Gen Alpha and artificial intelligence (AI) will be major shapers of the food and beverage industry's future, according to Datassential. The market research company named both as important trends in 2023 in its annual FoodBytes trend report, which combines the opinions of industry experts with consumer insights to predict the upcoming year's biggest macro and micro trends. While the oldest members of Gen Alpha are about to reach their teenage years and make their own spending decisions, Datassential sees these young consumers already are influencing purchasing patterns in their homes and others through family and social media. The diverse generation, set to number almost two billion globally by 2025, has wasted no time gaining the attention of some restaurant operators, with 35% telling Datassential that the group is already important to their business. Companies will need to engage the tech-savvy group through various channels to make them into customers, and fortunately most brands have figured out how to take part in the social media craze surrounding food photography on sites like Instagram. Now, however, they also will need to adapt to the explosion in popularity of short-form videos, especially on TikTok, one of Datassential's micro trends.

Faux burgers and chicken nuggets are having a moment. In 2018, Impossible Foods, the Silicon Valley–based alternative meat company known for its plant-based burger that "bleeds" like the real thing, made its nationwide fast food debut at all White Castle locations in the US. A year later, KFC partnered with Los Angeles–based alt-protein producer Beyond Meat to create a plant-based fried chicken that is "finger lickin' good." And since the onset of the pandemic, sales of plant-based meats from supermarkets have more than doubled. Once reserved only for hippies and PETA employees, protein alternatives have finally entered the mainstream. But that doesn't mean industrial animal agriculture is on its way out.

As we enter our third decade in the 21st century, it seems appropriate to reflect on the ways technology developed and note the breakthroughs that were achieved in the last 10 years. The 2010s saw IBM's Watson win a game of Jeopardy, ushering in mainstream awareness of machine learning, along with DeepMind's AlphaGO becoming the world's Go champion. It was the decade that industrial tools like drones, 3D printers, genetic sequencing, and virtual reality (VR) all became consumer products. And it was a decade in which some alarming trends related to surveillance, targeted misinformation, and deepfakes came online. For better or worse, the past decade was a breathtaking era in human history in which the idea of exponential growth in information technologies powered by computation became a mainstream concept.