Mike Lee

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist. He maps how food could change across the next 5 to 50 years, and he helps the companies who feed us turn that picture into present-day strategy.

He is the author and designer of Mise: On the Future of Food (pronounced "meez"), a book of four scenarios set between 2033 and 2067 that trace how today's biggest forces could reshape the way we grow, cook, and eat.

Working under the name The Future Market, he has built futures and innovation strategy for Danone, Mars, Campbell's, Givaudan, Compass, the Culinary Institute of America, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Simple Mills, Banza, King Arthur Flour, Beef+Lamb New Zealand, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Earlier in his career he worked on the Innovation & New Ventures team at Chobani, and before that at Amex Labs, American Express's skunkworks for emerging technology during the early days of the smartphone and social media.

He writes The Future Market on Substack (thefuturemarket.com) and hosts The Tomorrow Today Show, a podcast about what we eat next. He speaks worldwide, including Menus of Change, Groceryshop, EvokeAg, Natural Products Expo East and West, and the Fancy Food Shows, and his work has run in The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and The New York Times.

He is the grandson and son of Chinese American restaurant owners in Metro Detroit, which is probably where all of it started. Detroit gave him something else too: the concept car, the auto industry's way of building an object from its own imagined future, which became his model for the work he does with food. He spent eighteen years in New York City, where he founded Studiofeast, a pop-up supper club, then moved home to Metro Detroit, where he lives today, a proud girl dad. He studied business at the University of Michigan and design at Parsons School of Design.