Yo Reader,

There are only 3 types of food in a supermarket.

Sure, you can disagree with me. But my breakdown is for food marketing, and I’m pretty sure I’m not wrong.

There’s ingredients, functional foods, and everything else.

I first started to think about this when I was looking at examples of great organic video content and trying to apply them to Dr Bugs. There’s a bunch of CPG darlings internationally whose feeds are fresh, imagery is on point, and messaging is fresh. Brands like fishwife, graza, fly by jing. And every time I looked at what I could learn from them, it just didn’t feel like it connected.

Then it hit me - they’re all ingredients.

See with ingredients, the customer is the hero. Our hero is on a journey of cooking up a storm or curating an aesthetic lunch. A great ingredient is making the hero look good. And advertising reflects this. I’m not finding great examples out of my camera roll right now, but a few include “Transform your salads from bland to best” (Best Foods sauces), “let’s eat together” (Tegel).

The meta story in ingredient marketing is something like “as you transform the ingredient, your true self and what you value are revealed” Marketing gets to play on those higher order desires: you as the hero using the product to unlock who you really are.

And functional foods are a pretty similar ball game. Only this time, instead of the product being a canvas for you to transform on your journey to revealing your true self, the product is taking an active role in removing the obstacles to you being your true self. Whether the obstacle is tiredness (caffeine), bloating (pre and probiotic sodas), or hangriness (protein, maybe even Snickers), functional foods are there to help you be the best version of yourself. The meta story is something like “as the food transforms you physiologically, your true self gets the space to shine”

And then, there’s everything else.

Now sure, at the most basic level almost all food is functional. So you’ll see absolute stretches where the vision being cast could apply to anything that has calories. And there’s grey areas. Convenience is a function, so getting calories on the go can work for some products and formats - Snickers’ “you’re not you when you’re hungry” is a perfect example. And counter-positioning can also be functional - “all the flavour with 95% less calories” is a functional benefit, even if the product is a cookie. Both of those examples nicely slot into the meta story of the product removing obstacles for your true self to shine.

So there’s still a large section of the store that is “everything else”

It might sound like I’m shitting on all marketing for non-ingredient or non-functional products. But I think there’s a beauty in leaning into the fact that your product isn’t life changing, the journey your consumer going on is only 8 seconds long, and you just taste delicious. Because that opens the door to figuring out how to build out authentic memory structures in a creative way.

Two examples stand out here.

First, Brent Vrdoljak wrote an excellent piece this week about Snackachangi. Leigh Hart has built a creative empire with Griffins (and previously with McCashins) with the marketing centred around an inside joke: “imagine taking chips this seriously”. The brand is memorable because it’s creative and funny, not because it’s overpromising a trumped up benefit.

Second, Whittakers main message these days seems to just be “hello chocolate lover”. And sure, there’s a bunch going on with the imagery they choose to use, the flavours they drop, and the brand cues of craft, artisanship, and legacy. But fundamentally they’re not waxing eloquent about elevating your Friday night, helping you to experience chocolate nirvana, or promising a moment of indulgence away from the stresses of a modern life.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

What I'm reading

Fenton Hazelwood has been writing some excellent pieces on Substack about the vegetable growing industry in New Zealand. He's super active on LinkedIn and something he's said that's stuck with me is there's a fundamental difference between fruit and vegetable growers. Fruit tends to be disproportionately exported or made into higher value items, whereas vegetable growers are heavily domestic. Fruit seems to be booming with some great returns, while vegetable growers are struggling a lot more. His entire substack is great, a recent article about country of origin on frozen veges is excellent, would recommand subscribing

What I'm watching

I've been loving content from a potato farmer in the US - this video has been doing numbers on IG (with an appropriate number of people telling him that confined spaces are not worth messing with). It's impressive to see the automation in growing, and also love his takes on building alternative routes to market.

That's all from me this week. Have been stuck in a holding pattern the last 2 months recovering from glandular fever but I think it's getting better, so I'm hoping to scale up more unhinged grocery takes very soon.

Reuben