Personal Food Factories

The megatrend of individualization means that our diets are becoming increasingly varied and individualized. But what was limited to the packaging a few years ago (the eternally identical cola with its own name) is now also increasingly reflected in the composition of the food itself (e.g. sugar-, gluten-, meat- or lactose-free). The next step is the individualization of the production of these foods on demand, i.e. the emergence of small “personal food factories” that can produce food for each target group according to their individual needs. Thanks to new technologies and advancing digitalization, industry will be able to control production processes here completely automatically and individually. The online store through which we will order our food in the future will always include sliders or drop-down menus that we can use to, for example, select a food item. the fat content of the milk, the sugar content of the chocolate bars or the herb content of the strained tomatoes.

In their book “Food Code”, Hendrik Haase and Olaf Deiniger rightly ask in this context whether this way of customizing inidivualized food by cutting it up and assembling it to fit exactly can be a future strategy of the food industry. Although the individual person would seem to be at the center, this system was based on a technical understanding of nutrition, which was basically seen only as the replenishment of fuel.

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