Flavours of the Future
This project is a provocation from the future. It rethinks how Friesland, Groningen, and Drenthe approach food service by treating hospitality as infrastructure, culture, and ecological repair.
It matters because incremental change will fail in the face of climate breakdown, automation, and social fragmentation. Instead of reacting to these shifts, the project explores how competing futures can make uncertainty actionable and support more deliberate regional decision-making.
In doing so, it turns long-term imagination into strategic capacity for the present.
What is the motivation for the project?
This study is important because it challenges short-term thinking in hospitality and encourages the Northern Netherlands to engage with long-term, irreversible change. Climate instability, automation, demographic shifts, and cultural homogenisation will reshape food systems whether we prepare for them or not.
By using a 2075 horizon, the research creates space to imagine large-scale disruption beyond today’s constraints and to reflect on deeper choices about identity, technology, equity, and sustainability. Food service plays a central role in this discussion, connecting work, culture, land use, tourism, and education. This makes it a powerful lens for exploring regional futures.
The study supports educators, designers, policymakers, and industry partners in aligning skills, curricula, investment, and regulation with multiple plausible futures. Ultimately, it aims to shift the region from reacting to change towards actively shaping its future.
What problem does the project solve?
The project addresses a lack of long-term strategic thinking in the food service sector. Regional planning for hospitality is often based on short-term forecasts, incremental innovation, and current constraints, which leaves little capacity to anticipate systemic change. As a result, regions are underprepared for major disruptions such as climate breakdown, automation, labour shifts, and cultural transformation. This short-term focus creates strategic blindness, limiting the ability to make informed choices about the future of food systems. It also reinforces fragmented decision-making, where key issues such as identity, skills, technology, and sustainability are addressed too late or in isolation. The consequence is reactive rather than deliberate change, increasing the risk of missed opportunities and long-term instability.
Who are in the project team?
The project team consisted of three senior academics from NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Hotel Management School Leeuwarden:
- Dr Ian Yeoman – Professor of Disruption, Innovation and New Phenomena (Lead Researcher)
- Dr Hanneke Assen – Professor of International Hospitality Education
- Dr Elena Cavagnaro – Professor of Sustainability in Hospitality & Tourism
Together, they combined expertise in future studies, hospitality education, sustainability, and scenario planning.
The study was further supported by BA Hospitality Management students, who contributed as part of a third-year design challenge by developing a fifth “middle way” scenario.
What is the project approach?
The project used a scenario planning and strategic foresight methodology to explore plausible futures for the food service sector in the Northern Netherlands up to 2075. It drew on Pierre Wack’s Shell scenario method, combined with an ontological scenario framework adapted from 2075: The Future of Food Tourism.
The research began with extensive secondary analysis of industry data, academic literature, climate projections, and consumer trends to identify key drivers of change and two critical uncertainties, forming a scenario matrix. Four contrasting scenarios were developed and refined through stakeholder workshops and expert interviews with chefs, operators, and policymakers. A fifth “middle way” scenario was added to reflect everyday realities. Each scenario was analysed in terms of business strategy, sustainability, future skills, job roles, and curriculum implications. The approach prioritised plausibility, divergence, and decision-making value rather than prediction.
What are the main (or prelimanary) results?
The primary outcome of the project is the development of five clear and contrasting future scenarios illustrating how the food service sector in Friesland, Groningen, and Drenthe could evolve by 2075. These scenarios demonstrate that the future will not follow a single path, but is likely to fragment into co-existing models, including hyper-automated food systems, cultural revival, luxury gastronomy, regenerative ecosystems, and a pragmatic everyday middle way.
The research also identifies strategic decisions that remain relevant across all futures, particularly around regional identity, supply chain control, technology adoption, sustainability standards, and talent development. Importantly, it translates these scenarios into concrete implications for business strategy, workforce skills, education curricula, and sustainability policy.
Rather than offering prediction, the project delivers actionable foresight: a framework that supports robust decision-making today under radically different future conditions.
Project partners
Noorderpoort is one of the largest regional vocational education and training centres (ROC) in the Northern Netherlands. It provides secondary vocational education (MBO) for young people, adults, and professionals, primarily in the province of Groningen and also in Assen (Drenthe).
The study was part of Generation Hospitality, a Noorderpoort-led programme that brings together vocational education, hospitality businesses, and public partners to strengthen the hospitality sector in Groningen and North Drenthe. It focuses on training young talent and career switchers through practice-based learning, innovation labs, and close collaboration with industry to address labour shortages and future skills needs.
Professorship Disruption, Innovation and New Phenomena
