A taste of the future: 2016 food and drink trends include a post-workout craft beer

Boozing for vitality, recycling food waste and the blurred line between fast food and good food – welcome to hospitality in 2016.

British-based consultancy The Future Laboratory, which analyses trends to future-proof businesses, recently held the Food and Drinks Future Forum in Melbourne.

Most of the trends they're tipping are based around what The Future Laboratory has dubbed "the optimised self". Although it sounds like something from The Matrix, the term refers to our tendency to aim for personal measures of wellness, as opposed to perfection.

In food and beverage terms, this translates to liquids and solids that make you feel better, inside and out. Here's what you can expect to see in 2016 and beyond.

Anti Happy Hour

Drinking is no longer about getting drunk; it's about flavour. In a society where the average person knows more about food than ever before, we are driven by taste.

This is backed up by the rise in popularity of vermouth, bitters and longer drinks with lower alcohol volumes, and best demonstrated by menus that offer degustations paired with cocktails, such as 1806 and State of Grace in Melbourne's CBD.

"Let's get rid of this idea that cocktails are for happy hour and should be marked down," says The Future Laboratory co-founder Chris Sanderson. "Let's actually think and really start to concentrate on the wonder of the great cocktail."

The signature cocktails at Milk the Cow in St Kilda and Carlton take this approach a step further. Each drink arrives garnished with a wedge of matched cheese, such as the Fig Shrub – a blend of fig balsamic, pear, vodka and citrus finished with Italian gorgonzola.

Alcohealth

Say goodbye to Dry July; alcohol is being repositioned as healthy, or at least not unhealthy. Sanderson calls it "healthy hedonism", where something traditionally bad for you becomes beneficial when consumed as part of a balanced lifestyle.

For example, at select Lululemon Athletic stores in Canada, the company offered a limited edition, post-workout craft beer called Curiosity Lager. On home soil at Eau de Vie, there's a section on the cocktail list titled "The Apothecary", which features restorative concoctions loaded with superfoods and natural remedies, such as detox tea and aloe vera juice; as well as another that tastes like a Butter-Menthol.

Ancient appetites

When it comes to wellness, ancient superfoods such as teff and kefir (quinoa and chia are so 2013) seem to have more pull than vegetables like broccoli, another superfood by definition. The Future Laboratory's other co-founder, Martin Raymond, has also noticed ties to ayurvedic medicine, even in alcoholic drinks that might be spiked with lemon myrtle or pink Himalayan rock salt.

"Think about health and wellness and how it's gone back to traditional and ancient and indigenous remedies," he says. "We're seeing the same with alcohol; when you see a cocktail recipe [at a bar], it's almost like it's a prescription for health, prescribed by the barperson."

Trash to table

One of the trends already booming in Melbourne is trash to table, where food that would otherwise go to waste is incorporated into something else. Every time Four Pillars distils a batch of gin, it's left with three kilograms of oranges that it turns into marmalade. The recently launched Yume app is also positioning itself as an online marketplace for food that would usually end up in the bin, with chefs getting creative during Yume Hour.

"A lot of waste comes out as a byproduct of people being active in the kitchen or businesses being active producing food … a lot of chefs and people in hospitality are saying, 'why don't we reuse those products in a more effective way?'" Raymond says.

High-low dining

According to Euromonitor, the fast-casual category has grown by 550 per cent since 1999. We've already seen top chefs move into gourmet fast food (Daniel Wilson's Huxtaburger, George Calombaris' Jimmy Grants, Shane Delia's Biggie Smalls, etc). Similarly, the most affordable Michelin-starred restaurant, Tim Ho Wan, is about to open in Melbourne, while the guide awarded a star to a casual ramen shop in Tokyo at the end of last year. But The Future Laboratory has noticed larger players attempting to lure customers in by pairing low-cost food with the values and design principles of higher-class establishments.

Last month The Corner by McCafe – a McDonald's venue disguised as something else thanks to fashionable branding, white tiles and blondwood finishes – announced it was selling MILKLAB soy, almond, coconut and lactose-free milks. Their build-your-own-burger offering, advertised with the catchline, "how very Un-McDonald's", is another example. Even Starbucks has launched evening dining options in some US cities, featuring truffled macaroni and cheese and prosecco.

Language

It's one thing to analyse food and drink, but the way in which restaurants commandeer language in an attempt to rebrand the basics always hits a nerve.

The Future Laboratory says we're starting to reject buzzwords like "locally sourced" and "hand-crafted", as they're now expectations, not boasting rights.

The Future Laboratory's membership-only website, LS:N Global, "a call to arms to stop using tropes that have no place in the commercial world".

"We ask you, and ourselves, to ban buzzwords such as heritage, experience, curated and authentic from the lexicon."

I'll raise a matcha-infused protein cocktail to that.