Target Teams Up with MIT Geniuses to Figure Out “Future of Food”

Target isn’t any more sure what the future of food is than we are. But they’ve got at least as much of a dog in the fight: a whopping 20 percent, around $15 billion, of its sales last year came from the grocery section. And Target has lagged behind competitors (which, when you’re talking this kind of volume, are entities like Walmart and Whole Foods) in offering some of the trendier, more forward-looking options, whether that’s sustainable seafood, organic produce, or locally produced goods.

But Target is trying to change that; aside from partnering with our buds the Beekman Boys on a line of small-farmer-produced (mostly) items like sauces and spice mixes, the company announced last week that they’ll be partnering with two high-tech luminaries to fund research into the future of food. Those luminaries are IDEO, a design firm perhaps best known for creating Apple’s first mouse, and MIT’s Media Lab, a legendary collection of researchers who work on everything from large-scale multimedia art to affordable laptops for developing nations.

The new collaboration amongst the three groups is wide-ranging and, to be honest, extremely vague. According to a press release, Target will be releasing its reams of data about customer behavior to figure out what people are interested in, identifying trends and such. They’ll also be creating the “Food + Future coLAB,” a multidisciplinary research lab dedicated to “solving some of the toughest challenges related to food.”

There’s been, as might be obvious by now, basically no concrete examples given as to what exactly this partnership is attempting to do. But a representative from Target told BetaBoston that they’d be looking into urban farming, an intriguing idea given how many enormous, climate-controlled warehouses Target owns. Those could be a very useful tool for working on various high-tech urban farming ideas: aeroponics, vertical farming, closed-loop systems, that kind of thing. And with the intellectual muscle of the MIT Media Lab on hand, Target could – or at least wants us to think they could – truly figure out some amazing possibilities. We’ll be watching.