What Is Food Design and What Does a Food Designer Do?

Discover this broad discipline that reflects on how we create, present, and consume food

Human development is closely related to our ability to transform the raw ingredients we find in nature into something delicious and nutritious. Just think about bread, a by-product of fermentation that's been a staple food for millennia; or how we use salt, fat, and sugar as preservatives.

Creating and handling food is a design process. In an essay titled Body, Design and Evolution, published in Brazilian design book Disegno. Desenho. Designio, Helena Katz defines design as:

Design is the organization of parts into a whole so that these components produce an intended result. But achieving this arrangement is always unlikely, both when you are designing something ordinary and something extraordinary. There are too many potential combinations. Every arrangement is nothing more than an enormous number of possibilities. In other words, any finished design is as unlikely as the potential designs that didn’t get made.

This means that the concept of food design is related to everything involved in creating with food, or the act of eating.

What exactly is food design?

Simply defined, food design is a sub-discipline of product design. It includes the creation of new foods as well as factors like packaging, staging, and ways to present and preserve food. The term was first coined in Europe in around 1997 and is now backed by the International Food Design Society (IFDS).

Food design also incorporates knowledge from subject areas like biology, genetics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and nutrition.

The foundation of food design is people, in all our complexity, which is why it’s important to consider social, economic, and cultural aspects whenever you’re thinking about any product or service related to food.

In her essay, What is Food Design? The complete overview of all Food Design sub-disciplines and how they merge, researcher and food design expert Francesca Zampollo presents a simple but essential definition:

Food Design is, simply, the connection between food and Design. Food Design is the design process that leads to innovation on products, services, or systems for food and eating: from production, procurement, preservation, and transportation, to preparation, presentation, consumption, and disposal.

The sub-categories of food design

Food design is divided into several sub-categories that make it easier to study and understand:

- Design with food: This discipline approaches food like an object, considering aspects like usability and ergonomics. It's governed by the logic of industrialization using creative processes to come up with new formats, materials, names, packaging, flavors, textures, temperatures, and colors.

- Food product design: The creation of foods that will be mass-produced by large industries.

- Design for food: All products that can be used to cook, cut, mix, store, preserve, and serve food. It also includes everything used to prepare, distribute, and market food. Packaging is an example of design for food, used to both preserve and transport food, as well as promote the brand and the contents.

Food space design

Food space design considers the spaces where we eat—from restaurants to kitchens to dining rooms. It examines interior design features (lighting, furniture, etc) as well as factors like ambiance (temperature, music, etc) in order to create a comfortable dining experience. It also looks at places where food is prepared and sold, including bakeries, cafés, food stores, etc.

Eating design

Eating design examines our interactions with food, especially at mealtimes! It’s the most complex sub-category because it covers disciplines like sociology and anthropology, which look at how people behave and feature many variables.

What does a food designer do?

According to food design expert Francesca Zampollo, a food product designer or designer of food products is generally trained in product or industrial design and understands how food is handled, printed, extruded, and so on.

These designers may also be familiar with packaging design or work closely with a packaging designer.

Zampollo also notes, "A food product designer usually doesn’t have a vast expertise in food science and food technology, maybe a little bit, maybe none, so he is likely to collaborate with a food scientist when it comes to designing the recipe of the food material he is using."

A food designer may work to develop new formulas at a major food company or, for example, in a restaurant or bakery. They create everything from the recipe for a dish to the way in which the elements are arranged on the plate, and how the final creation should be presented and sold.

This expertise also includes an area known as food styling.

So, what is food styling?

Closely related to food design, food stylists create food sets for films, videos, TV, and advertising campaigns.
Ever pined after a burger in an advert? That's in part thanks to the food stylist who carefully presented the dish to make it look as delicious as possible.

Food stylists also work in restaurants, developing the way in which the dishes are served and presented at the table in order to create the best possible impression.

Want to find out more about food design? Don’t miss Domestika's online food design courses for innovative classes on everything from food styling to texture design.

English version by @studiogaunt.

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