As 2016 comes to a close, Playback has its sights set on the year ahead. To help make predictions for the biggest trends in unscripted, Playback spoke with experts to hear their thoughts on what will be hot in 2017 – and what will fall out of fashion. Here, Jim Berger, CEO of High Noon Entertainment (the company behind factual series such as Cake Boss) and Amos Neumann, COO of Armoza Formats (Still Standing); and Harry Gamsu, VP format acquisitions and sales, Red Arrow International (Married at First Sight) make predictions for what will be big in food.

The food genre has long been dominated by the big brands – Master Chef, Top Chef, The Great British Bake Off.

Jim Berger

And while High Noon’s Berger says networks will always be on the lookout for that next great cooking competition, producers need to think outside of the box – or outside of the studio, rather.

“I think the bigger broadcast networks will look for shiny-floor shows, but I think the premium cable networks like Food Network will probably also be looking to see, ‘Can we find a competition show that’s authentic and location-based? A competition show that doesn’t necessarily [take place] in a studio?”” he said. “I think that’s a big one.”

Also big: finding a whiz in the kitchen who doesn’t necessarily work in one.

“I think you’re going to see a focus on discovering new culinary talent who are not necessarily five-star chefs,” he said. “[They’re] regular people: the grandma, or a mom who has written a cookbook in a small area of Canada or the U.S. that you’ve never heard of, and she’s awesome on television and she’s got generational recipes.”

Harry Gamsu

Talent, of course, will always play a major role in culinary series, but Red Arrow’s Gamsu says, unlike in the home space, producers should be wary of trying to sell a format that’s based around a big name.

“It’s just important with a format that you’re not solely dependent on one key talent, which can make great TV, like [Gordon Ramsay-hosted] Kitchen Nightmares, but can also be a restraint when it comes to selling that format as a local version.”

Armoza’s Neumann says his company is increasingly looking away from the stars in the kitchen who make the food and turning toward those in the dining room who eat it.

Amos Neumann

Last year, Armoza presented a format called The Foodies which watches five tables of food lovers as they eat and talk about their meals. “It’s like being a fly on the wall of the restaurant and watching what people talk about when they eat, which is always a curiosity,” he said.

Neumann says what’s happening in the food space is similar to what’s happening with talent shows. The show itself is beginning to revolve more around the life stories of the contestants and talent than the actual performance or act of creating/eating a meal.

“This is something that will be interesting to see how it evolves. In the next two or three stages it will become just a documentary show about people and that will be redundant. We don’t want that.”

Ultimately, to keep the food space fresh, Neumann says we’ll increasingly see a hybrid of genres that include food in them. “Game shows with food, documentary with food, or reality shows with food,” he said. Producers and broadcasters have explored the food genre “to death” said Neumann, and audiences are tiring of the traditional formats. “I think if we want to take the food area further we need to take a creative way to combine food into genres where the food does not exist yet.”

We ran down the hot trends in unscripted. Check all of them out here.