Why the Food Industry Is Turning to Foresight and What Roquette’s New HORIZONS Platform Reveals About the Road to 2035

Courtesy: Fabstyle

The food industry has grown accustomed to volatility, but the pressures shaping it today go far beyond price spikes or shifting consumer preferences. Climate-linked disruptions, emerging definitions of “processing,” tightening regulatory scrutiny, demographic shifts, and the rapid advance of digital and biological technologies are forcing companies to look much further ahead than their traditional planning cycles allow. In this context, foresight is becoming less of a luxury and more of an operational necessity.

Roquette’s new HORIZONS platform enters this landscape as part of a wider pivot within the sector. While presented through a corporate announcement, the underlying work reflects a broader trend: large food and nutrition companies are building internal futures capabilities to navigate long-term uncertainty, stress-test decisions, and anticipate shifts before they hit the market.

The accompanying HORIZONS deck outlines a substantial internal effort, compiling more than 200 signals and 25 macro drivers across five forces, lifestyle shifts, governance rules, technological enablers, market dynamics, and resource management. These include everything from “mass-market precision nutrition” and “food sensory exploration” to “climate accountability for corporates,” AI modelling for R&D, and supply-chain sovereignty, illustrating the breadth of pressures shaping the next decade of food innovation. 

If the platform resonates beyond Roquette, it will be because it attempts to bring coherence to these forces. The company uses a dual-axis framework, consumer behaviour (proactive vs reactive) and regulatory strength (market-led vs regulation-led), to outline four plausible futures. In one scenario, strong policy alignment and engaged consumers accelerate the adoption of science-backed solutions, from microbiome-targeted foods to precision-engineered ingredients. Another envisions fragmented systems, stalled innovation, and defensive decision-making driven by cost or mistrust.

Roquette's Trend Analysis

Crucially, HORIZONS does not limit itself to abstract futures. It connects macro forces to consumer trends across health, indulgence, convenience, eco-consciousness, and clean-label expectations. For example, the platform’s use case on precision nutrition at home highlights how GLP-1 medications, microbiome testing, and digital health wearables are reshaping expectations around personalization, while also posing questions about accessibility, data use, and regulatory guardrails. The deck even sketches near-future product concepts, such as smart supplement dispensers calibrated to real-time biometric data, reflecting how technological enablers may intersect with changing lifestyles. 

This type of linkage is where foresight tools prove most useful. Many companies struggle in the space between insight and strategy: knowing a trend exists isn’t the same as understanding when it matters, how it interacts with other forces, or what it means for ingredient pipelines, formulation work, sourcing, or claims. Tools that map uncertainty across multiple time horizons, short-, mid-, and long-term, can help companies avoid reacting too late or investing too narrowly.

Roquette frames HORIZONS as an AI-supported, expert-validated engine for that translation. The scanning process is accelerated by machine intelligence, but all signals and scenarios pass through internal teams and external collaborators, including Hello Tomorrow and EDHEC Business School, to filter hype from meaningful change. It’s an approach that aligns with a growing trend across the sector: hybrid foresight models combining automated trend detection with human interpretation.

“HORIZONS is about giving the food industry the confidence to look further ahead and act with clarity today,” said Sébastien Adelis, Roquette’s Food & Nutrition Global Insights and Digital Planner. His comment captures the central tension companies face: short-term market pressures demand agility, while long-term resilience requires a fundamentally broader view.

The real test for HORIZONS will be its ability to support that middle ground, helping teams translate big-picture signals into concrete decisions about innovation, reformulation, sourcing, partnerships, and risk mitigation. But its launch underscores a wider shift in how the food industry is preparing for the future. As complexity grows, the question is no longer whether companies should invest in foresight, but how quickly they can embed it into their strategies.

If the past few years have shown anything, it’s that prediction is often impossible. Preparedness, however, is not.