A new toolkit to help food companies make the best of future global challenges has been launched by the Food Ethics Council.

The Food Ethics Council has devised four scenarios for UK food in 2022 to enable businesses and other organisations to identify key challenges, test out policies, products and campaigns, and think more clearly about the future.

Based on expert advice and emerging trends, the toolkit provides means for organisations to test their current strategies in the face of uncertainty. Posing a series of ‘what if…?’ questions, it is a platform on which to ‘future-proof’ policies and products.

The four scenarios for the future of UK food in 2022 are that new technology in nutrition will provide an answer; continue to consume but be efficient in Europe; automatic doorstep delivery of food for the ‘cash rich, time poor’; or food production flourishes in the urban jungle as tight budgets drive more allotments and global food companies look to more lucrative markets.

Dr Tom MacMillan, executive director of the Food Ethics Council, said: “We can’t predict the future at the best of times, yet the need to plan for a sustainable and ethical food system has never been greater. This toolkit is designed to help people plan ahead wisely in a world that is bound to surprise us.

“The future will hit us sooner than we think and events that experts predicted for a decade’s time have happened already. The frameworks in this report highlight a wide number of plausible outcomes, both good and bad, and explore how businesses and policies can evolve to address them.”