Hello Reader,

This week we ran factory tours at Dr Bugs Popcorn.

3 days of chaos, questions, and way too much popcorn being tasted. And I'm figuring out how quickly we can do it again (if you're in Christchurch - head to https://drbugs.co.nz/products/factory-tour-ticket-1 and jump on the waitlist if you're keen to come along)

One of the best parts of running tours is seeing the factory through fresh eyes as you see kids' eyes light up at different parts of the tour. Like, huh, making popcorn is kinda cool, eh. The bagger (vertical form fill and seal machine) is always a highlight - kids sit there mesmerised as popcorn drops, is weighed, and the machine keeps stamping out bags. One kid asked how it knows where to cut the bag in the right spot every time, and I got to show him the eye mark on the back of the pack. He'll probably spot that on 5 other products on the supermarket this week, and now his mental model of how food is made is permanently updated.

And honestly, that's the whole point.

See it's pretty easy to see all the finished products in the world and assume that there's a fundamental disconnect between the products we're able to make ourselves, and the products we buy. Like, they're made in rarefied air, by people with unachievable skills, on impossible to understand machines.

But that's really not the case.

Every step in food production has just been figured out by people solving one small problem at a time - like eye marks for film indexing in a VFFS machine. Most of what you buy in a supermarket could probably be made at home with a bit of ingenuity. Sure, there's a huge amount of technology in scaling up, consistency, packaging, shelf life, etc. But it's possible to start small.

And that's what excites me about factory tours. Because my biggest food belief is that the food industry has spreadsheeted itself into a local optimum, and we need to make food weird again. More stores like Big Fresh. Diverse price points. Products that potentially fail, but take big swings. Niche offers.

To do that, a bunch of people have to take risks on launching new things they're passionate about. And it can't come from incumbents, because delivering more value to consumers often takes disruptive innovation, which incumbents aren't incentivised to do. So we need non-industry-professionals to take swings.

And for that, imagination matters more than anything else. Because if you've seen factories and have a mental model of how food is made, then tinkering with recipes in your kitchen might not feel too distant from actually making a product. Once you've figured out a product, solving the next step of food control plan might not be so insurmountable. Once you've done that, figuring out how you're going to sell it is solvable.

But it starts with the mental model, which starts with seeing stuff being made. So lets open up more factories to tours.

What I'm watching

Enjoyed the first episode of Shamubeel Eaqub's new series on some of the smaller towns in NZ that have had their fortunes turn around. It takes a look at Balclutha and some of the work that's been going on with housing and jobs, while mentioning the massive changes in farming economics back in the 80s

Quick ask - I'm hoping to get around a few more factory tours in the next few months. Any that you'd recommend?

Reuben