By: Racheli Vizman, CEO & Co-Founder of SavorEat
Imagine waking up to a song of your choosing in the morning. Then driving to work in a car with the windows tinted just to your liking, and returning home to a custom-made mattress in the evening. Even your refrigerator is personalized with your favorite foods, selected from Whole Foods and your local veggie stand.
But when you arrive at your favorite local restaurant to meet friends the next day, that degree of personalization ends. You’re given the same menu as everyone else, with the only thing you can change being the doneness of your burger patty.
To some, this might sound like a first-world critique of the state of the commercial dining experience, being completely out of touch with the current state of the economy. But it’s really a harbinger of things to come.
Personalization is key
Customers expecting personalization is now the norm: a U.S. study showed that 80 percent of customers would prefer to purchase a brand that allows for a personalized experience. Case in point: the global personalization software market is estimated to reach $943.25 million this year and rise to $2.72 billion by 2027, marking a compound annual growth rate of 23.5 percent. Targeted marketing has put personalization front and center in our current economy, and it will expand into physical dining and retail spaces rapidly.
The most recent foodtech innovation revolution came with the emergence of food delivery apps, such as UberEats, Grubhub, and even last-mile delivery services like Kiwibot. Such apps have already incorporated a degree of personalization considering they can save your preferences and re-order for you within minutes, but there are few available options to customize the food itself beyond what’s on the menu. The next major wave of foodtech innovation will be to find ways to customize dishes and foods, and not only from delivery services.
Customizing menus
Twelve percent of consumers live on a plant-based diet, while nearly one in three households in the U.S. considers itself flexitarian. These figures would have been thought unimaginable just ten years ago. Consumers are diverging dietarily into various camps: 1 in 20 Americans avoids gluten, 1 in 10 Americans doesn’t eat meat and of course, within those categories, each individual has different dietary concerns based on the results of their most recent blood tests.
A glaring opportunity for foodtech to capitalize on this megatrend emerges. By utilizing a completely customizable menu, we could move toward a future in which we don’t necessarily need, for example, a totally gluten-free kitchen, because a robot would be able to ensure completely gluten-free food. Imagine your favorite restaurant customizing your next meal suggestions based on your past visits.
Vegetarians could customize each meal on the menu to their liking, while athletes could pack more protein into their sandwich patty. Could restaurants dedicate their entire existence to vegan options be replaced by most restaurants having an entirely vegan automated kitchen? We might not be quite there yet, but foodtech is certainly working to make such realities possible.
By tailoring menus and dishes to consumer preferences, foodtech companies have a higher chance of attracting a large client base and expanding their market share. This will lead to an explosion of startups working to produce the tech to make this possible, and ultimately enhance the dining experience for anyone with dietary restrictions. And also for everyone else.
About the author:
Racheli Vizman is the CEO & Co-Founder of SavorEat - a disruptive foodtech company, publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. A Co-Founder and Board member of Egg'n'Up (Subsidiary), and biotechnologist and chemist by academic training, Racheli previously served as COO of Beyond Air™ (formerly called AIT), a clinical-stage medical device and biopharmaceutical company.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.