consider our apparent desire for constant innovation.

According to one study by international food trade show, Sial Paris, while, remarkably, just 12 crops and five animal species account for three quarters of global food intake, it’s nonetheless commonplace for 50 per cent of the products on our supermarket shelves not to have existed about five years ago. Such is the rapid turnover of ideas, some of which stick, some or which don’t.

Last year’s Sial event saw the launch of snack bars made of hummus, chickpea and mushroom spreads, and various proposals for upcycling food waste (that is, turning the waste produced in making foods into something edible).

Recent years, of course, have seen the advent of alt-dairy products, cronuts, activated charcoal drinks and all manner of foods with added fibre or protein, all of which seem to be staying. Foods that were once considered exotic – quinoa, kimchi and kale, among others – have been reconsidered, repackaged and gone mainstream.

According to Amir Mousavi, founder of the London food design consultancy Good Food Studio – which has explored ideas such as how to extend the shelf-life of cheesecake through to the appeal of re-hydratable powdered yoghurt for major brands and small start-ups. Many food trends are initially led by consumers, with food producers monitoring online sentiment and then amplifying demand.”

“So, yes, alongside efforts to make food, say, longer lasting, more palatable or healthier, there’s certainly a cynical, commercial side [to food design] too – people don’t realise how much their food choices are manipulated through it,” he concedes. “But the fact is that the pace of development in food products is only getting faster as consumers demand more innovation.”

“Food designers certainly help the big multinationals drive that innovation in food – making it hard for start-ups to scale – and it’s certainly hard to keep up with the products that they think people want,” Gruijters explains.

“But I think in parallel, food design is also driving more consciousness with regards to food – moves towards more sustainable, as well as healthier systems – and the friction between those two approaches is what’s going to be behind its next transformative phase”.

While newness in food stuffs alone can drive sales, food design is also about responding to the changing needs of society. Currently, the lines are blurred between work and leisure, and changing family dynamics means that we’re less likely to eat together at regular times.

We’re more mobile and eat on the go, and thanks to social media, food is increasingly subject to fast-moving fashions. The fact that we’re an ageing society means we may need food to be more digestible. The connection between food and memory is already being explored in geriatric care.

Obesity is also a huge problem in developed nations but, as Gruijters points out, “food design can help us explore the idea that in order to be eaten regularly, healthy food also has to be seductive”. In 2023, one of her projects, Snackery Street, used research into the psychology of satiety to explore whether the kind of fast foods commonly dispensed from vending machines in the Netherlands could be reimagined to this end.

She came up with a pizza made from a cauliflower-based dough, a burger with a doughnut shaped patty that made it look bigger than its calorific value would suggest, and the Bigger Ball, a snack filled with tangled courgette strings. All proved popular.

Certainly some products launched over recent years push at the boundaries of taste and sci-fi – from snail sausages to fish skin salt, from 3D-printed artificial fruits, to Fabri Candy – which turns waste natural textiles into sweets by using the enzyme cellulase to break down their cellulose content into glucose – to the launch of a kitchen tabletop cricket farm.

Other, more conceptual ideas – such as designer Leyu Li’s Mush chicken or Peaf, hybrids of vegetables and lab-grown meats – ask us to think anew about what we eat. Yet others have investigated the notion that food is a kind of “smart material” – how, for example, might pasta’s ability to expand through added water be applied to, say, cereals?

“But this kind of speculative thinking in food design, a more experimental, as well as a more practical or commercial approach that explores what and how we might eat in the future, is important too,” argues Marije Vogelzang.

Vogelzang was a professor of food design at the University of Kassel, Germany, for the past couple of years, and later this summer, she will open a 700 square metre lab-meets-theatre space, Food Design Playground, in Dordrecht, Netherlands. One of her more recent projects blended the experience of eating with audio and meditation. The experience was so emotional that many of her subjects cried.

“Food is so abundant, we often have a rather mindless attitude towards it, but food design can help reestablish our connection to its sensory qualities,” Vogelzang adds.

“That food is tangible, alive, part of nature all make it something we crave in an increasingly digital world too, which is why I think we’re seeing more and more institutions looking for creative ways to deal with food, which also suggests a huge opportunity. This is as much about ‘eating design’ as ‘food design’.”

Dr Francesca Zampollo, food designer, editor of the International Journal of Food Design and arguably the leading public intellectual of food design, suggests examining topics such as “spirituality in food design” and “food design activism”.

“Food design isn’t just about making new products,” she says. “As with design, more broadly, it’s a process of deliberate and reasoned choices. We use the discipline of design thinking in so many other ways and the outcomes are consequently better. So why not apply that to food too?”

Not that the young discipline of food design is without its particular challenges, not least that, as Vogelzang points out, for many of us the attachment to the foods we’re used to is both deeply cultural and deep-seated.

We’re hard-wired to be suspicious of completely unfamiliar ideas in foods, after all. Edouard Malbois, head of the Paris food design agency Enivrance, which has worked with brands such as McDonald’s and Nestle, also argues that, right now, the food sector and consumers are locked into a vicious circle. It’s one that food design might rescue us from.

“The former is still following an industrial model of delivering cheap, easy and unhealthy foods and that makes it hard for us consumers to have the same excitement about food, and to make the same quality demands of it, and the same investment into it, as we do of, say, technology or transport,” reckons Malbois, who has even launched his own product, Grand Jardins – a variety of cold-infused exotic teas that are sold in wine bottles and selected with the same attention to terroir and provenance.

“What we need next is the right kind of food design,” he insists. “Bubble tea is, in a way, a perfect example of 100% food design now – new, easy to eat through a straw, liquid, but also chewy, colourful, graphic and entertaining, but ultimately crap.

“We need to decide if, instead, we want the kind of food design that can bring empowering, impactful solutions for how we need to live, because that’s what it can also give us.”