All PFN ARTICLES

Next year’s food discoveries could include a better bean lunch, Japanese comfort food and a drink with a pleasantly bitter edge. Whole Foods Market’s newly released predictions for 2027 suggest shoppers will be offered more adventurous flavours alongside a growing emphasis on straightforward ingredients and where their food comes from.

A dairy-free take on classic Kiwi onion dip and a founder who loves experimenting have given New Zealand’s plant-based food sector something to celebrate. Savour Vegan Creamery founder Auda Finan has been named Food Technologist/Developer of the Year at the 2026 New Zealand Food Awards, with Savour’s Onion winning gold in the Chilled/Frozen category and Butta collecting silver.

These five foods as concepts are speculative, but each has roots in science or products already emerging here.

Hundreds of stores hit, temperatures reaching 50°C and food dumped overnight. Could Australia and New Zealand’s supermarket freezers be sitting ducks?

Nearly 26,000 producers have embraced a simpler route from farm to consumer, true 'food power'. Australia and New Zealand could learn from it. While Australia and New Zealand grapple with grocery bills and supermarket dominance, Poland has been building another route to the dinner table. Its agricultural retail trade scheme allows eligible farmers to turn their own ingredients into bread, preserves, juices and other foods, then sell directly under simplified rules.

A tiny community on New Zealand's South Island is turning one of its ecological problems into something altogether more useful - food. From marine pest to pantry!!

SIAL Paris is putting the protein boom under scrutiny ahead of its 17–21 October food fair. Its published trend analysis warns of “protein washing” - marketing that elevates protein content without a corresponding nutritional benefit. The message to manufacturers is clear, protein quantity alone cannot establish a product’s value; quality, digestibility and the overall food matter too.

Every time tofu or soymilk is produced, a wet soybean pulp called okara is left behind. It still contains valuable nutrients and protein, but because it is highly perishable, fibrous and relatively unappealing in taste and texture, much of it ends up as low-value animal feed or food waste.

Garlic may seem an unlikely window into a global shadow food trade. Yet reports of Chinese garlic being smuggled into Mexico and Peru raise a much bigger question: how much food is already moving across borders outside the systems designed to tell us where it came from?

Abundant crops, struggling growers and consumers still watching every dollar are exposing a curious fault line in the fresh produce business. Why aren't vegetables getting cheaper?

Food innovation is entering a more commercially disciplined phase. The strongest developments are no longer technology demonstrations or novelty launches, they involve proven manufacturing, familiar applications and clearly defined routes to market. Here are five consequential food signals from the past week

Peru's blueberry industry has provided an early glimpse of what the strengthening El Niño could mean for global food production. But the emerging story isn't simply one of drought, crop failures and shortages. El Niño is changing where and increasingly when food is produced. For Australia and New Zealand, that presents risks, but also opportunities.