How The World’s Tastes Will Shift Over The Next Decade

The United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently published a forecast for the global population’s food consumption habits over the next ten years. Per Bloomberg, here’s what's expected to change and why food companies should pay attention.

In the previous decade, China was the root of a boom in meat and fish demand. This is expected to shrink over the next decade because the world’s most populous country is aging and won’t add to the global food demand at the same rate because the appetite for these foods is waning.

At the same time the Western world becomes more health conscious and eliminates sugar from diets, African nations, some emerging from high levels of poverty, are likely to embrace more processed foods.

India, however, is set to overtake China in terms of population by 2022, making it the most likely to be the site of the next decade’s boom. Poised to become the world’s second-biggest economy by 2050, India’s dominant religion that encourages vegetarianism not mean an increase in meat and fish consumption, but one in dairy.

Read a summary of the full results here.