Mike Lee speaking on stage

Food Futurist & Innovation Strategist

Mike Lee

Exploring and building the future of food.

Scenario planning, keynotes, and innovation strategy for the food industry.
Author of Mise: On the Future of Food.

I map the future of food and build the concepts that make it tangible.

My grandparents and parents owned Chinese American restaurants in Metro Detroit. I grew up in those kitchens and dining rooms, which is probably where all of this started. Detroit gave me one more thing: the concept car, the auto industry's way of building an object from its own imagined future. I've spent my career making the food version.

I spent eighteen years in New York City, where I founded Studiofeast, a pop-up supper club. By day I worked at Amex Labs, American Express's innovation team, and later on the new ventures team at Chobani. In 2020 I moved home to Metro Detroit, where I live today, a proud girl dad.

These days I work and write under the name The Future Market, where I map how food could change across the next 5 to 50 years and help companies like Danone and Mars turn that into strategy. My book, Mise: On the Future of Food, lives at mise.market. I host a podcast, The Tomorrow Today Show, about what we eat next. Different projects, one person, and this site is the home for all of it.

Full Bio

Role

Food Futurist & Innovation Strategist

Practice

The Future Market

Author

Mise: On the Future of Food

Previously

Amex Labs, Chobani

Based in

Metro Detroit, MI

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.

Better innovation in food today starts with more ambitious thinking about tomorrow.

Services

01

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.

02

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.

03

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.

04

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.

What the work looks like

Artifacts from Mise, my annual book of food futures, and my client scenario decks — the speculative products, ads, and worlds I build so the future is something you can react to.

Mise: On the Future of Food. My annual book of food scenarios, designed like a magazine from the future.
01 / 07

Mise: On the Future of Food

My annual book of food scenarios, designed like a magazine from the future.

My process

1

Signals

The forces driving change in food. I scan society, technology, the economy, the environment, and politics for what will reshape how we eat.

2

Scenarios

What the future could look like for your category. I turn the signals into vivid, plausible scenarios you can plan against.

3

Action

Tying those ambitious future visions back to what you do today. Through workshops and action planning, we turn the scenarios into concrete moves you can make this year: the opportunities to capture and the problems to solve first.

Select clients & partners

DanoneMarsGivaudanCampbell'sCompassCulinary Institute of AmericaSimple MillsBanzaKing Arthur FlourBeef+Lamb New ZealandEllen MacArthur Foundation

I help a room see the future of food before it arrives.

I speak on where food is headed and what's driving it there: AI in the kitchen, regenerative agriculture, GLP-1 drugs, the slow rewiring of how we cook and what we call healthy. I take the signals most rooms scroll past, follow them a decade out, and bring the story back to what it means for your business.

The best talks send a room out thinking bigger, with sharper questions and a clearer sense of what to do next. I've keynoted Menus of Change, Google Food Lab, and EvokeAg, plus corporate offsites and private dinners, for audiences from a single board to a hall of a thousand. Formats range from main-stage keynotes to executive sessions and hands-on workshops, each built for the room.

Book a talk

The Future of Food Is Not a Spectator Sport

Menus of Change 2026

Delicious Because It's Sustainable

Menus of Change 2026

Humans Cook Here

Menus of Change 2026

The Perfect Sandwich

Google Food Lab, Cambridge · 2025

Algorithmic Appetites

Google Food Lab, Chicago · 2024

EvokeAg Conference

Melbourne, Australia · 2020

Bring a talk like this to your event

A stack of Mise: On the Future of Food — Issue 01, Rethinking Reality

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 book

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 Podcasts

The supper club where I started exploring what we eat next.

The StudioFeast crew in striped aprons plating a course during a dinner
Plating a course, mid-service.

It started in 2008, when five of New York's secret supper clubs packed 165 people into a bi-level loft near the Empire State Building for a 12-course dinner. You found the door by walking into a bar on 35th Street, finding the guy learning how to cook everything, and asking him for a map. That was us.

I built it at night. By day I worked at Amex Labs, American Express's innovation team, prototyping where the company was headed. Even then I was exploring the future on two clocks, the way I still do.

For the next decade we cooked wherever an idea pointed. A six-course lunch on a moving L train. The Doppelganger Dinner, seven courses where the omnivore and vegetarian plates were built to look identical down the line. A year-end Last Meal run out of my own apartment in Crown Heights, where a Chicago hot dog came back as beef tartare and cured egg yolk got microplaned over caviar into a pile of yolk snow. The Illegal Eater filmed us. NBC's 1st Look came to my kitchen to cook baby eels, sous-vide beef heart, and cricket-flour cookies on camera. Our short film, I Am What I Eat, won Best Short and Best "Made in NYC" at the Food Film Festival.

Around 2015 the menus started pointing forward instead of inward. The Future of Protein, at the Museum of Food and Drink, was a five-course meal that walked guests from the wild proteins of 1850 to engineered protein in 2065, with insects somewhere in the middle. I billed it as the first dinner of a new project called The Future Market. The supper club had turned into a foresight practice. I have been running that practice ever since.

The Last Meal

StudioFeast

The Future of Protein

StudioFeast

I also teach food people to build their own software.

Outside of client work, I run Vibecoding for Food: a free guide for restaurant operators, CPG founders, and farmers who want the tools the big players have — built in plain English, no code, no subscriptions.

Four working prototypes, a fifteen-minute setup guide, a hundred ready-to-paste prompts, and a security check for whatever you build.

Explore Vibecoding for Food

Let's talk about what comes next.

Speaking engagements, foresight projects, strategic collaborations — or just a good conversation about the future of food.

Past work with Danone, Mars, Givaudan, Campbell's, Compass, the Culinary Institute of America, Simple Mills, Banza, King Arthur Flour, Beef+Lamb New Zealand, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

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