Gluttonomy turned 10 this year.
Writing that sentence feels strange. Ten years sounds like a very long time when you are starting a company, and somehow like a very short time when you look back at everything that has happened along the way.
My relationship with food started long before Gluttonomy. Before there was an agency, there was curiosity. I traveled to eat, wrote about food and restaurants, judged awards, met all sorts of interesting people across the industry, and probably spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about what, and where, I was going to eat next.
I didn't know it at the time, but all those experiences were building something. In 2016, that curiosity became Gluttonomy. The idea behind the company was based on a relatively simple belief: food deserved specialists. There were plenty of great creative agencies, strategy consultancies, and design studios, but I believed there was an opportunity for a company that understood those disciplines while also understanding food itself and peculiarities of this industry.
Over the years, we have created brands, designed packaging, developed restaurant concepts, built digital platforms, launched products, created campaigns and activations, worked on food innovation, and advised companies on strategy and collaborated with some of the most talented people in food. We have worked with global companies and with entrepreneurs starting with little more than an idea. We have worked on projects that reach millions of people and others that might only ever be experienced by a few dozen guests around a table.
The best research sometimes comes with a conversation
As an agency, we need to support our findings, strategies, and creative work with research and data. Today, we have access to tools that can analyze millions of consumer signals and help us understand behavior at a scale that would have been unimaginable when we started.
But ten years have also reinforced something I believed before starting the company: you have to go outside.
Some of the most valuable things I have learned about food have happened while sitting at a restaurant counter, walking through a supermarket in another country, visiting a food market, talking with a chef after service, or simply noticing something appearing repeatedly on menus.
Years ago, our trend reports were largely built this way: eating, traveling, reading, talking to people, and paying attention. Today, we can complement that firsthand knowledge with sophisticated data and AI, giving us access to an extraordinary amount of information. But the human part remains essential.
I wouldn’t understand food the way I do today if I hadn’t wandered the streets of Modena on a warm summer afternoon, talking with Massimo Bottura about the future of Italian cuisine, or cooked and talked with traditional cocineras in Morelia, learning about nixtamalization and the varieties of heirloom corn that form the backbone of traditional Mexican cuisine. Those experiences have shaped the way I understand this industry.
Perhaps the biggest lesson from all these years is that food is rarely just food. A dish can tell you where someone comes from. A restaurant can change a neighborhood. A packaged product can carry someone’s childhood into a supermarket thousands of miles away.
Food is identity, culture, health, community, and commerce, often all at the same time.
This is why authenticity matters so much. A large corporation doesn’t need to pretend to be a small artisan producer. A restaurant doesn’t need to manufacture a story that doesn’t exist. And a chef doesn’t need to follow whatever ingredient happens to be trending on social media that particular week.
Build relationships, create work you believe in
There are projects we can execute today because of conversations that started years ago, and our relationships with chefs are a good example.
What began as simply meeting interesting people in the industry gradually became a global community of chefs, restaurateurs, bartenders, entrepreneurs, journalists, and many others working around food. I have never particularly liked thinking about it as a “network,” because these are relationships.
We’ve worked with chefs on restaurant concepts, brand collaborations, product innovation, advisory boards, and events. We’ve introduced people and organizations who subsequently created things together. Many professional relationships have fortunately turned into friendships, and vice versa.
Just as we have invested in building strong relationships, we have also put considerable effort into projects that helped define Gluttonomy but weren’t created for clients.
Lengua is probably the best example. We created the conference because we felt Miami’s food community needed a place where people could meet, exchange ideas, learn, and have conversations about the industry. Nobody asked us to create it, although I believe the industry was waiting for something like it.
The same is true of our trend reports and the other content and initiatives we have published over the years. These projects require time, money, and energy that can be difficult to justify in the short term, but they have helped define who we are.
The role of AI and data
When Gluttonomy started in 2016, the technology available to us looked very different. Today, AI is changing how we research, analyze information, create, and make decisions. I'm enormously optimistic about what these tools can do, and we use them constantly, but at the same time I am increasingly convinced that technology makes expertise more important, not less.
Having access to information isn't the same as understanding it. AI can generate hundreds of ideas, but someone still needs to recognize the good one, understand its context and decide whether it makes cultural or commercial sense. I've shared in previous articles and talks my belief that the opportunity isn't human versus machine. The interesting part is combining the scale and speed of technology with experience, taste, intuition and judgment.
For years, we have also published our own food trend predictions. I’ve written about ingredients, dishes, restaurant behaviors, packaging, and plenty of other things. Some predictions became mainstream, some remained niche, and I’m sure there are a few we would happily hide somewhere deep on the internet.
But doing this year after year taught me something important: predicting what comes next is less interesting than understanding why it is happening. A regional cuisine becoming popular is interesting, for example, but understanding what its popularity says about migration, politics, identity, and changing consumer tastes is much more valuable.
Ten years later, we're still curious
There are plenty of things I would do differently if I were starting Gluttonomy again tomorrow. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve taken projects we probably shouldn’t have. We’ve underestimated how difficult certain ideas would be to execute.
We’ve spent too much time on things that didn’t matter enough and, occasionally, not enough time on things that did.
But I wouldn’t want to go back to 2016 knowing everything I know now, because much of the fun has been discovering it and learning from those experiences. Ten years later, the questions that excite me are still remarkably similar to the ones that brought me here in the first place.
Gluttonomy would not have reached ten years without the people who have been part of it: our team, clients, collaborators, friends, and the many people who have trusted us with their ideas. This company has always been shaped by people, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who has helped build it.
I don’t know exactly what Gluttonomy will look like ten years from now, but I want us to stay curious, bring interesting people together, challenge assumptions, deliver amazing projects, and understand this extraordinary industry a little better every day.