• by Teresa Buyikian , August 10, 2023

With all the talk of ungodly high temps around the U.S., unusual natural disasters worldwide and a raging fire on the usually rainy island of Maui, it’s clear that global warming is here to stay. As the food industry races to create less harmful ways of producing, packaging and distributing their products, one company imagines what it might be like to have limited access to the ingredients that come together to create the foods we love -- like pizza.

Animal-free cheese purveyor Nobell Foods in San Francisco, which creates cheese through growing dairy proteins in plants, gathered artists, designers, futurists and food writers to launch the digital report Pizza Futures.

The magazine, which also has a limited print run and accompanying public service campaign, explores the future of pizza through possible climate scenarios. For example, there’s Wasteland Pizza Express (California enters a permanent state of wildfire);  In-home Aeroponic Pizza Gardens (people have to grow everything they need for pizza themselves); and Pizza Museums (self-explanatory).

Marketing Daily spoke with Garett Awad, Nobell’s vice president of marketing, about creating Pizza Futures, which can be viewed and downloaded here.

Interview is slightly edited for clarity and length.

Why did you decide to create an actual magazine?

When a new company launches (unless being built from another brand or known person) their brand is typically meaningless. One of the first important things they can do is take actions that start to bring their belief system to life.  We saw a physical magazine as a great way to do this. One, it gave us a pre-established medium for deeply rich storytelling, and two, given that we are a pre-product company, its physicality could play an important role in creating something the audience could interact with.

Who will receive the magazine?

We want as many people as possible to read Pizza Futures, so we intentionally made it downloadable as well. Copies of the Pizza Futures magazine will be available in four bookshops: Dear Friends Books and Dimes Market in New York City;  Now Serving in Los Angeles; and Stolen Books in Lisbon, Portugal.  We will also be doing giveaways of the print edition via our social media during the month of August.

Who designed/physically created the effort?

We are extremely proud of the collaborative spirit behind Pizza Futures and extend our gratitude to all the brilliant minds that contributed to this project. Our own Douglas Haddow [director of content] was the creative director and editor of the magazine. Other contributors included chef and author David Zilber, graphic designer and educator Eva Gonçalves, art director/designer Fernando Pino, and Elvia Wilk (author of the novel "Oval" and book of essays "Death by Landscape"), and many more.

How does the magazine fit into your overall marketing mix?

Pizza Futures, the physical magazine and pdf, is the tip of the spear for the month. The campaign that accompanies it brings to life different scenarios from the magazine, available on the brand's site, Instagram and additional social executions. Some of these include a fake Sunken Pizzeria Scuba Tour off the coast of Nevada (which currently has no coast).  [Another execution] uses satire to poke fun at modern-day tech ads with a 4D pizza helmet that lets a future state world experience pizza virtually when all the ingredients have all gone but extinct. While most talk about how food impacts the planet, Pizza Futures and the campaign itself really explore how climate change might impact one of the dishes we love the most, pizza.