Food in the Age of Somatic Intelligence | Nextatlas x Future Food Institute

Nextatlas' Marketing Manager, Stephanie Clifford, joined social listening expert and cultural strategist Kim Townend to discuss how Gen Z has rewritten the rules of love and dating. Built on a year of social listening by Kim Towned and Nextatlas's early-adopter data, our joint webinar and subsequent report show how Gen Z women have reframed romance and why it matters.

The essential cultural shifts set to define 2026 — revealing the emerging forces reshaping consumer meaning, behaviour, and expectation in an era overwhelmed by algorithms and AI-driven sameness. Our annual trend webinar takes a radically new approach: powered by our proprietary LLM-driven discovery architecture, we surface signals still unfamiliar to the market, concepts growing rapidly at the edge of language and far beyond traditional trend radars. Designed to give brands first-mover advantage, we translate these ‘unknown unknowns’ into actionable insight, unpacking three macro-shifts that show how people are rediscovering truth, emotion, and time itself. With real-world implications and strategic pathways for brands, the webinar reveals not what’s already visible — but what’s just beginning to take shape.

As the food service industry evolves rapidly, Barilla developed ChefAtlas with Nextatlas to better understand emerging trends by analysing digital conversations among professional chefs. This session from the Esomar Trend Horizons in Washington DC explores how combining AI-driven analysis with human expertise can reveal rich, real-time insights and how these methods could apply across industries beyond food.