UFS accounts for over 20% of Unilever’s Foods business and the Future Menus initiative has contributed to turnover reaching nearly €3 billion
The Unilever Food Solutions annual Future Menus initiative helps chefs take the latest food trends from concept to creation. This year it taps into South American and Asian cuisines to drive growth for professional kitchens around the world.
The growing global appetite for culinary mash-ups like Korean tacos and Laksa chicken offers a taste of how Asian and South American flavours are taking the lead on global menus.
“Thanks to our in-house expertise and close contact with food operators all over the world, we saw this wave coming,” says Star Chen, CEO of Unilever Food Solutions (UFS).
As our chefs-for-chefs business, UFS supports professional kitchens around the world with trusted brands, quality solutions and, once a year, a Future Menus Trends book that offers a privileged insight into the world’s culinary state of play.
Thanks to input from 250 in-house UFS chefs and more than 1,100 food service professionals, the Future Menus initiative not only keeps chefs up to date on the latest industry trends but also helps them turn these into growth opportunities.
By boosting product visibility and strengthening customer loyalty, this initiative is also driving growth for UFS.
Future Menus is a key ingredient in UFS’s success story that has seen turnover reach nearly €3 billion, volumes surpass pre-pandemic levels and growth hit high-single digits led by volume with positive price in 2024. The result is that today UFS accounts for over 20 per cent of Unilever’s Foods business.
Since its launch in 2023, Future Menus has also contributed to a 12 per cent increase in new customers, generating 81,000 new leads in 2024 alone.
Consistently high customer satisfaction is undoubtedly behind this success, as reflected in its remarkable Net Promoter Score (NPS) which showed that 70 per cent of customers would recommend the business to others.
