From excess to enough
Envisioning a future food system
People involved
Reframing Studio
Hannah Goss (me)
Nynke Tromp
Rick Schifferstein
FETE consortium
Animation by Freek Trimbach
Project Output
Journal Paper
Video
Report
When
During PhD
Challenge
Today there exists a significant disparity in food distribution across the globe. Some countries face poverty and famine, while others experience an overabundance that leads to excessive food waste. In the Netherlands alone, 2 billion kilos of discarded food is wasted each year—the equivalent of a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam from Utrecht to Barcelona filled with edible food. And all this food waste has severe consequences for society by straining production resources, harming the environment, affecting public health, and incurring significant economic costs across the food chain (UNEP, 2024).
With the Netherlands hoping to meet the United Nations' goal of halving food waste by 2030, its current food system must undergo a fundamental shift across the food system, ultimately transitioning from a system based on excess to one of ‘enough’.
But what does a future food system that is built around the concept of ‘enough’ look like? What principles underpin this system? What new consumer and retail practices, grounded in potentially new business models, can support the transitions to enough? And how can designers develop visions that drive wide-scale societal changes?
Approach
Participatory design-led
Mobilisation
Vision in Design (VIP)
Interviews
To develop a vision of a future Dutch food system, I worked with the Amsterdam-based design and innovation agency Reframing Studio, which applied the Vision in Design method to develop a future vision. As part of the vision development, we actively engaged 18 actors from across the food system in a participatory process aimed at developing a desirable future for 2030. Through 18 semi-structured interviews and desk research, we generated 217 context factors, each representing a building block of a future world.
Together with Reframing Studio, these factors were clustered and analysed into four potential future systems. To ensure the collective efforts of the consortium were moving in the same direction, the four systems were combined into a unified future vision. This was done by identifying consumption behaviours of a system that caters to enough. Then, for each system, the role and value of consumers, retailers, and producers were identified, along with the interactions between these actors.
Outcomes
Unified vision
4 system principles
Animated Video
The unified vision of future Dutch food system is based on four key system principles:
Putting vitality first and governing the prevention of illness properly
Embracing flexibility and highlighting its benefits
Celebrating and valuing the food journey
Using technology to learn about ourselves as individuals and as a society.
These principles refer to dynamics between key stakeholders and imply new actions from each.
For example, putting vitality first involves implementing holistic health programs and repositioning food purchases into a larger set of vitality and wellbeing-focused lifestyle offerings (new stakeholder dynamics). Services are offered by sports facilities, municipalities, and retailers as part of their commitment to a vitality consortium. This repositions retailers from food companies to care companies (new business models) helping consumers work towards a lifestyle that makes them feel balanced and strong by providing personalised meals, identity-exploring food experiences, and app-monitored consumption patterns reviewed by personal vitality coaches (meaning to people).
The future vision was shared through a report with system narratives and day-in-the-life scenarios, and an animated video to engage stakeholders. It sparked dialogue within the consortium and laid a strategic foundation for designing innovations for the Dutch food system transition.