Food Futurist & Innovation Strategist
Mike Lee
Exploring and building the future of food.
About
I study the future of food — and build the concepts that make it tangible.
The Future Market is the name I work under for my speaking and foresight consulting on the future of food. I use scenario planning to explore how food production and consumption could evolve across 5- to 50-year timeframes, and I design speculative products, immersive installations, and strategic frameworks that help organizations see around corners.
Before this, I founded Alpha Food Labs. Earlier in my career, I worked on the Innovation and New Ventures team at Chobani. Before that, in the early 2000s, I was at Amex Labs, the digital innovation team at American Express, where I built pilots for the future of the company alongside the rise of smartphones and social media. I've worked with Danone, Mars, Campbell's, Simple Mills, King Arthur Flour, Beef+Lamb New Zealand, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, applying futures thinking to real business challenges.
I studied business at the University of Michigan and design at Parsons School of Design. I'm the grandson and son of Chinese American restaurant owners, which is probably where all of this started.
I live in Metro Detroit, Michigan.
Role
Food Futurist & Innovation Strategist
Practice
The Future Market
Previously
Amex Labs, Chobani, Alpha Food Labs
Based in
Metro Detroit, MI
Selected Writing
View all on Substack →Make It Possible
What modern life makes hard about choosing better food
Economic Law is Not Natural Law
We wrote the rules of profit. We can rewrite them.
A New Blueprint for Big Food
Stop fighting the profit motive. Redirect it.
The Enshittification of Big Food
A digital-economy idea explains why the food on your shelf keeps getting worse
Antifragile by Design
The food system works exactly as designed, but it's the design that's the problem.
Fragile by Design
The food system was built with chokepoints. So was almost everything else.
Sample Keynotes
The Perfect Sandwich
Google Food Lab, Cambridge
Algorithmic Appetites
Google Food Lab, Chicago
EvokeAg Conference
Melbourne, Australia
Work With Me
Concept cars for food.
The auto industry institutionalized future-thinking by building concept cars — visions unconstrained by production realities that pushed the whole industry forward. I do the same thing for food.
I create speculative products, immersive experiences, and strategic frameworks that help food companies see around corners. Whether that's a 10-year scenario plan or a keynote that reframes how your team thinks about innovation.
Scenario Planning
I build detailed, plausible futures for your category — 5 to 50 years out — so you can stress-test strategy against what's actually coming, not what's comfortable to assume.
Innovation Strategy
I help food companies identify the signals that matter, cut the noise, and develop innovation roadmaps grounded in where consumers and systems are actually heading.
Speaking
Keynotes on the future of food, new approaches to innovation, and how shifts in technology, policy, and culture are reshaping what we eat. Conferences, corporate events, and private sessions.
Workshops
Hands-on sessions that help your team think further, faster. We work through futures frameworks, build scenarios together, and walk away with a shared language for what's next.
Select clients & partners
Books
Mise: On the Future of Food
Published in 2024. Four future scenarios spanning 2033 to 2067, each one a fully realized vision of how we might grow, distribute, cook, and eat. Part speculative fiction, part strategic foresight, part cookbook.
This is the book I wrote to make the future of food something you could hold, read, and taste.
Get the bookPodcast
The Tomorrow Today Show
Conversations about the forces reshaping how we eat, live, and think about the future. Each episode pulls a single thread — a technology, a policy, a cultural shift — and follows it forward.
Listen on Apple PodcastsContact
Let's talk about what comes next.
Speaking engagements, foresight projects, strategic collaborations — or just a good conversation about the future of food.