Work With Me
Ambition for the future of food.
The auto industry figured out something useful decades ago. To push the whole industry forward, you build concept cars: visions unconstrained by production realities, designed to provoke and demonstrate what’s possible. I do that for food.
Most strategy work in this industry is built around next quarter. The companies that come to me are trying to think in years and decades, because that’s the timeframe their real bets actually play out on. Crop systems, supply chains, regulatory regimes, consumer behavior shifts. None of those move on a fiscal calendar.
The Future Market is the name I work under for my speaking and foresight consulting. It’s me, plus partners I bring in when a project calls for it — designers, researchers, technologists, chefs, and other futurists I’ve worked with for years. The advantage of this setup is simple: every engagement gets my direct attention, and every team I assemble is built specifically for the problem in front of us.
I’ve worked with Danone, Mars, Campbell’s, Simple Mills, King Arthur Flour, Beef+Lamb New Zealand, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. I’ve keynoted at Google Food Lab in Cambridge and Chicago, EvokeAg in Melbourne, Natural Products Expo East and West, the Fancy Food Shows, and Groceryshop. My work has been covered in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fast Company.
There are two ways I most often work with companies.
Speaking
Keynotes and private sessions on the future of food. I speak to leadership offsites, corporate innovation teams, industry conferences, and investor gatherings. The talks I’m asked to give most often:
The future of food, 10 to 50 years out. What’s actually coming for the way we grow, distribute, cook, and eat. The forces driving the change and the categories most exposed to it.
Innovation, redesigned. Why most innovation pipelines fail and what to do instead. Drawn from a decade of building products and strategies inside Chobani, Alpha Food Labs, and The Future Market.
Reading the signals. How to tell which food trends are real movement and which are noise, and why most “trend reports” are getting it wrong.
Talks are tailored to the audience. I work with corporate communications and event teams to land the right message for the right room.
Foresight Consulting
Long-horizon strategic work for food and agriculture companies. This is the deepest engagement I offer, and the one most directly connected to my book.
In 2024 I wrote Mise: On the Future of Food, which laid out four full scenarios for what our food system might look like between 2033 and 2067. Mise wasn’t a forecast. Forecasting tries to predict the single most likely future, and at long timeframes that’s a fool’s errand. Mise was a scenario set: four internally coherent, plausible futures, each one a different answer to the question “what could happen?” Reading them next to each other is what makes them useful. They give you a map of the possibility space, not a single line.
That same method drives the consulting work. When a company hires me for foresight, we build scenarios specific to their category. We map the structural forces that are actually moving — demographics, climate, policy, technology, capital, behavior — and we develop multiple plausible futures the business has to be ready for. Then we stress-test current strategy against each one. The output is a strategic instrument the team keeps using, not a deck that gets archived in a shared drive.
Foresight engagements typically include some combination of:
Category-specific scenario planning (5 to 50 year horizons)
Innovation strategy and roadmaps grounded in where the system is heading
Workshops that build internal foresight capability so your team can keep doing this work after I’m gone
Speculative product and concept development, the same approach that produced Mise
If you want to see how this thinking looks fully realized, Mise is the clearest expression of it. Companies often read it before we start working together.
Selected clients and partners
Danone · Mars · Campbell’s · Simple Mills · King Arthur Flour · Beef+Lamb New Zealand · Ellen MacArthur Foundation
How to start
The best engagements I’ve done began with a conversation, not a brief. If you have a strategic question you keep circling, a category you’re trying to read, or a team that needs to think bigger, that’s enough to start.
For more on the broader practice, my book, podcast, and speaking history, visit mikelee.food.
Contact: mike@thefuturemarket.com