Serve someone a plate of duckweed and they will probably push it away. Call it a fresh water lentil salad and they will gladly try a bite. For food designer Katja Gruijters, this illustrates a small part of her work. “It has a lot to do with how you put something into words, but also how you present it.”
Gruijters has worked as a food designer for 25 years. She graduated from the Design Academy in Eindhoven with a food concept built around the mad cow disease and swine fever outbreaks of that moment. “I developed meat-replacement products that didn’t look like meat.”
A food designer shapes food, quite literally. Over the years the field has grown wider. Where Gruijters once designed single products, she now works across whole systems. She follows the full chain: where food comes from, how it moves, and how it ends up on your plate. “As a food designer, you look for patterns and friction”, she explains. She singles out friction and turns it into a product or a service to solve the matter.
Why this matters for the food sector
The backdrop to Katjas work is a food system under pressure. Climate change, health questions and shifting supply all play a part. The animal diseases of twenty years ago already hinted that something in the system was off. Climate change has made the picture more complex.
Everything is connected, and Gruijters treats that as a strength rather than a problem. When war in Ukraine caused grain shortages, it showed how fast supply can change. Her answer is openness and collaboration. “Because we all really need each other to keep feeding the world.”
The hard part is not agreeing that food must change. It is actually doing it. People are creatures of habit, and food is culture. Anything unfamiliar feels risky. This is where design lowers the barrier. Once an idea takes the shape of a burger, it gets an identity that people recognise and accept.
Language does the same. Gruijters points to research she wrote about: label a product ‘vegan’ or ‘plant-based’ too explicitly, and many shoppers hesitate. Leave the label off while keeping the ingredient in, and they’ll happily buy it. Her work sits exactly where food design meets marketing and words.
A natural fit with FoodX
Gruijters has worked with FoodX for years. “I developed three thematic tastings, based on the three pillars of FoodX”, she says, including a plant-based lunch and a circular tasting, all built on ingredients from Dutch start-ups. The step to a shared programme felt logical, so the Future Food Concepting programme was born.
Katja sees herself as a missing link. FoodX offers experience, and her work makes that experience tangible and sensory. Her guiding idea is healthy pleasure: you tempt people to eat well, instead of lecturing them. Right now she is working on brewers’ spent grain, the residual stream from beer, most of which still goes to animal feed.
What international delegations take home
For visiting delegations, this all comes together in Future Food Concepting, the programme Gruijters leads through FoodX with the FoodX Concepting Toolkit. It is where food design meets innovation strategy, and it runs as a structured journey.
Day one, Feed & Frame, is a field trip through the FoodX ecosystem. Your team meets innovative companies, products and players, spots trends, and shapes its first design questions. Day two, Concept Growth, turns those insights into two or three future-proof directions. Here Gruijters works with a flexible network of partners, from strategy and positioning to product and business development.
A three-week development period follows, then two hours of online coaching to sharpen the directions into concrete next steps, partnerships or pilots.
Delegations leave with more than inspiration. They take home two or three concrete conceptual directions, an initial roadmap, a view of relevant partners in the ecosystem, a possible pilot, and honest feedback on positioning, feasibility and implementation. In other words, a direction you can actually build on, and a clearer sense of who to build it with.