There is a line that greets almost every newcomer to the foodservice industry. Somewhere between the first kitchen walkthrough and the first real client meeting, that question is: “What can you bring to this field?” The expected answers are honest enough. If I were to answer today, my answer would be the same one I would have given two years ago. And that, if you sit with it, is exactly the problem.
My answer is: “I bring better questions.” I am no longer certain that is enough.
Think back to what happened to ghost kitchens. Between 2020-22, the sector attracted more than $3bn in venture capital on a premise that felt airtight: simply strip away the dining room to concentrate on delivery, then let the unit economics do the rest. It was a clean story. Then, when 58% of restaurants in some facilities closed within 12 months, the occupancy models collapsed with them. The issue pointed each time at too much excitement vs. little operational logic. Prioritizing an acceleration mode, before fully understanding the sector.
The question that should have been asked – “Does this math survive contact with reality?” – never came early enough. By the time it did, the leases were signed and the brands were being thrown away along with the food inside them.
In fact, the people who built those ghost kitchens were asking questions constantly “How do we scale faster?” and “Which platforms give us the best margin?” Personally, I see it from an distanced perspective, because the discipline the industry actually needs is not more questions, and not even better questions in the abstract. It is the specific capacity to identify which questions are structurally load-bearing, and which ones are just keeping people occupied while the foundation cracks.
Geopolitical impacts
That distinction has never been harder to maintain, because the ground beneath every project has shifted.
Right now, tariffs paid by mid-size businesses have tripled in a single year. Equipment made in Mexico, beef sourced from Canada, olive oil processed in Europe… ingredients prices are fluctuating under the simultaneous pressure of global trade conditions, transportation costs, climate disruption, and international conflicts, making margin management increasingly difficult in ways that can’t be forecasted.
The specification assumptions underlying most current kitchen designs were built on a world that no longer exists, or the lead-time they quoted the client is probably wrong. Or even, the supplier they specified may be rerouting goods through a third country to avoid duties. The local sourcing strategy that once looked like a cultural statement now looks like the only financially viable option because the alternative became untenable while the project was still in schematic design. A 2026 designer who does not ask “What supply chain assumption is embedded in every line I am about to draw?” is not designing for 2026, they are designing for a stability that has already dissolved.
This is where the Morocco and Africa story stops being a regional footnote and becomes the main argument.
African operators have spent years building smarter, more resilient businesses while navigating currency volatility, supply constraints, and shifting consumer expectations, and as global players search for models that balance growth with meaning, Africa offers a blueprint forged through experience rather than theory. The discipline that wealthier markets are now scrambling to acquire is the discipline that operators from Casablanca to Lagos have been practicing out of necessity for a long time.
And the market is catching up to what they already knew. Moroccan cuisine now offers something increasingly rare in our globalized world. “Genuine authenticity” is a traditional method passed through generations. Communal meals shared from a single dish, cultural exchanges that tourists are actively traveling to experience. The return to physically grounded, high-touch hospitality is not an aesthetic preference circulating on mood boards, but a correction. Guests who spent years receiving food in boxes from kitchens they never saw have developed a fierce hunger for the thing that cannot be optimized away, because it only exists when it has not been optimized at all. Any designer who treats this as a trend has missed what it actually is.
Aligning the human with the artificial
Every time the industry has tried to abstract hospitality away from its human and physical specificity, it has eventually paid for it. And every time a project stayed grounded in where it actually was, who it was actually for, and what it was actually made of, it found something durable. That is the argument for better questions. And it leads, honestly, to one more.
The window for treating AI as a future project has officially closed. In a climate defined by labor scarcity and razor thin margins, AI has matured into a utility grade necessity. And clients are beginning to ask whether that utility extends to the pre-design conversation itself. I don’t believe the answer is yes. But I think the question deserves more honesty than the industry is currently giving it.
AI can optimize brilliantly within a defined frame. What it can’t do (yet) is reframe the frame. It can’t walk into a room where everyone has already decided. It can’t feel the silence around an unasked question and name the assumption that is holding the whole structure up. That is not algorithmic, it is diagnostic in the deepest sense, built not from data but from the accumulation of being wrong in specific ways, and understanding why.
But that judgment now has to be faster, more specific, and more demonstrably valuable than it has ever had to be in an environment where the supply chain, the regulatory reality, the cultural context, and the operational assumptions are all moving at once.
The argument for asking better questions has already been won. The ghost kitchens proved it, and the tariffs are proving it again. What has not been settled is whether the people who carry that discipline are prepared to apply it to themselves (me included), to ask without the comfort of a rehearsed answer, what it means to design in a moment when nothing about the context can be assumed.
Because the ground itself is the question now, and that changes everything about how we begin.
Nada Fati is a student member of FCSI France. Contact her at: nada.fati.work@gmail.com.
