Paris: Imagine gold-studded chocolate bars, powdery sequins swirling in mineral water or asparagus tips trapped in a ball of jelly for a quick snack at the office.

This is virtual food, fruit of the imagination.

After designer clothes and designer decor, France's first designer food consultancy is up and running and made its international debut at the SIAL global food fair that took place in Paris this week.

Paris is the world capital for style and design consultants, who provide the fashion and luxury industries with forecasts on upcoming trends. Enivrance, which describes itself as "a food and drink bureau de style", is a subsidiary of Carlin, one of the biggest such style forecasters, and is probably the world's first consultant in designer food.

"The food industry needs new shapes, new textures, new styles," said Edouard Malbois, who heads Enivrance. "Our job is Imaginary Foods, a new discipline situated between the real world and the world of fantasy."

"Just like the fashion industry, we aim to put out one collection a year."

Malbois said top brass from top companies such as Nestle, Lenotre, Fauchon, Harrods and Unilever had visited the Enivrance stand at last week's food fair. "Our first outing was a success, people were extremely interested," he said.

Thumbing through his fashion book, Malbois said that the space-aged mouth-watering designs were "not recipes" but dummy reproductions of "visionary food and drink concepts".

Drawing inspiration from basic urban shapes, the circle, rectangle and straight line, the company proposes "food blocks" of assorted vegetables or fruits that come in seasonal colours (dark winter greens, spring like yellow corn and pale green veg, bright oranges and yellow fruit in summer) and can be carried and crunched anywhere.

There are also blocks like tablets of chocolate, bricks of food divided like trays of ice-blocks and layers of different foods piled up in cubes.

Vegetables too can be trapped inside a ball you can bite or melt down into soup, and spices sold as tiny beads.

Instead of messy cocktail savoury pies and cakes, Enivrance suggests the industry create forests of edible food-sticks coated in sesame seeds and tapioca, fruit cigars of exotic fruit rolled in mint-leaves and glitter-chocolate studded with gold nuggets or sprayed with shiny dust.

Mineral water too could be turned into glitter water and thick coloured dairy products served up in jars like cold cream or cosmetics.

Spices, Enivrance suggested, would be ideal crushed into paper-thin leaves and sold as books with each page torn individually.

While some of the design suggestions are for carry-around "nomadic" foods, others cater for the "cocooning" or stay-safely-at-home trend, which is at the other end of the lifestyle spectrum.

In this world, "food would not be solely in the kitchen, there would be special foods for the bathroom, bedroom and living-room", Malbois said.

The living-room would be ideal for fruity cigars, gold-studded chocolate and sugar diamonds. Midnight snacks in tiny capsules, solid pills of herbal teas, and other bedtime goodies to brighten up the night could sit by the pillow, while substances such as blue boy- or pink girl- chocolate and sweet finger-foods would be destined to accompany the bath.

"We are not asking consumers what they want," said Malbois, who worked for Coca-Cola in Africa and Tag Heuer LVMH in South-East Asia. "We are creating a collection for the consumer."