Disruptive Trends in Food and Agriculture

In the past couple weeks, I've had several opportunities to engage with some forward looking farmers and agribusiness executives, and a common theme seems to have emerged around many of the conversations: what are the issues or food and agricultural technologies on the horizon that could be potentially disruptive for the current incumbents?  

1) Block chain technology.  This isn't bitcoin, but rather the underlying technology that facilitates bitcoin trades, which could be applied to many other industries.  This Reuters article from earlier in the week, for example, indicates, "A cargo of U.S. soybeans shipped to China has become the first fully-fledged agricultural trade conducted using blockchain."  The thought is that blockchain technology might prove to be a mechanism that can more rapidly disseminate many types of information about trades (the Reuters article mentions the "sales contract, letter of credit and certificates") more widely and rapidly.  Big players like Walmart and IBM are also talking about using blockchain to improve traceability and food safety.

2) Plant-based and cellular-based protein.  This is a topic I've written about many times in the past (e.g., here or here).  What's changed is the high level of investment flowing into this space, including by companies like Tyson and Cargill.  Moreover, there are now products from companies like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, JUST, and others that are actually in the market.  If sales ramp up, what are the impacts on producers of current animal feeds (primarily corn and soy)?  What are the new agricultural inputs for these plant-based meat/egg/dairy alternatives? 

3) CRISPR.  Again, the basic science isn't necessarily new,  but there are new applications coming on board (non-browning apples, hornless Holsteins, etc.) and potential changes in the regulatory landscape that could accelerate (or decelerate) adoption and consumer acceptance.

4) Agricultural analytics.  This includes precision agriculture, sensing, big data, drones, modeling, etc.  Yes, these have been around for a while and there have been many discussions about data ownership and rights, but there is a sense that the data and technology have moved to a point where some adopters may be able to start gaining a competitive advantage. 

5) Online food buying.  Will Amazon do to the food supply chain what they've done in other industries?  Walmart is also making big moves into this space.  What are the implications for traceability, tracking, and vertical market coordination?

6) Trade.  Agricultural trade has a big impact on US agriculture, and it appears there may be changes in trade policy on the horizon. 

What have I missed?

Don't Want to Eat Pink Slime? Would You Even Know?

It's hard to believe it's been almost five years since the finely textured beef (aka "pink slime")  scandal broke.  To briefly re-cap, by 2012 it had become an industry standard to include finely textured beef with other beef trimmings to make ground beef.  The process enabled food processors to add value, cut down on waste, and increased the leanness of ground beef in an affordable manner.  But, a series of news stories broke, which caused public backlash against the process, and ultimately led to the closure of several plants that produced finely textured beef.  In 2013, I wrote about my visit to BPI, one of the largest producers of lean finely textured beef (this summer, ABC settled a multi-million dollar lawsuit brought by BPI regarding ABC's coverage of the issue).  I devoted a whole chapter of my 2016 book, Unnaturally Delicious, to the issue.  I'll also note, for some aspiring journalist out there,  that I can imagine a highly compelling a book-length treatment of the saga.

Back to the heart of the story, must of the public backlash presumably came about because the public was worried about taste or safety of ground beef made with finely textured beef.  In the monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS), we've been running for almost five years, we ask about perceptions of the safety of "pink slime" and of "lean finely textured beef".  The data suggests neither are top safety concerns.  The most common answer is that people are "neither concerned nor unconcerned" about the safety of these issues (for lean finely textured beef, the average response is actually in the direction of "somewhat unconcerned").

Well, what about taste?  People may think "pink slime" tastes bad, but what would happen in a blind taste test?  Along with several of my former econ and meat science colleagues at Oklahoma State University (Molly Depue, Morgan Neilson, Gretchen Mafi, Bailey Norwood, Ranjith Ramanathan, and Deb VanOverbek), we conducted a study to find out.  The results were just published in PLoS ONE.  Here's what we found.

“Over 200 untrained subjects participated in a sensory analysis in which they tasted one ground beef sample with no finely textured beef, another with 15% finely textured beef (by weight), and another with more than 15%. Beef with 15% finely textured beef has an improved juiciness (p < 0.01) and tenderness (p < 0.01) quality. However, subjects rate the flavor-liking and overall likeability the same regardless of the finely textured beef content. Moreover, when the three beef types are consumed as part of a slider (small hamburger), subjects are indifferent to the level of finely textured beef.”

So, a burger made with 15% finely textured beef is as tasty or tastier than a burger without finely textured beef.  If people knew this, would it have changed their reaction to the Jamie Oliver show or the 2012 ABC News stories?   

How Innovative are Food Sellers?

I tend to think of the food and grocery business as hyper-competitive with many new product introductions and failures.  For example, data from the USDA ERS suggests roughly 20,000 new food and beverage products come on the market each year.  That seems like a lot.  But, compared to what?

I ran across a presentation that Austan Goolsbee and Pete Klenow recently gave at the ASSA conference in Philadelphia.  They use online price and quantity data collected by Adobe Analytics.  Their main objective was to construct price indices to compare against the official government consumer price index measures.  Those results are interesting, but I was intrigued by some of their other findings regarding new product introductions and exits.

Below are two slides they created that challenged my prior beliefs about the food and beverage category.  

If I'm understanding this correctly (and I may not be), I think the data below suggests that 69.8% of the total sales in the apparel category come from newly entering products.  Moreover, 29.5% of total sales in the the apparel category come from products that are soon to exist the market.  Other categories with high levels of "churn" and new product introductions are "other goods and services", ICT (which I believe is information and communications technology), and recreational goods.  For food and beverages, "only" 19.5% of sales are by new entrants, and 8.5% of sales are by soon-to-be-gone products. By this measure, the food sector seems less dynamic than others. 

Their next slide conveys the same information in a different way - by measuring the percent growth in sales-weighted variety.  By this measure, variety in food and beverages has only grown by an average of 1.2% per year, and the only category with a smaller growth in variety is medicines and medical supplies. By contrast, there is an average 18.3% growth in vareity in the aparel cateogory.  

One downside to these data is that they only reflect online sales.  Perhaps there is more "churn" and new product introduction in brick-and-mortar grocery stores than online?  Either way, this is interesting food for thought. 

Taste elasticities?

Economists are accustomed to reporting price elasticities, which indicate the percentage reduction in quantity of a product that will be demanded when the price of a product increases by 1%.  The focus on price elasticities might suggest that changes in prices are more important demand determinants than changes in other variables.  Another possibility is that prices are observable.  That is, we focus on price changes because we can see and measure them.

This new paper, published in Managerial and Decision Economics with Trey Malone, suggests other factors that are highly influential demand determinants.  In particular, Trey designed a survey to measure preferences (and demand) for different beer brands at various prices.  He asked people to answer choice questions like the one below.

The only difference across the choice questions were the prices assigned to brands.  It is straightforward to calculate the typical own-price demand elasticities from these data - one simply has to observe how the frequency with which a brand is chosen changes when its price changes.  

In addition to these standard questions, Trey and I also asked questions about consumer perceptions of each brand.  Here is a partial screen shot of the question we asked on taste (a similar question was asked about familiarity).  

Merging these data with the choice data, then, allows us to see how a change in perceived taste (or familiarity) affects choice.  

One of the key challenges with this sort of analysis is that taste/familiarity perceptions might be endogenously determined with other variables, such that we don't really know whether we're measuring mere correlations or the causal impact of taste changes on choice.  Our paper suggests a way to deal with this challenge.  In short, it involves using perceptions for other brands as instruments for perceptions of another brand.  I won't go into the details here, but we show the approach has a substantive effect on the results.  

So, what did we find?  Not surprisingly, taste and familiarity matter.  But by how much?  Here is a table of elasticities (not price elasticities, mind you, but taste elasticities). 

We write:

“Changes in perceived taste matter much more for the craft options (Marshall and Oskar Blues) than do changes in the perceived taste of the premium and macro options. For example, a 1% increase in the perceived taste of the Oskar Blues option leads to a 6.753% increase in the quantity demanded of that beer, whereas the same increase in the perceived taste of Corona leads to a 4.891% increase in its quantity demanded. Similar to the own-taste elasticities, relative to the familiarity elasticities, cross-taste elasticities are much larger. According to the model estimated via the control function approach, the perceived taste of Samuel Adams is the option most dependent on the perceived taste of the other beers. Specifically, the 1% increase in Corona’s perceived taste would also lead to a 1.339% reduction in the probability a Samuel Adams was selected, and the 1% increase in Oskar Blues’ perceived taste would create a corresponding 1.991% reduction in Samuel Adams’ quantity demanded.”

Another result that probably won't be too surprising to many craft beer drinkers:

“Once we control for endogeneity, our estimates indicate that some participants actually prefer an unfamiliar beer (i.e., they are variety seekers)”

Elite Consumer Motives

I ran across a couple recent articles (via a e-news letter by Susan MacMillian) that did a good job encapsulating some of the core drivers of the modern food movement trends.   

The first is a review by Benjamin Schwartz of Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's book, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class.  He argues that people (particularly the people he calls the "educated elite") have descended into a form of "consumer narcissism" in which "consumption becomes the dominant means of self-definition."  He writes:

“Currid-Halkett convincingly argues that the consumer preferences of today’s elite—be it the approved podcast, TED Talk, or magazine; goat tacos from the farmers market, a five-dollar cup of Intelligentsia Coffee, ceviche at the Oaxacan restaurant in the approved urban enclave, or tuition for the anointed school—are now the primary means by which members of the educated elite establish, reinforce, and signify their identities. In a detailed analysis of the experience of shopping at a Whole Foods supermarket, for instance, she explores the rather stark hypothesis that “for the aspirational class, we are what we eat, drink, and consume more generally.” By creating “an identity and story to which people wish to subscribe,” the store allows members of that class to “consume [their] way to a particular type of persona.” The upshot is that elite consumption—the pursuit of personal gratification—somewhat paradoxically entwines with the pursuit and buttressing of what amounts to a tribal identity.”

Currid-Halkett herself summarizes some of the main themes of the book in this piece in Aeon.
Here's an excerpt: 

“Given that everyone can now buy designer handbags and new cars, the rich have taken to using much more tacit signifiers of their social position. Yes, oligarchs and the superrich still show off their wealth with yachts and Bentleys and gated mansions. But the dramatic changes in elite spending are driven by a well-to-do, educated elite, or what I call the ‘aspirational class’. This new elite cements its status through prizing knowledge and building cultural capital, not to mention the spending habits that go with it – preferring to spend on services, education and human-capital investments over purely material goods. These new status behaviours are what I call ‘inconspicuous consumption’. None of the consumer choices that the term covers are inherently obvious or ostensibly material but they are, without question, exclusionary.”

and

“While much inconspicuous consumption is extremely expensive, it shows itself through less expensive but equally pronounced signalling – from reading The Economist to buying pasture-raised eggs. Inconspicuous consumption in other words, has become a shorthand through which the new elite signal their cultural capital to one another. In lockstep with the invoice for private preschool comes the knowledge that one should pack the lunchbox with quinoa crackers and organic fruit. ”