The New Romantics | Nextatlas x Kim Towned

We identified Somatic Intelligence as one of the key trends for 2026 in our annual trend report, where consumers are shifting from thinking to feeling, relying on the body’s instinctive signals as the new source of truth and value in an AI-saturated world. This joint webinar with Sara Roversi of the Future Food Institute explores the new somatic intelligence emerging in the food world. From gut feeling to embodied knowledge, it examines why the next food revolution starts below the mind, how intuition and visceral awareness are reshaping consumer behavior in the F&B sector.

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.