At Lumina Intelligence’s Q3 Food Strategy Forum this September, Insight Manager Adrian Kowalski opened the morning with a session titled “New beginnings: the effect on hospitality”. His starting point was August’s GfK consumer confidence score of -14, the strongest reading the UK has seen in two years. His question was whether it marks a real shift in the UK hospitality outlook or just a brief lift in mood.
Care may not be the sexy end of foodservice but for brands looking for growth they may very well want to take a closer look. I spent the 2nd of November at the Sofitel London St James for Arena’s third cost sector breakfast, ‘More than a Meal: The Future of Care and Senior Living Catering’, and left wondering how many brands are overlooking it. Read More
It’s 7.40pm on a Tuesday in Margate. Friends are due at eight, there are no dips in the fridge and nobody fancies a trip out in the drizzle. So out comes the phone, open goes Deliveroo, and a thumb-sized picture of a tub of houmous decides which brand gets invited to the party.
Lumina Intelligence’s UK Eating Out Market Report projected that UK food inflation could reach 9% to 12% by December. Eek! That lands on top of the £3.4bn in extra cost pressures UKHospitality says operators already carry.[1] So, last week’s Frozen Food Week couldn’t have been better timed.
Ask the Tesco app what to cook for dinner and if you’re among the first customers to get its new AI assistant, it won’t just suggest a recipe. It will start filling your basket too. In early October, Tesco started to roll out an AI assistant designed to help customers plan meals, following a trial with around 280,000 employees. Sainsbury’s, meanwhile, launched an AI-powered tool to help customers plan their shop, create lists and find products more easily. For the first time, the UK’s two biggest grocers have AI shopping assistants sitting between the shopper and the shelf.
Microsoft Advertising recently ran a webinar on agentic commerce: AI assistants that don’t just recommend products but buy them on a shopper’s behalf. We listened, so you don’t have to. Below are the five points we think matter most for food and drink brands, and what we’d do about them.
A third of UK shoppers now think too many food and drink products make health claims. For brands with several health claims on pack, it raises an important question. It’s also the clearest sign yet that functional food marketing has entered a new phase.
Walk into ExCeL for Technology for Marketing 2026 and you could play a simple game – count the stands that didn’t mention AI. You’d be finished before you reached the coffee queue.
Most people plan a holiday around a beach or a city. At jellybean, we plan ours around lunch. So when my friend in Basel suggested cycling the Route des Vins d’Alsace, the only real question was how much Alsace food and wine we could fit into one trip.
Although in person events are still a huge part of the foodservice, hospitality and food and drink world (we are a people business after all!), it is fair to say that post-Covid we have seen a consolidation of trade shows across the board, which is no bad thing when everyone’s time is at a premium. Read More
When the first lockdown hit in 2020, dried pasta, tinned tomatoes and blocks of Parmigiano Reggiano were among the first products to vanish from UK supermarket shelves, faster even than bread. It wasn’t panic. It was priority. Britain has been quietly obsessed with Italian food for a very long time, and in a crisis, people reach for what they trust. YouGov has named Italian cuisine the most popular in the world, with 91% of British people who have tried it saying they like it. For any Italian food brand weighing up the UK market, that’s one of the strongest tailwinds going in FMCG.
Walk into any supermarket this autumn and you’ll feel it before you even see it: a connection between brand and shopper. It’s on the pack, in the display, in the moment someone reaches for it – a moment where the shopper doesn’t think, they just instinctively reach. That instinct isn’t random. It’s been built by everything the brand has already said elsewhere, integrated long before the shopper ever gets near the shelf. When that connection is executed well, it’s rarely an accident. It’s there because the shopper marketing agency behind it worked integrated by instinct – understanding how that moment linked to everything else the brand does and stands for, even if shopper marketing was the only brief they’d actually been given.
With 87% of B2B marketers now using LinkedIn, and 76% calling it the most effective channel for thought leadership¹, it’s easy to see why so many B2B brands focus their social media strategy around the platform. But while LinkedIn is an important part of any B2B strategy, relying on one platform alone could mean missing out on where your customers, chefs, operators and decision-makers are actually spending their time online. The short answer: LinkedIn is essential for B2B, but it shouldn’t be the only platform carrying your strategy.
For years, food and drink marketers have had a blind spot. You could see exactly how your website ranked on Google. You had no idea how a viral TikTok or a scroll stopping Reel showed up in someone’s search results. That gap has just started to close.
As planning for 2027 comes hurtling towards us you may well be looking for an agency to support your brand or brands in foodservice. Choosing a foodservice marketing agency is however a different exercise to selecting a general marketing agency, and treating it the same way is where most agency reviews go wrong. Read More
Poutine has been around for a while now. Chips, gravy and squeaky cheese curds have been turning up on London’s late-night menus for over a decade, from the four branches of Dip & Flip to Caribou Poutine in Liverpool, the UK’s first dedicated poutine restaurant.
“It’s only good nutrition if children are eating it!”
Nine words from Arena’s Feeding the Future event that every food and drink brand selling into schools should pin above the NPD whiteboard and the Government would do well to consider. With new school food standards for England landing in September*, here’s who wins, who loses and who needs to reformulate fast.
Arena’s Summer Event took place this year at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower in Knightsbridge, a day dedicated to shaping the future of foodservice and hospitality. Arena gatherings are always a reliable barometer of industry mood, and this one delivered sharp insight, honest conversation and a wonderful lunch.
Some evenings remind you exactly why we all love this industry. The Cateys did just that on the 7th of July, when nearly a thousand hospitality professionals filled JW Marriott Grosvenor House London for the awards fondly known as the Oscars of hospitality – The Cateys. Those lucky enough to have a ticket dusted off the black tie and donned their posh frocks to catch up with familiar faces and cheered some thoroughly deserving winners.
I came back from Lisbon last month having worked my way through more than ten pastel de natas, so my standards were pretty high. I say this because the first stop on our Shoreditch food tour cleared that bar within the first 5 minutes… yum.
