By Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, and Alexandra Whittington

Fast Future’s Life in 2025: “Say Hello Say Goodbye” Scenarios were developed in partnership with Huawei Consumer Business Group. This latest scenario explores how a range of exponentially advancing technologies such as AI and big data could transform the way we experience food and dining.

Our food experience will see dramatic and unexpected shifts in everything from farming and food quality, to grocery shopping and dining. Using an array of smart technologies, farms could become highly automated and productive sources of premium quality food. Picture tomorrow’s farm – with sensors monitoring every aspect of the environment and AI used to optimise the planning and conduct of all farming activity. With robots and drones doing the physical work, farms could become hyper-efficient – bringing dramatic food waste reductions – something that could be repeated across the food chain through the use of similar technologies.

Say goodbye to…

• Unhealthy eating – with fast food orders replaced by digital subscriptions for produce from traditional and vertical farms. Everyday consumers could become the farmers of the future – owning physical allotments within these farms. Such farms would be nurtured and managed remotely through robots and drones, under the guidance of our AI communicating via our smartphones. Produce would be delivered on demand, directly to our door once ripe, by personalised drones.

An expanded understanding of human health and nutrition will enable deep personalisation of dining experiences. Our smartphone-based AI technology would monitor and guide menu options and ingredient selection, interrogating the contents and provenance of restaurant dishes and grocery store products, negotiating with chefs to tailor recipes, and guiding us through domestic meal preparation.

Our phones and an array of interconnected home devices will become the gateway through which we can access a range of food services and dining experiences. For example, “access on demand” shared community robots may eliminate several food related tasks. These robots would be tasked with shopping, loading and unpacking bags, and stacking shelves.

By 2025, robots will also routinely be preparing and serving meals in highly interconnected smart kitchens, laying and clearing the table, and of course doing the washing up. Sensors and intelligence built into autonomous cooking utensils and cutlery would allow meals to be cooked in the precise manner of a celebrity chef. Entrepreneurial home chefs could create recipes, have the details, smells, and tastes captured by these smart kitchen devices and resold over the internet with potential customers able to smell and taste the recipe before purchase using multi-sensory VR.

Say goodbye to…

• The Friday night takeaway – which could be replaced by a home menu of options from digital celebrity chefs, whose skills and abilities can be synced and programmed into in-house AI robots – making gourmet meals accessible to all, with the services accessed via our smartphones and interconnected home devices.

Our profiles and preferences could also be used to 3D print highly personalised food and to request meals to be prepared by celebrity inspired robo-chefs or humans working from “ghost kitchens”. They would create customised meals on demand, with the food heated to perfection on route to your door via autonomous vehicles or drones.

Robo-chefs could also deliver personalised self-heating trays, containing all the dishes for the forthcoming edition of a cooking programme such as Masterchef, so that you can sample the food alongside the judges. For home-cooked meals, neighbours could share recipes, ingredients and kitchen tools using automated social networks which display the goods available to buy or borrow locally.

Our smartphone embedded AI could also be scanning social media and web-based networks of innovative new and emerging professional and amateur chefs, sourcing the latest recipes that would be beneficial to our personal dietary regime.

Say goodbye to…

• The traditional cookbook market and dining with celebrity chefs – which will be replaced by recipes sourced from the most innovative cookery networks and celebrity chefs’ robo-twins.
• Fast food, frozen food, large grocery orders, and bulk-purchases – which could be replaced with the dining experience becoming much more spontaneous, customised, healthy, and affordable.

Concerns over food safety and adverse reactions could be eliminated with low cost smartphone-connected portable sensors. These would scan everything on store shelves or our plates for ingredients, possible contaminants, and freshness.

The authors are futurists with Fast Future – a professional foresight firm specializing in delivering keynote speeches, executive education, research, and consulting for global clients on the emerging future and the impacts of change. To arrange a presentation on the Life in 2025 scenarios please contact

To access more of our articles and learn more about our work please visit www.fastfuture.com

You can find summaries of the ten scenarios here https://consumer.huawei.com/uk/campaign/truestories/tech/

To find out more about the developments, ideas, tools, and approaches to help you navigate a fast changing future, why not attend one of the events taking place during Fast Future’s London Futures Week.

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