The new Caesarstone trend book 2019

Food and materials inspire one another and become a multi-sensorial form of creative expression. Food graduates as a new design discipline to reckon with.

This forecast explores three trend directions alongside profiles on three contemporary designers whose work is connected to food. Teaching our taste buds along the way, informing our visual aesthetics, and illustrating with gusto how form follows food.

Lidewij (Li) Edelkoort

There is an inherent beauty found in rawness and sturdy materials, reflecting the authentic textures of manufacturing, such as oxidized steel, poured plaster sifted sand, piled fractions and raw concrete. The concept of cementing materials together is also already reflecting in food trends, where pulverized ingredients are compressed into cheese, bread, paste or smash. Foods will lend themselves to being spread, chiseled and pummeled with a painter’s spatula, like in conceptual art, turning the consumer into an artisan at work.

The sudden return of marble has triggered a return to classical inspirations. Veining now comes in manifold variations, from the delicacy of intricately-laced lines to the dynamic drama of oversized thicker veining. Veining is also impacting trends in fashion, textiles, ceramics, paper and design objects – each one generously splashed with marbled motifs. Veining also follows marbling in food design. A similar taste for texture and visual excitement pervades mottled foods and frothy desserts, with the prominence of marbled meringues...

Return to the beginning: like the authenticity found in foraged foods, in hunted and gathered ingredients. With these primal rituals, there seems to be a sober lifestyle direction emerging for the future, almost essentialist in its spirit. The darker side of living brings unfamiliar textures to the fore, in a sensual attempt to embrace fetish foods, evoking the primitive on our table the aesthetic of black is newly revealed and rediscovered, impacting interior design. These roasted, fired and drying treatments cast a dark shadow over all ingredients and introduce an intriguing new chapter in the designing, preparing and presentation of food.