Food Ethnographer is catching future signals.

We conduct cohort-based qualitative research about people’s relationship to food, life and everything else. We are generating user insights to help you see more, hear more and feel more into future possibilities.

Foodlife is our portal into the worlds we are making and making ourselves ready for. Our whole approach to Foodlife research is to ask literally and symbolically: What's delicious to you? What feeds and sustains you? What’s tricky? What are your Modern Hungers?

Cohort-based research is an efficient way to track cultural change in the moment, and over time. Our ethnographic gaze is on the meta (patterns, frameworks), and on the messy details of where the action is (what people say, not say, and actually do).

How we work with you

What possibilities might emerge if we bridge gaps between organizational needs (improvements, innovations, impact) with their users’ deepest needs, most desperate desires and wildest dreams?

We would love to support your organization’s strategy through cohort-based research. We will do the heavy lift of research design, recruitment, fieldwork, analysis and synthesis.  And then, weave the data into insights for your strategy. Our Foodlife Research Cohorts:

01  Gen Z Longitudinal ethnography of Gen Z ambitions, aspirations, and anxieties about their futures (and ours), through the lens of food + life. Through interviews, multimedia journaling engagements, and culinary improv pop-ups, we seek to understand, translate, and ultimately collaborate in the world-making projects of Gen Z youth (born 1997-2012). 

02  Hi-Tech Bespoke organizational ethnographies for clients who are building our digital infrastructures (and may someday, take us to Mars). We give an outsider-insider perspective to help you see and feel more (differently), so that you can anticipate changes throughout your ecosystems that align with your business strategy.

03  Deep Food Ongoing ethnographic conversations with farmers, makers, chefs and entrepreneurs who are transforming food systems. We draw from more than 20 years of food-systems research and consulting (for Big Food to start-ups) to drive systemic change.