From a culinary culture and business perspective, the cupcake boom of the mid-2000s to early 2010s was undeniably weird. Food trends come and go, but this one was a bit oversized, for lack of a better term. The narrative surrounding this big boom of tiny cakes often gets treated like a harmless curiosity. Nothing more … Read more
In a recent video breakdown of modern grocery economics, an Aldi executive discussed the chain’s business model with the kind of reverent solemnity usually reserved for Silicon Valley disruptors: “It’s about simplicity, and it’s about efficiency, and it’s about a consistent experience all the time.” The narrator quickly chimed in to display the spoils of … Read more
According to business analysts, the world before the late 1990s was desperately waiting for someone to solve the great, agonizing puzzle of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The popular narrative assumes that mass-market adoption was simply the inevitable result of a food-science breakthrough. Once industrial food scientists cracked the code on moisture barriers and … Read more
Every few months, business publications and financial channels run somber video essays analyzing the perpetual crisis of the meal kit industry. They’re great at citing a staggering number, telling us that among major delivery services like HelloFresh, Blue Apron, and Home Chef, roughly 90% of customers cancel their subscriptions within a year. However, financial analysts … Read more
A modern genre of consumer commentary revolves around taking mundane facts and making them the next big outrage moment. A common premise is to treat normal commercial kitchen safeguards as deliberate corporate crimes. In these food exposés, standard casual dining operations are routinely reframed as calculated corporate conspiracies, like the viral claim that Olive Garden … Read more
In the corporate branding industry, a self-serving myth has taken hold over the last few decades. It’s the idea that consumer food brands achieve multi-billion-dollar success through predictive psycho-linguistics. According to this theory, brand strategists and corporate consultants carefully construct names using phonetic sound symbolism, manipulating front vs. back vowels and soft fricatives vs. hard … Read more