The vegetarian wave in the United States is picking up speed: 13% of comparable milk drinks are consumed purely vegetarian. Now we speak of the triumph of vegetarian burgers. As food trends evolve more and more globally, one can confidently take such tendencies as an indication: reasonably – and increasingly for environmental reasons – the trend towards vegetarian nutrition will continue to increase. This applies to both ready meals and corresponding ingredients. But of course there is a lot of room for improvement especially in the area of the finished dishes.
Procurement and purchasing of raw materials and products can increasingly do without a comprehensive overview. Even if it is already predicted in this important area that artificial intelligence is a realistic approach to sourcing, this certainly means that comprehensive transparency in the procurement of food is becoming increasingly important. Without real insight into markets and the state of processing, procurement becomes less and less conceivable. Today, this know-how is generally greater for larger agents and intermediaries in the various markets than for retail chains.
Once a category becomes part of mainstream consumption, these products will also be of interest to the top retailers. This can be wonderfully studied in Central Europe on the organic products. Strong retail chains and discounters are now incorporating organic products into medium-term forecasts. Although everyone claims the opposite, in addition to shorter paths, it is always about the possibility of attracting customers with more attractive sales prices. And they jump on it, as one sees in Germany, where in many organic basic products, the supply only from the organic retailers to the food full-range hikers migrated and now in the next stage to discount.
Procurement is becoming more and more clear. The more directly the purchase of a product is cultivated from cultivation and processing to the offer to the end customer, the more successful, but also the more logical. In the end, it’s more and more about eliminating unnecessary trade levels in procurement. And the more the transparency of market knowledge increases, the sooner and the more comprehensive it becomes possible.