Top five food retailing trends in 2018
Food theme parks, crickets on toast and the death of the rock star chef? These are some of the trends that will drive food retailing in 2018, says director of Brain & Poulter, Suzee Brain.
Considered one of Australia’s experts on food and beverage retailing, Brain (pictured) has seen and done it all.
After owning an award-winning café chain and holding senior management roles in hotels and commercial catering, Brain and her 15-strong team of food and beverage experts now advise clients on how to grow their assets through strategic F&B offerings.
So, what are the trends on Brain’s radar for 2018?
- Food theme parks
Eataly World, a 100,000 sqm Italian gastro park outside Bologna, opened last week. The $100 million development is a giant showcase for Italian fare, with 47 restaurants, a 9,000 sqm farmers market and 40 areas for food production. The park’s creator, Oscar Farinetta, who owns global Italian marketplace Eataly, expects to attract six million visitors a year – half of them from outside Italy.
“We are talking about 100,000 sqm of space being chewed up by food and beverage – that’s a whole major regional sized shopping centre just devoted to food,” Brain says.
Meanwhile, SoHo farmhouse, a 10-acre club and event-based tourism experience outside London continues the theme, featuring accommodation, restaurants, gardening, education, homestyling and events.
Brain says these two examples are the tip of the iceberg. “These are immersive food experiences, and the implications for property are wide-reaching. Experiential food and beverage offerings are no longer limited to the city.
- Convenience and experience eating
The rise of UberEATS and Deliveroo will encourage restauranteurs to set up “dark kitchens” to deal with home delivery.
“Delivery companies are setting up multi-kitchen sites that are leased out for this purpose, which presents new opportunities for low-grade retail space and basements to be repurposed,” Brain says.As chef-quality food can now be ordered in, diners don’t need to leave the comfort of their own homes, Brain adds.
“Now that you can eat the food of your favourite chef at home, the restaurant experience must be about much more than just the chef. Eating out will become more of an experience.
“Tenancies will get larger, fitouts more expensive and rents established as base plus percentage to manage the risk.”
Brain points to examples such as the 15-acres of “experience eating” at the Great Ocean Road Chocolaterie and Ice Creamery and The Grounds of Alexandria, with its café, bakery, retailing and gardens in an old Sydney pie factory.
“To create experience dining, you need 10 reasons other than food to attract people to the restaurant. Think education, hands-on experience, sustainability, growing, tasting, listening, learning, participating, music and entertainment,” she says.
- Protein alternatives
Smashed avo with crunchy crickets anyone?
Veganism is the fastest rising meal preference among millennials, Brain says.
“Meat alternatives are being constructed to model the texture, colour and juiciness of animal protein,” she explains, pointing to the Impossible Burger as an example.
The United Nations has been promoting insects as the “meat of the future”, and Brain says her team has dubbed it “wing-to-sting” eating.
Chefs at the top level – the gastronomists at Noma and the likes of Kylie Kwong in Australia are good examples – are already featuring roasted crickets and mealworms, dehydrated earthworms and green tree ants on their menus.
How fast will this food trend become the norm?
“Expect to see crickets at the McDonald’s near you in the next couple of years,” Brain says.
- Zero waste
Sustainability continues to drive transformation in food and beverage retailing, Brain explains.
“At the property owners’ level, it’s no longer about a Green Star rating. It’s about making sure that every activity within retail – particularly in food and beverage where there is an enormous amount of waste – is sustainable.”Think composting fields, pickling and preserves, rooftop gardens and recycled materials. “It’s about the whole lifecycle,” she says.
“Expect to see a lot more nose-to-tail and root-to-tip eating.”
And this trend is consumer-led, as people “demand to know where their spent coffee grounds go, where the outer leaves of the lettuce end up, what happens to the rind of the watermelon. They want to see this waste used in a way that benefits the earth and our communities”.
Landlords will need to consider how they tackle the zero waste trend in everything from “how they procure tenants to the design of fitouts, to the use of rooftops and creation of green walls,” Brain advises.
- The death of the food court and the rock star chef
“At the property owners’ level, it’s no longer about a Green Star rating. It’s about making sure that every activity within retail – particularly in food and beverage where there is an enormous amount of waste – is sustainable.”
Rock star chefs have had their day, Brain says, as large multi-operational restaurant groups take over as the must-have tenancies.
“Until recently, only two per cent of all restaurants in Australia had more than three outlets. But we are seeing a big shift, which makes it easier for landlords to strike a deal with a much larger company.”
Last year, celebrity chef Neil Perry merged his Rockpool Group with private equity-backed Urban Purveyor Group to build a larger portfolio of restaurants. Rockpool Dining Group now has 60 restaurants and 16 brands.
While bespoke artisan fine dining may be on the wane, so too is the polar opposite – that is “mediocre, unbranded fast food dining in a homogenised space”.
“Food and beverage will change at both ends, and the middle of the market will be replaced with large-format and experience based dining.”
Brain & Poulter’s message is clear. “Vanilla will no longer cut it. You must have 10 reasons for people to come to eat that don’t involve eating. The landlords that understand this are those that will flourish in 2018.”