As NRN looks back on the past 50 years, the editors look ahead. Here's what could be in store in the next 50 years of foodservice. 

Fifty years from now, low-price casual-dining restaurants will include quick-service capabilities to provide convenient meals for customers too busy to cook or dine out, and delivery services taking their signature menu items to immobile consumers.

The fast-casual concepts of today will evolve into foodie joints with the authentic ethnic or regional edibles of today’s fine-dining restaurants. There will be little on-site consumption, and prices will reflect menu ambitiousness.

Today’s quick-service restaurants will morph into convenience-store competitors, with key categories of packaged goods and partnered services, such as dry cleaning, that let customers maximize stops on their urban walking commutes or in their self-driving cars.

Sit-down meals will occur, but, at lower price points, the service will primarily be consumer actuated through spoken orders off of holographic menus, augmented by living “experience concierges” who cut in when customer hesitation or confusion are detected.

At the high end, food and service will be enhanced by amenities that entertain customers or help them entertain, from 3-D movie projectors to Uber-dispatched actors and musicians for live productions, to tie-ins to guests’ home video libraries.

Independent operators will have cut out the distribution middleman and lowered rents by becoming prepared-foods partners to supermarkets.

— Alan Liddle

The restaurant industry is in for a shakeout.

This year, it has become fully evident that the U.S. restaurant industry has reached capacity. Traffic has declined industrywide, even after years of weakness following the recession. Simply put: There are too many places to eat and not enough meals to go around.

Still, entrepreneurs continue to invest in restaurants and find new ways to deliver prepared meals to consumers. And consumers, always looking for something new, have opted for these meals and concepts.

So, here’s what to expect in the coming years: A shakeout, perhaps major, as consumers continue to shift spending away from the chains they grew up with and toward newer concepts and those that have hit the right notes with customers.

Expect more closures, particularly in casual dining, but also among traditional quick-service concepts and, maybe unsurprisingly, a few fast-casual chains that jumped too quickly onto some bandwagons.

They could take cues from Arby’s and KFC, which are in turnaround mode after culling weaker units in the aftermath of the recession. Rising labor costs and rent hikes could also force closures.

At the same time, new concepts will continue to be built, because that’s how the restaurant industry works. Consumers, armed with more information, will flock to the newcomers, leaving concepts that are old and tired in the dust.

— Jonathan Maze

In the past five years, restaurant marketing has expanded dramatically beyond traditional vehicles such as television, radio, print and direct mail with the widespread adaption of smartphones and digital media.

Customer relationship management has turned marketing into a one-on-one proposition rather than a one-brand-to-audience exercise.

That seismic shift will continue, with companies and vendors honing their abilities to reach individual customers and to quickly assess their needs, wants and desires.

Big restaurant marketers are already using smartphone loyalty apps, in combination with emails and text messages, to drive traffic during off-peak days and dayparts. Starbucks, for example, sends emails that urge customers to make purchases via app on certain days and within certain hours by dangling the carrot-like reward of quadruple points.

"People have come to expect certain conveniences when they shop, travel and handle their finances — such as mobile access, personalization, loyalty tracking and no-touch transactions," said Andrew Feinberg, principal of Deloitte Consulting LLP’s restaurant and foodservice practice, in a September study on restaurant technology. "More and more, they want their restaurant experiences to feel the same way.”

Feinberg said restaurants will need to engage customers in a “personalized way, even as interactions become more omni-channel."

So no matter how customers place orders — via Internet, app or social media — they want the restaurant brand to recognize them.

Restaurants will use technology to recognize and motivate individual behaviors and, perhaps with beacons, offer specials when the consumer drives or walks by a location.

— Ron Ruggless

There will be robots.

That’s been predicted for years, and is only beginning to come to fruition. Automation will increasingly play a role in restaurant operations over the next half century, which will likely have both good and bad implications for the humans involved in cooking, serving and selling food.

It will make their jobs easier, but it may also replace them.

With automation will come intelligent communication. The Internet of Things is a fairly new concept, but the next-generation restaurant worker will probably not remember a time when they couldn’t check freezer temperatures remotely via smartphone, or the dishwasher didn’t automatically order its own replacement parts.

With intelligent communication will come data, and plenty of it. The restaurant operator of the future will have more data at their fingertips than they can digest, which means operations teams will build smarter filters, monitoring, storage and communication methods into their daily routines.

With the pace of modern life accelerating, restaurants will place more emphasis on speed of service as a focal point of operations. What is seen as convenient today will likely be deemed too darn slow for the restaurant customer of tomorrow.

— Lisa Jennings

In 50 years, maybe sooner, there will be no difference between supermarkets and restaurants. The labels will disappear.

Let’s face it. The line between food segments is already murky. You can buy froyo and fresh sushi at drugstore Duane Reade; you can pickup coffee beans at Dunkin’ Donuts; you can hit up the lunch buffet at Whole Foods Market. (And how do you even classify hybrid operators like Eataly?)

Everyone is in the prepared foods game, and that isn’t going to change.

Instead of planning a grocery visit or restaurant visit, customers will align themselves — and their meal planning — with specific brands. I mean the word brand broadly. A brand isn’t just a company. It could mean a farmers market that a customers goes to for breakfast because he likes the idea of supporting local growers. Once he gets there, he may pick up a scone to eat or buy bacon to cook later, but the most important part to him is that he wants to participate in the farmers market experience. It could mean “getting lunch” at Trader Joes for a frozen meal or already made wrap.

In coming years, building a connection with customers via mission, convenience and food quality will be critical for restaurant chains and mom-and-pop shops alike.

— Jenna Telesca

It seems clear that two fields will improve dramatically over the next 50 years: Medical science and information technology. Both will improve how and what we eat.

As we and our doctors come to understand our own bodies’ idiosyncrasies better — whether we swell up from too much salt, get gassy from dairy or actually shouldn’t eat kale — we’ll be able to communicate those issues to restaurants, which will be able to customize our meals to make them as tasty and nutritionally beneficial as possible. We’ll know specifically which bacteria cultures benefit our personal biomes, and have our yogurt custom-made for us.

We’ll also become more aware of the whole lifecycle of our food. As the world grows more crowded, we’ll be eating fewer animals and more plants, and probably our fair share of insects.

Meat and wild-caught seafood will be more like luxuries than everyday fare, and they’ll be treated as such. We’ll know exactly where our beef, pork and lamb come from — down to the individual animal. Some European cattle already have their own traceable identity “passports.”

We’ll see that become more widespread as consumers in this ever-changing world seek even more grounding and comfort in knowing exactly where their food comes from. 

— Bret Thorn