This week I attended the Fancy Food Show in New York City, which has long been one of my favorite food conferences. That's because I love walking around and sampling delicious food, and I'm sure everyone agrees.
The amazing food samples on display in the expo hall were reason enough for me to hop on a plane to New York, but the real reason I was there was to hear a keynote speech on how AI is changing the food business.
To be sure, the crowd that flocks to Fancy Foods isn't your typical Silicon Valley crowd enthusiastic about technology itself: Instead, they're usually successful small businesses that make between $1 million and $250 million a year selling their favorite hot sauce or healthy crackers.
In other words, the good stuff.
These are food brands first, not tech companies, so I kept it brief: I explained that AI has been used in the food industry for years, that new forms of AI (particularly generative AI) are advancing rapidly, and that the next decade will dramatically change all of the rules that govern business, from sales and supply chain to customer acquisition and product development.
If you're tired, that's understandable. I've long been skeptical of the exaggerated warnings about “disruption,” and by now most people are tired of hearing about how important AI is. But that hasn't stopped me from giving up, because despite all the talk, I think most people are underestimating the profound changes that AI will bring to our daily lives over the next decade. In other words, most people are not prepared for how dramatically it will change the rules that govern business and everyday professional life.
This belief was reinforced last week when I met Samantha Rose, a longtime consumer products entrepreneur who went on to become a Yale magazine editor and award-winning poet before launching a wildly successful home goods startup that she sold to Pattern Brands in 2021. Since then, she's started a third-party logistics and business services company and is now raising capital for a new venture buying and turning around struggling consumer products brands. And along the way, she landed a commercial for Chase Card.
So Sam has mastered the modern rules of business today. But when I asked her about AI, she said, “I feel like all the rules are changing, so I want to take a year off to study AI and become an expert.”
It made me wonder, if someone as knowledgeable as Sam felt the need to go back to school for AI, what opportunities do the rest of us have?
Following my talk, I hosted a panel on AI to dive deeper into how it could potentially change business and how small food business entrepreneurs should prepare.
One theme that emerged from the session was that growing food brands need to pay attention to how consumer purchasing behavior will be dramatically influenced by AI. Imagine a future where we have our own AI co-pilot giving us directions on what to eat, where to get the best deals, and more. In a world where everyone is guided by one or more AIs, how will consumer behavior change when it comes to food shopping?
This is already starting to happen and will undoubtedly be widely adopted within the decade.
Additionally, AI-driven information can be purposefully crafted and sent to consumers with the goal of changing their purchasing behavior. Restaurants are flooding review sites with AI-generated reviews, and there are already so many good ones that consumers can’t tell the difference.
As a publisher, I can’t help but think about how Google’s de-emphasis on website search results and its push for its own AI-generated answers will impact not only my business, but also the type of information consumers consume to guide their actions.
Bottom line: No matter which way you look, every industry and its associated value chain is changing faster than ever before. The rules are changing too. Unfortunately, most of us don't have the time to study and have to learn on the fly.
I will share the suggestions I made to these companies at the Fancy Food Show in subsequent posts.
