For the fourth consecutive year, JWT Manila shared highlights from JWTIntelligence’s 10 Trends for 2012 report with clients and industry partners. The presentation was augmented by insights generated from local ethnographic research and expert interviews that I (the executive planning director in the Philippines) conducted along with planners Jojo Leonardo and Karla DQ De Quiros.

Interestingly, we found that Filipino consumers don’t lag behind when it comes to many of the trends outlined in JWT’s report. Take Navigating the New Normal, which points to more marketers in more categories opening up more entry points for extremely cost-sensitive consumers. Because of their innate resourcefulness amid continuing economic adversity, Filipino consumers have become adept at navigating “thrift as the omnipresent normal” and are accustomed to choosing smaller sizes, stripped-down offerings and otherwise more accessible products and services.

We’re even seeing the beginnings of Marriage Optional, the trend that recognizes that a growing cohort of women doesn’t see marriage as an essential part of their life plan. Among middle-income consumers, the older single-by-choice woman is rising up the ladder in the workplace. According to a July 2011 Agence France-Presse report, more couples here are starting families out of wedlock. The latest census figures, from 2008, show a 12.5% year-over-year increase in babies born to unmarried mothers, comprising about 37% of the country’s 1.78 million babies born in the Philippines in that year.

For more on how JWT’s 10 Trends for 2012 are playing out in the Philippines, watch our post-presentation interview with Adobo magazine or see the Executive Summary.

-“Down and out” is becoming the new normal for British youth facing long-term unemployment, reports The New York Times.

-The Atlantic looks at the ways in which the recession has caused young people to postpone adulthood.

-A Financial Times special report on the Future of the Company argues that the corporate world’s biggest challenge today is to “unlock the productive power of people.”

-The BBC’s Future of Work series includes Q&As with the president of Microsoft International and a Gartner Fellow.

-Interracial marriage has reached a new high in the U.S., according to The Wall Street Journal, noting that it has “evolved from being illegal to being a taboo to being merely unusual.”

-The Christian Science Monitor takes a look at modern courtship rituals among Millennials.

-The Economist interviews Eric Klinenberg about his book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

-The New York Times looks at how the “age of big data” will see a revolution in data-driven discovery and decision-making across industries.

-The Wall Street Journal outlines how board game manufacturers are integrating tablets and smartphones into play.

-The world’s 50 most innovative companies, according to Fast Company.

-Tech giants like Google and Amazon are looking to “own every waking moment,” selling devices as well as content and even accompanying ads, reports The New York Times.

-Some retailers are giving F-commerce an “F,” reports Bloomberg.

-The BBC looks at the rise of BYOD (bring your own device)—one of our 100 Things to Watch in 2012—in the workplace.

-Adweek looks at how location-based technology will redefine behavioral targeting.

-Ad Age reports on a global Accenture study that found consumers are more satisfied with customer service yet are switching brands at a high rate.

-The New York Times’ David Pogue investigates the Pinterest phenomenon, and The Wall Street Journal reports that while the site has seen huge recent growth, Pinterest has no business model as yet. Grant McCracken sees it as a source for free market research.

-The New York Times discusses how Facebook and other Web successes will struggle to balance user interests with the demands of their business models.

-With coconut water a hot category, as we note in our new food report, The Wall Street Journal looks at the battle among the brands selling it.

-The Association of National Advertisers’ TV and Everything Video Forum spotlighted what’s changing for marketers in the realm of video content.

-Sports Illustrated cover girl Kate Upton prompts a look at how the Web has changed fame from author David Weinberger, on CNN.com.

-New data confirms the advent of the post-PC era, showing that Web traffic from iPads and iPhones has surpassed that from Macs, reports ReadWriteWeb.

With more people buying online, retail spaces will increasingly serve as a “third space” that’s only partly about shopping (one of our Trends for 2011). In the food sector, as online services such as FreshDirect and Seamless.com expand, consumers are seeking real-world spaces where they can not only eat or buy food but meet people and enjoy unique experiences, as we found in a survey conducted for our February trend report on food.

Our study, which polled 1,270 adults in the U.K. and the U.S., found that Millennials are most eager for third-space experiences at food outlets. More than 7 in 10 said they would be interested in special events at grocery stores or restaurants, and more than half liked the idea of communal tables and meeting other diners at restaurants. Gen Xers are somewhat less interested, while Boomers lag Millennials by more than 20 points on each question.

Some retailers are pitching themselves as more than just a place to pick up supplies, like Whole Foods, which recently debuted a series of comedy videos on YouTube that showcase the store as a spot for socializing and matchmaking. See our trend report, “What’s Cooking?,” for more on how the idea of the third space is manifesting in the food sector.

How did you become interested in the topic of food waste?

I grew up interested in food as something that united our family. We would always have dinner together each night. I viewed food as something to be enjoyed, but I was also taught to value that food. We always saved our leftovers and took leftovers home from restaurants. Later on I had a volunteer experience at DC Central Kitchen, which is a food recovery group in our nation’s capital. “Food recovery” is the practice of going out to restaurants, supermarkets, caterers, etc., and rescuing edible but unsellable food and then getting it to people who need it.

I was stunned by the quantity and quality of rescued food I saw. The epiphany I had that day was, ‘Well, what happens in cities and towns that don’t have that kind of food recovery operation? And how much food is slipping between the cracks.’ That’s the experience that propelled me to research this issue further.

What’s the ultimate goal you’re trying to achieve through your research and writing on food waste?

My goal is to have people think of food as the precious resource it is and to value it instead of squandering it freely, as most of us do today. We’ve reached a point where Americans are pretty good at conserving some of our natural resources. Unfortunately, we’re not quite there yet with food. I’m hoping to raise awareness for food waste as an issue and to get people to think about the consequences of their cavalier approach to food.

How would you rank consumer awareness of the relationship between the environment and our food choices?

There isn’t a great awareness. I’d say there’s a much more developed awareness of how food impacts our health and how organic food might be better for us to consume than conventional. But there aren’t too many people thinking about the impact on the soil and the pesticides that end up going into the water runoff, ending up in streams, and those kinds of impacts. And certainly an even lower percentage of Americans are aware of the consequences of squandering so much food—all the natural resources that go into growing that food that we then render wasted by throwing out so much.

Do you think people will start to become more aware of this issue in the next three to five years?

I think it will change. Awareness is on the rise, and it will only be helped by increased food prices. So as our foods become more expensive, we will value them more, and we will waste less. Our approach to food should change for that reason alone, if not for environmental reasons as well.

How can consumers be educated about the impact of wasted food?

That’s the really important thing I’m trying to figure out now. There is a green fatigue that sets in to a certain extent, where we’re asking consumers to consider so many issues. People are reaching a point where it’s almost paralyzing. The issue of waste is a pretty simple one in that we’re simply buying too much food and stuffing our refrigerators to the point where we couldn’t possibly use all that food.

In terms of behavior change, which I realize is a difficult task, what I’m hoping to do is just to get people to become smarter shoppers. There are a number of ways that could happen. If people like shopping, maybe it means going to the store more often and buying less each time. If you’re someone who lives far away from the store or doesn’t really like to shop, then you have to plan out meals, make a detailed shopping list and try to stick to that list in the store.

So, however shoppers do it, the main goal is to just buy less food. The average house throws out or doesn’t use about 25% of what they bring home. The simple bit of advice I’d have is to try to buy about a quarter less food.

To play devil’s advocate, people aren’t necessarily going to do that. Do you think governments or corporations have a responsibility to educate people?

I’d love to see that kind of campaign. There are changes we as individuals can make at the same time businesses can change some of their practices, and there’s certainly a place for policy changes and some messaging coming from the government, at the policymaking level.

We have a history of pretty successful public service campaigns that get people to think about issues and change their behaviors. Right now very few Americans realize there’s an environmental impact to throwing food away. There’s this common misconception that when we throw away organic items, they meet a benign end in the landfill. And that’s just not true. When food decomposes without air, it produces methane—a harmful greenhouse gas. We definitely need to increase awareness for the environmental impact of our waste.

Have you seen examples of businesses or corporations that are doing a good job reducing food waste and have taken up this cause?

There are plenty of examples in Europe, and the U.K. in particular, where supermarkets have made it part of their mission to reduce waste, and it falls under the corporate social responsibility category. It’s a way to court goodwill among shoppers. There’s been much more of an emphasis on reducing waste, partly due to government involvement and sponsoring of research, and then those somewhat shocking research findings being echoed in the media.

In the U.S., we’re not quite there yet in terms of government involvement, media attention or even new research. The one example I would point to is, somewhat surprisingly, Walmart, which has made an effort to reduce waste of all sorts, including food waste. They’ve created a store-by-store approach to try and reduce the waste created and to donate, in many cases, the excess food they have. They also compost their food waste instead of throwing it into the landfill.

You know the U.K. recently announced plans to eliminate the sell by date on packaged goods?

I’d say that with the elimination of the sell-by date, it can’t hurt. There’s a real confusion among consumers on what the different terms mean. So eliminating one, the sell-by date, will help us not throw out food that’s perfectly edible just because of an often arbitrary date label. And the sell-by date is definitely the right term to eliminate, because it’s aimed at the retailer to let them know how long to display an item, but it has nothing to do with whether or not that item’s good.

I was speaking to an executive for a major food producer in the U.S., and they said their sell-by date was roughly nine months before the goods would be bad. It makes you wonder why there’s any need for that kind of control. Certainly stores need to know how long they can display something. So that’s where “closed dating,” which is the term for when consumers can’t really see it or it’s coded in a way, makes a lot more sense than having sell-by dating.

Is part of the issue the fact that we’re so disconnected from the entire process of creating food in this country and other developed countries?

Bingo. That’s exactly it. It’s as if we have lost some of those food ways, and we’re not quite sure even when things are good or not because, like you said, we’re so disconnected from our food—where it comes from and how it’s prepared. We’ve fallen into relying on the expiration dates that are so ubiquitous, and so we end up tossing out so much more food than we need to. There’s this attitude of “When in doubt, throw it out.” Because people are not entirely sure whether they can scrape the mold off the top of the pasta sauce jar and use the rest, they’re going to throw it out. But a little bit of common sense or inherited wisdom would eliminate that problem.

How would you define sustainability in terms of food waste?

Sustainability implies we can continue farming and growing food as we do. The current situation is not sustainable, because we’re using natural resources at a much faster rate than we’re replenishing them. And that applies to oil, to water and even to our soil, where we are really depleting the soil of its nutrients and not giving it time to regenerate. So that’s where the idea of producing twice the amount of food we need, which comes at a pretty heavy cost, in terms of how we grow things today. And then on a human scale, given how much hunger exists, the idea of wasting so much isn’t exactly sustainable either.

Do you think consumers will start to demand more transparency as far as how food is handled in its lifecycle?

I’m a little cynical on this point. I think consumers are primarily driven by cost. The nice thing here is that these ideas can go in hand in hand, where less waste can mean lower prices. With current practices, the cost of all that wasted food is built into the price. So if, say, one supermarket chain decided to trim waste by 25%, there should be real savings there to pass along to the consumer. If it’s in the same ballpark pricewise, then shoppers will want to do the green and socially conscious thing as well.

We could see consumers gravitate toward stores that make an effort to cut waste or to donate excess edibles. But the main grabber is going to be the price.

Do you think it’s going to be the retailers, the restaurants or the manufacturers that make the most impact as far as driving awareness around waste?

It is the retail level where there is the most room for improvement and space to receive positive publicity for doing so. That’s the model we’ve seen in the U.K., where supermarket chains have essentially been trying to one-up each other by how much they can push waste reduction. It’s reached the point where you’ll have some stores handing out recipe cards to try and get people thinking about how they can use old bananas or products that might not be perfect.

In the U.S., by contrast, we have stores that don’t even want to have a discount produce rack because they don’t want shoppers to get the image that their store has anything but the utmost fresh food available. The other part of that, too, is that supermarkets have conducted studies and found that opinions of the store are based largely upon the produce department, so there’s a real emphasis on freshness there, and that leads to the culling of the displays where an apple with a slight bruise or blemish is pulled off the shelf immediately. You’d like to see the more progressive stores finding another use for that apple, in their prepared foods section or the deli. The truth is, the majority of stores don’t have that practice built into how they do things.

Do you think austerity will eventually trickle into the supermarket?

Thrift is becoming increasingly popular. It remains to be seen whether that’ll catch on in the food realm. A nice bellwether for that would be the Meatless Monday campaign. If we can get people to give up meat one day a week, that bodes well for the idea of people being more efficient with their food, just that slight change of behavior, it could lead to so much good.

The rising cost of foods will get people to really value that idea of not throwing away so much. I do see the topic as fitting in with the general thrifty, crafty movement. Our wasting of food fits in with our overall behavior, where we live in a throwaway society. Things aren’t made as well, they don’t last as long, we don’t repair things—we just discard them and buy new ones. And it’s partly because we’re incentivized to do it with price, where it’ll cost the same amount to fix something as it would to buy a new one. But there’s the lost knowledge: Just as we don’t really know how to transition leftover chicken into a casserole, for example, we don’t know as many people who know how to fix televisions or radios.

I think the farther away we get from World War II, where there was rationing, or the Depression, and the fewer people who have grandparents telling them what it was like to see so much of society unemployed and standing in line for food, that kind of thing, the easier it is to throw out food. Food is just so much cheaper these days, too. It’s an artificial cheapness—we’re mortgaging the future of our environment and our health, just for today’s food to be less expensive.

Arguably your campaign is starting to get the conversation going on this issue.

It’s a matter of getting the ball rolling and then getting out of the way. Because what homemaker wouldn’t want to increase her savings by 25 percent by not throwing away so much food? It seems like enlightened self-interest to try to reduce your household food waste. I guess the flip side of that coin is you’re asking people to change their behavior even a tiny bit, and that can be difficult, but I’m optimistic that we can make tackling food waste the next big green thing. You’re not asking consumers to go to their store and ask where this meat came from and whether growth hormones were used. It’s very firmly in shoppers’ hands to reduce their waste or to cook a nonmeat meal on a Monday.

From my perspective, there are three main factors when you look at food waste. There’s the environmental, ethical and economic impact. So, for the homemaker to be able to boost their home budget, to do the right thing ethically and to not cause environmental ills, I think that’s a pretty convincing argument.

Lastly, what’s on your personal “things to watch” list in the area of food waste?

I’m waiting to see what the Environmental Protection Agency is going to do. They’re increasingly paying attention to food waste, and I think they should have a real role in raising awareness of the environmental impacts of our food waste. I’m also hoping the U.S. Department of Agriculture returns to the topic. They haven’t done a full food-chain-wide study of how much food is wasted since 1997.

Then in the retail segment, there’s a real opportunity for a supermarket chain to garner positive publicity and good feelings from shoppers just by going out and starting a campaign to reduce food waste in-store and to help shoppers do the same in their homes.

To help kick off Social Media Week in New York, JWTIntelligence’s Ann Mack, Director of Trendspotting at JWT, outlined trends that are shaping social media in 2012. (Video from the event, featuring a keynote speech by David Eastman, CEO North America and Worldwide Digital Director at JWT, is available here.)

Mack noted that today, young people are looking to figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Larry Page as role models and embracing entrepreneurialism. This uniquely resourceful cohort, one we’ve termed Generation Go, is finding opportunity in economic adversity, with many using social media as a platform for their entrepreneurial energies.

This generation has also embraced conspicuous living, clamoring to show and tell all, no matter how personal, over social media. As they share photos and updates about their vacations and other envy-inducing activities, they’re engaging in social one-upmanship, creating fears of missing out, or FOMO (which we explored in a trend report last year). Social media, in tandem with mobile devices and location-based tools, has also helped to drive the Web’s evolution into a constantly updating stream of real-time information. We’ve become hyper-documentarians, chronicling everything—the big, the small and everything in between—in words, pictures, video and emoticons as it happens. The numbers just keep rising: The top two tweets-per-second records were set recently with the Japanese TV screening of Castle in the Sky and in the final minutes of last month’s Super Bowl).

Meanwhile, social media has become key to everything from social change—as evidenced by its role in last year’s Arab Spring—to commerce, with more and more brands selling directly on Facebook or overlaying its social graph. Social media also creates a “filter bubble” for people that helps to hyper-personalize the Web’s content—giving rise to a countertrend that will see people craving more randomness and serendipity, or different points of view. We’ll see more services like Turntable.fm and Yobongo, which make it fun to discover new music or people.

Social Media Week runs in New York and 11 other cities worldwide through Friday.

The advent of interactive screens is one of our 10 Trends for 2012, and our year-end trend report spotlighted several ways in which retailers are using interactive touch screens to provide customers with immersive and engaging experiences. Several more innovative examples surfaced at last month’s National Retail Federation convention, as detailed in Time.

Some of these enable retailers to bring elements of e-commerce into the physical store, providing customers with detailed product information or an organized overview of what the store stocks. The Beauty Spot, an innovative kiosk from Macy’s in partnership with Intel, lets users peruse the cosmetics floor’s offerings by top picks, category or items that can help achieve various “looks.” Customers can view product details, online reviews and similar products, adding items to a shopping list that they can email to themselves or print out, handing over to a sales assistant who can gather the products.

Touch screens can also give a physical presence to virtual retailers. HSN, the home shopping channel, developed a 13-foot interactive wall offering a “pizza challenge” that could be installed anywhere from food festivals to airports. Users can play the pizza-making game with on-screen host/celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, who uses products sold by HSN as he makes pies. Aspiring chefs can find out more about the ingredients and kitchenware used and, if interested, send themselves a link to the products on HSN’s site.

As interactive screens proliferate, we’ll see more novel ideas about how to inform, engage and motivate consumers and facilitate new kinds of consumer connections.

-Indonesia and the Philippines are among the developing countries demanding better treatment for their unskilled workers abroad, a trend The Wall Street Journal says “could shake up global labor markets.”

-Recently released data from fellow WPP company Landor suggests that most companies need to invest more in their CSR efforts.

-Half of workers across 24 countries would consider moving abroad for work, according to a new study from Ipsos.

-“Is ‘Made in America’ Back in Style?” asks Time.

-Mashable takes a look at what motivates people to participate in the sharing economy.

-Author David Owen argues in The Wall Street Journal that a “Prius fallacy” dupes us into believing that token actions mean we’re being eco-friendly.

-A new GlobalWebIndex study reveals that while Facebook fatigue is spreading, social networking continues to grow, especially in BRIC nations.

-American suburbs are evolving into more racially diverse microcosms, reports Adweek.

-The Economist reports how Chinese students arriving at American universities are changing stereotypes. And The New York Times looks at how an influx of foreign students is affecting U.S. colleges.

-Reuters reports on “black diamonds,” the new group of wealthy African consumers lusting for luxury.

-A new study explores the rise of middle-aged singles in America; Adweek interviews its authors.

-A report from Reuters questions the efficacy of dating websites.

-The New York Times looks at how companies like Samsung are embracing gamification to increase customer loyalty and collect metrics.

-USA Today reports on how interactive screens are enabling retailers to “bring the convenience of online shopping to the offline world.”

-As American malls struggle, The New York Times reports that some communities are finding creative ways to redevelop the spaces, “building the downtowns that the suburbs never had.”

-A Nielsen report on how Americans spend their media time is “the first significant evidence” that younger viewers are moving away from TV sets to watch shows, reports The New York Times. MediaPost spotlights the finding that more households are bypassing cable or satellite, subscribing only to broadband Internet.

-“Multiscreen multitaskers” are the norm at many desks, says The New York Times, so much so that “a single monitor can seem as outdated as dial-up Internet.”

-NPR looks at how helicopter parents are meddling in the workplace as their Millennial kids go to work.

-For today’s tweens, “dating” means a lot more texting than actual talking, reports The Wall Street Journal.

-The Pew Research Center says that thanks to a segment of “power users,” most Facebook members receive more from friends on the social network than they give.

-Pinterest is helping to drive a new look in website design, says Mashable.

-The Wall Street Journal spotlights fashion’s new influencers as New York’s fashion week gets under way.

-Mead, that staple Renaissance fair beverage, is coming back into fashion, reports The New York Times.

-Cans are replacing bottles as the packaging of choice among craft beer brewers, reports Restaurant News.

-Print news organizations are taking to the Web with live video reports, says The New York Times.

-With concerns about water shortages growing, more cities are looking to recycled wastewater, explains The New York Times.

-This week, we released our February trend report, which takes a look at what’s changing when it comes to how we find, cook and eat food, how we think about what we eat and how brands are marketing food. To download What’s Cooking? Trends in Food, click here.

Unwrapping the Process, one of our 100 Things to Watch in 2012, is the idea that we’ll be seeing more about the “making of” as consumer expectations of Radical Transparency evolve to include interest in the process behind the product. This is especially pertinent when it comes to food, as we found recently when we surveyed 1,270 adults in the U.K. and the U.S for our February trend report, “What’s Cooking? Trends in Food.”

Millennials are especially interested in the story behind their food and looking to learn more about what’s in it and how it’s made: 8 in 10 said they like “behind the scenes” commercials for foods they consume, they want to know more about how their food is produced, and they think brands don’t disclose enough about their food products. Gen Xers are somewhat less interested, while Boomers lag the Millennials by about 15 points on each question.

With a clear majority of all generations wanting to know more and saying that brands aren’t transparent enough, marketers should find ways to give customers a window into the process. In Australia, for instance, the website for ecoeggs features a “ChookCam,” a live remote camera that viewers can control to see for themselves that the chickens are free-range. In Buenos Aires, Lay’s rolled out a supermarket kiosk that displays a “hyper-realistic” video showing how its chips are made, designed to back up its “natural” claim.

The report, detailing what’s trending in food, is available here.

What and how we eat today might look quite baffling to anyone who’s missed the past decade: buying gluten-free treats from a food truck; “Foodspotting” an order of locally sourced, heirloom vegetables. Yet at the same time we’re reconnecting with our past, looking to eat more communally and celebrating regional food traditions, even digging up antique recipes. For our February trend report, we take a look at what’s changing when it comes to how we find, cook and eat food, how we think about what we eat and how brands are marketing food.

It’s an expansive topic, and we don’t attempt to be comprehensive. Instead, “What’s Cooking? Trends in Food” looks at the category through the lens of eight relevant macro trends JWT has highlighted over the past few years—including Food as the New Eco-Issue, Screened Interactions and Maximum Disclosure—as well as three overarching trends shaping food today: the influence of technology, the rise of health and wellness, and foodie culture. Within these trends, we spotlight myriad things to watch we’ve been tracking.

In addition to desk research for this report, we interviewed influencers and experts in food, received input from the JWT planning network and conducted quantitative surveys in the U.S. and the U.K. Download our report here.

While researching one of our 2012 trends, Food as the New-Eco Issue—the idea that the environmental impact of our food choices will become a more prominent concern—we interviewed Dan Crossley, principal sustainability adviser at Forum for the Future. The not-for-profit works globally with business and government on sustainability issues, with Crossley leading the group’s efforts to take more sustainable practices around food into the mainstream.

Based in London, Crossley has worked with leading food businesses, including PepsiCo, Cadbury, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Tata Global Beverages. He recently led PepsiCo’s Scenarios & Strategies 2030 work and Consumer Futures 2020 with Sainsbury’s and Unilever. Before joining the Forum, Crossley was a food sector researcher for a large food manufacturer and a factory financial controller. We discussed the sustainability issues involved with food and touched on consumer awareness (and how to improve it), what brands are doing right and why there’s some reason for optimism.

Later this week, watch for our trend report “What’s Cooking? Trends in Food” for more on what’s hot in the food industry.

What’s your organization’s 30-second elevator pitch?

Forum for the Future is a not-for-profit organization working globally with business and government to help create a sustainable future. Work on food is one of the key systems we’re focusing on. We want to help mainstream sustainable food by doing three things: rebalancing equity and fairness in value chains; reconnecting people with food to allow producers to raise standards; and restoring resilience in the food system, making more effective use of resources and cutting food waste.

“Sustainability” is a term that’s thrown around so loosely these days. How would you define it in relation to food and the environment?

Sustainable food is a complicated concept. These foods would have minimal environmental impacts, positive social impact and appropriate nutrition for people. It’s always a balance of those three key areas. We believe sustainable food is something that is enjoyable, desirable and fun.

What are some of the key macro eco issues surrounding our current food production and distribution systems that you’re concerned about?

Firstly, food waste. In countries like the U.S. and the U.K., between 30% and 40% of food that consumers buy is thrown away. If you include food grown in lots of developing countries where are there pre-harvest and post-harvest losses, some estimate more than half the food grown in the world is thrown away without being eaten. That’s arguably the biggest issue within the global food system.

Food waste is so critical because there’s more than a billion people starving and malnourished but also because of the huge environmental impacts of food production and growing: the climate change-related impacts, all the energy and labor that goes into making all that food being thrown away, is massive in itself. And the disposal of that food waste, particularly in the developing world, has huge greenhouse and other impacts.

The whole idea of sustainable diet is an emerging macro trend impacting food. People are looking at what they eat and the impacts of those diets. For example, meat consumption has huge, huge environmental impacts. If people can reduce meat consumption in the developed world—where they’re eating too much meat—it can have huge health benefits but also huge environmental benefits. Brands are starting to get into this very tricky issue of how you shape consumer demand, consumer purchase and what they’re eating.

Another key issue would be water scarcity: 70% of fresh water used by humans in the world is for agriculture, and two out of three people in the world are expected to live in water-stressed areas by 2025. This will have an impact most noticeably for beverage companies, many of which are starting to take good steps. Water scarcity is also an issue for food businesses, farmers and growers, clearly.

Biodiversity is also a massive issue that is only starting to get recognized. Bees represent between a quarter and a third of the pollinating force in the food we eat, so they are critical; without them, we all starve. We fundamentally rely on biodiversity and ecosystems. The collapse of bees in the U.S. and other parts of the world, for example, has led to hand pollination of some crops in China.

Another key area is climate change across multiple levels, such as the carbon impacts, the actual impacts of growing, producing and disposing of food. How people, businesses and countries adapt to climate change will be hugely important. We know some areas that can grow food now won’t be suitable for growing those crops in 20 or 30 years’ time. We’re already seeing more instances of extreme weather events in many parts of the world.

Population growth is another issue. It’s not an environmental issue in itself, but clearly if we’re going to have 9 billion people on the planet by 2050, we will have significantly greater demand for food, plus a warmer planet to produce those resources from.

These issues are arguably really macro for people to think about. How much consumer awareness is there around the link between what we eat and the environment?

Most people do not know very much, but it depends on which part of the world you’re talking about. For parts of Europe and the U.S., most people are very disconnected from how food is grown, where it comes from, how it’s produced, what the impacts are. That’s why one of our big strategies is trying to reconnect people with food and working with brands, amongst others, to help them connect people with food in order to make them value it more so that they throw less away and understand some of those hidden impacts.

In the developing world, generalizing hugely, there’s more subsistence agriculture, and lots of people are more directly connected to the land and to food. They can see some of the impacts of climate change, water scarcity and soil degradation more prominently. Whereas, for those of us sitting in a nice Starbucks in New York or in London, it’s very easy to forget about the people that grew and processed the coffee beans or all the pesticides and water consumed to create that steaming cup of coffee.

Which food issues are consumers are aware of, and how will this change over the next few years?

Again, it varies market to market. Consumers aren’t completely disconnected, but often they think of the impacts of the packaging itself. Whilst important, if you had to rate the material impacts in order, that would be lower down the list. But it’s very tangible and visible. What people don’t think about is the impacts of growing, production and food distribution as a whole. Certainly we expect brands going forward to help educate consumers on where the big impacts are.

If you look at what some of the leading organizations in this space, like Unilever and PepsiCo, are doing, they are starting to translate some very complicated messages into easier-to-understand messages for the consumer so they can start to connect with this. We’ll see more signs of radical transparency happening. In a non-food example, Asda, the U.K. arm of Walmart, has put webcams in its clothing factories with live feeds to their website so consumers can watch where their clothing comes from—the same could apply to food. There is a growing demand to see where things are made and where they come from.

We want brands to help shape what consumers buy and create demand based on sustainability, rather than saying to consumers, “Soil is really important. Climate change is really important. Water is really important. You must understand these issues.” That is becoming quite old-fashioned green messaging. We’re seeing brands being much cleverer in their thinking about how to resonate with consumers. If you talk about cooking in a more energy-efficient way that saves money, that might appeal more than saying, “Think about what the carbon impacts of this food are.” There will be some education needed by brands on these big issues, but brands need to be very careful in the way they try to engage consumers on this agenda.

Issues like water and biodiversity will start becoming more mainstream, but it will take time and, given the urgency of the challenges, brands are better off trying to make the complicated decisions on behalf of consumers rather than trying to educate them about the impacts to the whole system.

If you could create a checklist for corporations and governments that want to increase awareness around these issues, what would it look like?

The first stage, almost before the checklist, is for businesses to understand their material impacts. And then to focus on those that are the most relevant for them. Then in terms of engaging consumers, the first step would be to think through what will resonate or what consumers of the future might be demanding to know—rather than getting stuck in the mindset of asking consumers what they think is important, which means you’re basing tomorrow’s decisions off yesterday’s information. The first thing to do is get in the heads of your future consumers as much as possible.

Then think through your key brand attributes that you can use to engage consumers in a positive way and to help shape that particular future. If you can try to understand what your consumers might look like in the future, how they might behave, you’re going to have a better chance of both changing the products and services but also marketing to them in a way that appeals to consumers of today.

The next piece of the checklist is, finally, make it fun. Don’t get too serious, and don’t get too preachy. We’ve seen that a lot in the past, and as I said, it hasn’t tended to work very well. If we’re to engage the mainstream consumers rather than just the 10 percent or 20 percent at the top, we need to make sustainability something that’s fun and desirable and attractive—not just focusing on the doom and gloom of climate change, hunger and scarcity that most consumers don’t find very empowering.

Do you think there’s a risk of consumers becoming cynical with these issues?

There is always that risk, but I think that will get reduced by increased transparency. There will be more and more pressure from NGOs, campaigning organizations and others to scrutinize companies’ supply chains in the future.

How will transparency impact sustainability when it comes to food brands?

Transparency creates exciting opportunities for new businesses in this space that can help connect organizations. More and more consumers are getting interested in what brands are doing. We’re already seeing mobile apps and other ways you can swipe your mobile over a product and it will give you reviews of what people think about it. In the future, I’m sure we’ll be able to see the farm where it was grown or a live video link of the factory where it comes from. That sort of technology is already emerging.

Transparency will empower some consumers, but the critical thing is there will always be some who take the time to seek out the details, but there will also be a big bulk of consumers in the middle, that 60-70 percent who maybe aren’t interested in all the details, and they just expect brands to make the tough decision on their behalf. They will want to trust the food or beverage brand they’re buying. They want to know the brand is doing everything it can to get their product to them in the lowest-impact way and delivering as much nutrition as they can. We’re clearly a long way away from that, but that trust in brands will be critical.

Yes, and people are holding brands accountable for what they do.

And that’s saying there’s a bigger role for NGOs and not-for-profits who can challenge business and make sure they do keep brands on their toes, making sure they aren’t getting too relaxed and forgetting to raise the bar. It’s so important that there are people who are constantly putting pressure on brands to keep up their game.

There are clearly external certification organizations like Fair Trade that are going to play a powerful role in providing added assurance to consumers. In the future, however, we may see fewer of those certification schemes as brands become the shortcut, because people aren’t going to want 20 different labels on a food item. We’ll see more certifications in the next few years, but gradually that will decrease as it grows complex.

Can you give me a few examples of who is doing it right when it comes to educating consumers about these issues?

Companies like Unilever and, to be fair, one of their rivals, Procter & Gamble, have done a great job here. They’ve both understood their material impacts and then started to communicate to consumers on those impacts. Unilever has made commitments around 100 percent sustainably sourced ingredients by 2020, working closely with organizations like Red Cross and others to help bring those goals to life. They’ve done some good marketing campaigns in the U.K. with tea brand PG Tips or Lipton over in the States on trying to connect consumers with tea and how it’s grown, which is really powerful.

One brand I quite like is Swedish burger chain Max Burgers. They’ve carbon footprint-labeled their menu, which is interesting in itself. But then they went further, actually encouraging their consumers to change from beef burgers, which have higher environmental impacts, to non-beef, chicken or vegetable burgers. I read that since they’ve introduced that strategy, they’ve got 30 percent in shift to non-beef burgers and they’re still maintaining profit margins of 11 percent or 12 percent compared with 2 percent for the multinational burger chains. It shows they can influence more consumers but still remain profitable, which is always really important.

Sainsbury’s in the U.K. has run campaigns called Love Your Leftovers, encouraging consumers to reduce their food waste by providing recipe cards in store and things like that—which is not just telling consumers they need to reduce food waste but actually giving them tools to enable them to do that.

And I like what PepsiCo have done generally. We’ve done lots of work with PepsiCo the last few years. On the sourcing side, they’ve got some really ambitious goals around reducing water and carbon by 50 percent in five years. And they’re trying to engage consumers in quite a fun way through some of their leading brands.

There are some smaller, niche players that are doing interesting things as well. Innocent Drinks is a smoothie brand here in the U.K. that tells a fun story on pack and engages consumers in a really positive way about some of the steps they’re taking on sustainability. They don’t try and tell consumers all the things they’re doing on sustainability in one go on one pack. Rather they have one key message which they’ll put on pack for a period of time, then change to keep it fresh.

There are more obvious ones like Ben & Jerry’s, who are well-known for being quite quirky and innovative and also for embracing this agenda and, in fact, helping to engage consumers on things like climate change in a more fun, lighthearted way than some other brands have tried to.

As food prices start to rise due in part to climate change, do you think that will be a trigger for people to pay more attention to these issues? Some people say the era of cheap food is over.

I think that’s very true. Over the past few decades, we’ve gotten used to very cheap food in restaurants, burger joints and supermarkets. We’ve started to see food prices rise in the last year or two, and that’s only going to continue. Food prices are going to be on an upward trend and increasingly volatile. We’re starting to see consumers recognize that and be a bit more thrifty and a bit more careful about the amount of food they throw away and the amount of food they buy, certainly here in Europe. That trend about people starting to understand the importance of food will continue.

The other thing that’s worth saying is that the proportion of our disposable income that we spend on food in the developed world is tiny compared to what it used to be, and whilst food prices going up will put increasing pressure on those that are already in food poverty, price increases put food higher on the agenda. Food will become a much higher proportion of disposable income. It’s only 10 percent of people’s disposable income in many Western countries, and in the past it was more than 50 percent.

It’s important not just to think about food in isolation but to think for consumers about their broader lifestyles and about what really is important. Some of the things they’ve come to rely on used to be luxuries and are now seen as necessities. We might need to fundamentally shift perceptions on that. People need to start living different lifestyles, and we’ll have to behave very differently to how we do today. It’s easy to say and harder to do.

I’m certain lots of people in the world feel very pessimistic, and we do have huge challenges. But actually when you look at some of the positives and stuff that some brands are doing, it gives you hope and you think there are definitely opportunities for brands to make money by helping mainstream sustainable food, so it shouldn’t be seen as a negative thing. Clearly, there is a pressure for companies to maintain security of supply, but they’re still big on opportunities to influence what consumers are buying in a positive way and reduce the impacts of how the food’s made and how consumers are using it.

Finally, what’s on your personal “things to watch” list in regard to sustainable foods?

I’m very hopeful that the solutions are already out there, in lots of cases, to the huge challenges that exist. So if we can just be savvy about connecting up different organizations working on this agenda, bringing together companies to tackle some of these challenges they can’t solve on their own, I think I’m an optimist.

We haven’t touched on the critical role of investors. Paul Polman, chief executive and chairman of Unilever, talks about the fact that he doesn’t want investors to invest in their company for the short term, he only wants long-term investors. And that kind of leadership is really important. And in terms of areas of focus, there’s been more activity happening within retail. There’s still a long way to go, especially in food service and fast food. I’d love to see more slow food getting into fast food.