The Food Market by 2050

Acknowledgements
Foreword: what this book is about

Introduction
Where and how will we go shopping for food tomorrow?
A century of diversity and tensions
Diversity and tensions still persist today
The end-market from brick-and-mortal self-service to virtual platforms
Beyond our precise scope: ecosystems and public regulation
Four achievable, coherent, and contrasted scenarios
Time and space scope: France in thirty years
Methodology of the prospective study
The target audiences and the organization of the book
Content and reading guide

Part 1. E-commerce for Food, Marketplaces, and Platforms

1. The Role of platforms at first glance: matching the existing  
Nine technologies that explain the rise of online platforms
What is a platform?
Marketplaces
Matching pre-existing products: when choice and provision become independent
Matching the existing: when Juliet searches for her Romeo
Virtual marketplaces: global trend towards plateformisation
Transaction costs, network externalities, and critical mass

2. The enhanced role of platforms: aligning preferences and characteristics
Beyond facilitation: from matching to alignment
Aligning three ‘domains’: characteristics, preferences, and production methods
Changing product characteristics
Changing preferences
Changing modes of production

3. The Industrial Revolution 4.0
Each Industrial Revolution comes with its specific matching and alignment way
Products three stages: standardized, differentiated, personalized
What major German manufacturers discovered at the 2007 Hannover Fair

4. Self-service, yesterday and today
Self-service for reducing transaction costs of standard products
Birth of the modern food trade: Félix Potain, Carrefour and a few others
The customer journey in the age of self-service
From the end-market to the extended value chains at the age of self-service
The current limits of self-service
A proliferation of new forms of sales

5. Scenario Method
Our goal: explore the possible, not just the desirable
The progress of our study
The method of morphological analysis
System, Eco-System
Nine key variables defining four scenarios

Boxes: Charts, Tables, and Overviews

Part 2. Analysis by key variable of the four scenarios

6. Key variable #1. Where to shop?
Presentation of the variable
Scenario Personalization: Delegate to the platform the initiative of anticipating food desires
Scenario Commitment: Accept a platform that controls the consequences of one’s diet
Scenario Communities: Join one or more communities
Scenario Low Prices: Access a unique and competitive marketplace

7. Key variable #2. How to choose your products?
Presentation of the variable
Scenario Personalization: A digital Maître d’Hôtel offers a streaming food experience
Scenario Commitment: The platform filters available choices, diet is constrained by its consequences
Scenario Communities: The choice is made by direct interpersonal dialogues
Scenario Low Prices: The choice is oriented towards the cheapest commoditized agri-food

8. Key variable #3. How to dispose of your purchases?
Presentation of the variable
Scenario Personalization: Round-the-clock delivery for instant use, ready-to-eat or ready-to-cook
Scenario Commitment: Control tower platforms optimize delivery for best collective consequences
Scenario Communities: A provision for tightfitting producers and customers  
Scenario Low Prices: Proximity outlets reduce delivery time and costs

9. Key variable #4. Why should you buy?
Presentation of the variable
Scenario Personalization: Hedonic preferences, made of rewarding experiences
Scenario Commitment: Consequential preferences based on a collective desire for change
Scenario Communities: Preferences grounded on embodied workers, with genuine intentions
Scenario Low Prices: ??Preference based on basic needs, with minimum budget and time

10. Key variable #5. Which offer, at what price?
Presentation of the variable
Scenario Personalization: Characteristics made up of a stream of serviced products, sold by subscription
Scenario Commitment: Characteristics that distinguishes diet from foods
Scenario Communities: Heterogeneous characteristics, sold at fair price
Scenario Low Prices: Standardized and unmarked characteristics, sold by volume at competitive price

11. Key variable #6. Why and how to eat?
Presentation of the variable
Scenario Personalization: Festive meals, with support and training, from kitchen to dining table
Scenario Commitment: Overcoming barriers to diet changes, learning to consume new products
Scenario Communities: Community-wide commensality
Scenario Low Prices: Cooking and eating with limited time, budget, involvement and attention

12. Key variable #7. How to design and produce?
Presentation of the variable
Scenario Personalization: Contain the costs of a continuously renewed service
Scenario Commitment: Design attractive products while ensuring systemic control of consequences
Scenario Communities: Design and produce in small, open to visitors’ processes
Scenario Low Prices: Price competition imposes large-scale best practices at killed costs

13. Key variable #8. Which extended value chain?
Presentation of the variable
Scenario Personalization: 3rd transformation businesses arise, merging with last mile logistics
Scenario Commitment: Manage and synchronize changes that mainly affect agriculture
Scenario Communities: Value chains are integrating communities through short circuits
Scenario Low Prices: Each link is connected to the value chain by globalized markets and logistics

14. Key variable #9. Governance, Management, Regulation
Presentation of the variable
Scenario Personalization: An ‘industry 4.0’ style food supply, a public regulator in the background
Scenario Commitment: Mission platforms attempt private regulation that public authorities cannot achieve
Scenario Communities: Specialized platforms serve the faces that own them
Scenario Low Prices: Independent platforms increase competition

General conclusion
Bibliography
Glossary