Country for PR: Hong Kong
Contributor: PR Newswire Asia (Hong Kong)
Thursday, April 08 2021 - 10:55
AsiaNet
Food Audiences And New Gatekeepers
HONG KONG, April 13, 2021 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --

Will new eno-gastronomy gatekeepers and operators take into account the 
changing sentiment of food audiences? praxis's 'appraisal. at present - 
RE-SEED' - on wine and food business 

Eno-gastronomy – the wine & food world - is perhaps the sector that expresses 
most fluently the plurality of the realities we are living.

Awareness about food has incredibly evolved in the last decade, or rather 
returned to be a matter of discussion the last year, and has made nutrition 
even more relevant.

WHAT: Consumers and particularly the youth – Millennials and Generation Z – are 
paying attention. 

Albeit skeptical of 'labels' and critical in the approach to information, 
buyers seem to have developed a sense of agency towards food that in recent 
years has fueled organized groups and start-up on a mission to improve the way 
we eat, and the way food is produced.

HOW-TO-WHERE: Changes in eno-gastronomy, however, are about the content as much 
as about the way wine and food are consumed, the places where they are consumed 
and how these impacts our sociality.

Restaurants, eateries, and lunch venues – already orphaned by tourists – have 
shifted to takeaway, organizing deliveries, adapting menus to customers' needs 
and supply chain alterations.

Reasonably, these changes are already informing and designing the future 
development of the sector reflecting the needs of a society that would probably 
behave differently and is re-considering geo-location, making alternative 
lifestyle choices.

Spaces are changing: smaller foot prints, different locations in 
neighbourhood-communities; redesigned into natural looking, 'sustainable' 
styles, equipped with manicured outdoors and 'built-in' safety and hygiene 
measures.

Would it be enough?

WHO: The recent medical emergency has been building upon behavioural changes 
that were already brewing for a while. 

Customers seem to be more likely to order food from platforms, restaurant 
groups are creating white labels and ghost kitchens serving exclusively an 
online audience. People have been rediscovering home-cooking, one of the few 
residues of tactile living in a heavily digitized lifestyle. 

The cumulative effect of these new behaviours is denting into restaurants 
businesses with consequences impacting the entire food ecosystems – farmers, 
producers, suppliers – who are now diversifying their distribution network and 
retooling to develop a direct relation with consumers.

All categories are moving closer together creating more competition and more 
'noise', as each segment of the food market fights for the attention of final 
patrons, 

At the same time, a determined breed of consumers and gatekeepers in the food 
business – seemingly looking for different contents in difference places with 
different purposes – is expressing resistance to 'digital intrusion' and is 
pushing for sustainability, honest products, better value proposition, gender 
and racial equality and shaping a new sociality.

How to reply to these signs? How to reflect new food audiences' aspiration? 
This is the conversation proposed in the RE-SEED issue of appraisal. At 
present. www.appraisalatpresent.com 

appraisal. at present. is a collection of self-initiated, multi-disciplinary, 
community driven researches and articles about customer facing businesses. 

praxis is a management consulting practice with a focus on brands & connected 
retail businesses/projects. 

www.intopraxis.com 

SOURCE: praxis.
Translations

Japanese