This chapter look at what new trends are forseen in the arena of Food Fusion and the Americana Blending of different cultural foods and tastes. We hope you find this chapter and those to come interesting.
The concept is fusing food ingredients from different segments of the industry to create new and different food products. This is done today in various ways, like with the "Mars" candy ice cream bars and the "Dole" frozen fruit juice bars, etc. But there are also more creative ways of applying food fusion.
The idea would be to take products or ingredients from the dairy field, beverages, juices, meats, cheeses, oils, condiments, etc and have them become interactive on many levels. By doing this, you could obtain an unique well-balanced product acceptable to the consumer.
Examples are:
The other direction you could take is to fuse different ethnic food categories together to create complete cross-overs that have not been done before. Examples could be "Chinese-Italian, Mexican-Thai, or Amish-French",etc.
Americana blending of different cultural foods has been done for over 250 years. First with the Native Americans and European cusines and now with Mexican, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, etc. With the world getting smaller for Americans because of international travel and ethnic groups from all over coming to America, today's consumers are exposed to the fine cusines of other countries in restraurants.
But the vast majority of Americans still prefer a more American version of these foods. Interesting areas to explore would be Africa, South America, Eastern and Central Europe, Russia and the Southern Pacific Rim countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.
Examples could be:
By taking well-known food items and meals from these countries and Americanizing them, new mainstream products could be offered to the retail trade. Remember, what were small niche areas 20 to 30 years ago, have become multi-billion categories today.