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.
I'm the principal futurist at The Future Market, a foresight studio where I use scenario planning to explore how food production and consumption evolve across 5- to 50-year timeframes. I design speculative products, immersive installations, and strategic frameworks that help organizations see around corners.
Before this, I founded Alpha Food Labs and led innovation and new ventures at Chobani. 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
Studio
The Future Market
Previously
Chobani, Alpha Food Labs
Based in
Metro Detroit, MI
Selected Writing
View all on Substack →The Splintering of the American Diet
On purity spirals, creator armies, and where dietary tribalism goes from here
How to Eat Real Food
Cooking is the closest thing to self-defense in a food system that benefits from you being passive
MAHA Is Not Worth MAGA
This administration's food policy wins aren't worth the rest of the package
F*ck It, Free Groceries!
What a free grocery store pop-up reveals about a permanent crisis
The Cost of Nothing
Trump's EPA just valued human life at $0
The Food System Under Siege
ICE is waging war on the people who feed America
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
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.