Supermarket Evolution: Grocery History, Industry Insights & 2024 Food Trend Forecasts

[00:00:01][Music] this is M Street radio from PRX and I'm your host Christopher Kimble today it's our episode about grocery stores how they work behind the scenes what sells and what doesn't plus the rise of the superstore in 1956 when the first American style Supermarket opens overseas in Rome people were shrieking with the light a woman started running up and down the aisle screaming This Must Be Heaven we also find out what new products we'll be seeing in the upcoming year I actually did this whole Deep dive on the rise of like spiritual Beverages and snacks so like you know instead of a shaman you have aroan stories from the supermarket first up we're visiting the freezer [Music] aisle so the question is how did TV dinners change the world I'm joined Now by Jeff swiston he's author of TV dinners unboxed the hot history of frozen meals Jeff welcome to Milk Street wow what a pleasure I'm really happy to be here thanks for having me there were a number of things going on sort of mid 20th century that led up to this invention of and Surge and TV dinners what what were some of the things going on in in the culture at the time yeah you know macro level you had the baby you had Prosperity uh all those things we sort of note about the 50s I I really like discovering through the the research that you know we sort of have romanticized and idealized the the 1950s as sort of Happy Days and all that stuff but you know what uh people were stressed uh there was the Cold War uh there was the keeping up with the Joneses and what really the TV dinner Hit Upon was people not only were stressed they were time pressed and the TV dinner promised right out of the the gate and continues to be speed ease and convenience and so that's what uh you know largely Americans but other chunks of the world glommed on to here was this thing that could be ready in 30 minutes three different chunks of food a meat a couple of vegetables and people were astounded by the science of it that that three different things could heat up to the same temperature uh have the same consistency and uh no fuss no mus with Swanson TV turkey dinners you just heat and serve and you serve big and Hearty slices of moist tender swans and turkey with grand giblet gravy and special cornbread dressing and fluffy whipped sweet potatoes with golden swansen butter M mother Murphy lucky me my wife uses swansson TV turkey dinners yeah and there's a direct line back to the late 19th century when there was a movement to get women out of the kitchen by having sort of uh Community Kitchens that would produce food and women I I guess in your research found that they were spending four hours per day cooking food and cleaning up so that that was a consistent problem for a very long time which this would evidently solve Al also you also mentioned this is fascinating food was three times more expensive than it is today and so cost was also a factor right it it definitely was but I I was astounded by that too Chris that um roughly when Swanson sort of hit and they were of course the you know the big one the coke of the industry so to speak and then you had banquet that was the P Pepsi of the industry but you know 98 cents was roughly the the pricing around the mid-50s uh when Swanson was really at its height selling about you know within two years of production selling 25 million of these things a year and if you actually did the inflation check on that which I did it would put these dinners at around $11 equivalent in you know 1954 55 but if you go and buy a Swanson TV dinner today it's about a third of that or half that so it was really really more expensive and uh so people were willing to pay for um the convenience of it in 1942 you report on a serum's ad that was uh futuristic talking about what was coming down the road Deluxe service for tomorrow's homes cook to order meals brought right to the door piping hot on time ordered a day ahead for weekly menus etc etc so although the TV dinner is slightly different than this that idea of having meals piping hot easily prepared and you could choose yeah I I think Choice also was a big thing here right you could choose among lots of different things that that was actually predicted right during the second world war you know I love that campaign I I used to work on Madison Avenue Vue for a big agency and I I came across that campaign so Seagrams did this it was you know to sell their uh their liquor but it was predicting the future from 1942 and my God were they accurate you know they they got the cell phone they got plant-based products that would substitute meat they they hit all on that yeah and they hit on this one but Chrissy Menon choice and TV dinners did that TV dinners introduced much of America to Asian food specifically you know Swanson's take on Chinese food um but we saw that through the the 60s too the Mexican dishes they had to temper the uh the hotness of traditional Mexican food uh so it you know conformed or or was uh fine with American pallets at the time but really TV dinners were the ones that introduced International Cuisine to the majority of the country well yeah some version of international cuisine but I take your point no no I'm I'm being generous in my description generous they take you away from the everyday World makal Swanson so lots of other companies started doing this how did Swanson's just beat the competition because they got out there first in in mass production is that what happened I I think um it was a couple of things one Swanson had been kind of a creery uh or meat supplier they already had like kind of the distribution contracts and I I believe they had it initially like you could make all the jokes you want about TV dinners overall and I'm pretty sure I've heard them all but back then when you look at what they were producing it wasn't this sort of really mass-produced stuff it almost looked like an artisan meal you know the meat looked like it had been handcarved um so there was quality to it as well but really they could get out because they had distribution and for the first year they sold something like you know 5,000 or 30,000 units and and they were encouraged the next year they sold 10 million the year following 25 million and literally uh you know this is a company that was doing about 70 million in sales back then which was you know very respectable uh across all of their different businesses but Campbell saw them and bought them in 1955 in an all-stock deal they just went the TV dinner is the future and you know Campbell's owned them for decades so if someone hired you today to sell the concept of an updated TV dinner however you want to package that how would you go about selling it so if you handed me the brief today and said you know we've got a new product we really want to break out we want to hit the same sort of numbers that that Swanson had at the beginning you got to hit on a few things I think this is a fist this is five fingers coming together and I'm I'm kind of doing this off the top of my head but it it's got to be you got to speak to the the healthy ingredients you got to speak to the Exotic nature that you couldn't prepare this at home by yourself kind of like the meal kit positioning uh you're not going to have dishes you're going to have it in a short period of time and it's going to taste good that would be you know the marketing fist on that product that's the way I would approach it and you'd have to package it in a way that feels upscale and exciting Etc yeah I you know really it it's funny ConAgra um the ConAgra CEO said you you cannot diminish the naming of a product the importance of it and the packaging of it and the um brand lenu that came out in the 80s I love Lem menu um my mom went back to work in the 80s I was just finishing high school she was a fantastic cook and all of a sudden she was gone right she was back in the workforce and our freezer was full of lenus and uh you know to feed my brother and I the two left at home uh but lenu at the time was selling for like 12 bucks and and I think you were paying about five out of the 12 bucks for the plate it was like a Corell plate that you would buy almost like for picnics it was of that quality but reusable theelite the music the flowers lenu oh lenu the breast of chicken parmigiana succulant and tender with zesty tomato sauce and they had sirloin tip one was one of the the Entre they were absolutely fantastic but it also highlighted you know a great lament with TV dinner afficionados around the time the microwave came in people really thought that they went downhill with the microwave and for obvious reasons that things didn't heat to the same consistency people wanted to put their aluminum one in the oven for the 30 minutes cuz it really came out better it was better tasting better consistency uh versus the zapping that we all did well there's another answer for that which is that it's 30 minutes some cocktail hours that's right that's exactly put in the oven you got 30 minutes for your cocktail maybe that helps organize your evening Jeff it's been a real pleasure thank you thank you it was a great fun for me too [Music] cheers that was Jeff swiston his book is TV dinners unboxed now it's time to answer your cooking questions with my co-host Sarah Molton Sarah is of course the star of Sarah's week night meals on public television also author of home cooking one one so Sarah so when you go to the supermarket uh have you come across anything that you know just blew you away there was just really a fabulous new product yes fire roasted corn it's fantastic is this Frozen yes really so I'm a big fan of frozen vegetables anyway or some some let's put it that way but this fire roasted corn is really good highly recommend why are you Whispering because I'm so excited okay uh the other thing that I've discovered that I like and you know Greek friends or cookbook authors and chefs have embraced it or mostly homecooks frozen spinach not the chopped up kind I've also found the whole Leaf frozen and you know you have to squeeze out the liquid which I do in my rer hold on hold on you had me with a fire roasted corn you don't have me with frozen spinach why isn't fresh spinach better than Frozen cuz the frozen's already been shrink wrapped I mean you know you know how you take a huge bag of spinach and you cook it down and but when you buy itzen it's essentially already theyed it by freezing it it's reduced you know also again it's at the height of its freshness it's a beautiful color you barely have to cook it I mean not that you would have anyway and it's great in recipes like spanic Copo or you know some sort of pie or I throw it into soups so it's a nice ingredient to have in the freezer yeah so those are two of my new favorites well you got me with at least one of them okay I can't imagine which one can imagine let's take a call Welcome to Milk Street who's calling David Shay hi David where are you calling from I'm calling from hudleston Virginia how can we help you today well this is a return call oh I called earlier and asked for some advice on baking a carrot cake okay and after our call I concluded the recipe was fine and although I did buy a new double oven that wasn't the problem it was user err plain and simple all right well can you just you know refresh our memory about what was the problem with this carrot cake and what we advised oh sure the problem was it really came out stpy although the edges looked like they were almost oh yeah I remember this call yeah the center was a mess yeah yeah and so I think I was Rel lying more on the nness of the outer edges than the middle so I just did the tried andrue test I ignored the outer edges and I stuck a fork in the middle you followed the instructions no don't ever follow the directions no but here here's the thing Dave I tell people the first time you make a recipe follow it exactly you know even if it's counterintuitive to what you know Chris is going to disagree with me on this one but sometimes and this came from years of testing recipes of Home Cooks at Gourmet magazine sometimes those people know something you don't just because they've done a trial and error sure you need to start by following the recipe exactly and then you can depart from the text and sometimes the person who wrote The Recipe is a complete idiot ID of course and if you follow the recipe I did a soccer tour I won't say who wrote the recipe and she had you melting chocolate and then adding a bunch of water to it and so I was going like this does not look good cuz you had water to chocolate seases and I had $30 worth of chocolate in that pot and I added the water and it seized but you know yes I agree in general but you also have to use common sense so what happened then Davis you just cooked it longer so I did you know and they also give you sometimes it's like a 10minute range of how long you cook it but again I was really relying primarily on the fork in the middle and you know when it's get near the end of the range keep an eye on it and I will tell you since then I have made three carrots and one red velvet cake and they were pretty dang good well yay what Happ wait a minute what happened to red velvet cakes red velvet cakes is one of my favorite cakes of all time it's like nobody it's in the mid of culinary history maybe it's the red food dye well well you know truthfully when I made mine I didn't quite put enough in it I mean it was good but it wasn't that deeper red color in my wife I wouldn't have made it but it's one of her favorite cakes too well you can make it there's something called coach chanella it's an insect that it's been used for red coloring so you can get a natural version of that oh that's cool now let me ask one other question did you end up changing the oven temperature so it's a little lower or you just went with a recipe uh you know I went with the recipe they all say 350 yeah that sounds right you know I went back and I looked at a few recipes real quick and like it's not the recipe I have a standard cake recipe oh one quick thing you talked about seizing chocolate a few years ago on a Food Network show was a woman in the last round making dessert and she was from England and she was making melting chocolate and it seized up now I don't know how much but she said I know the solution and she poured honey in it really interesting and it worked and she actually won oh wow well that's a happy story but your story is a Happ happy story too there Dave I just got to say though give you credit you're one of the few people have called in and said it was user error blame yeah blame your spouse blame your kids blame the ree blame the talk show host but you actually took credit good for you yeah we applaud you for all of that very refreshing okay well thank you well thank you yeah and I thank you for your help okay and good luck with the red velvet too yes all right take care yes sir by okay take care bye welcome to Milk Street who's calling Steve from ker Point Maine how can we help you yeah so like a lot of people during the pandemic I took on a new hobby and I started making my own yogurt I had an insta pot so it's super easy I found a culture a yogurt culture I like my wife found milk from a local Farm here right and so we started making it and it was super easy consistent and I'd strain it to make it a little thicker a couple times I couldn't get access to this local milk and so I'd go to a grocery store store and just buy a name brand and it just didn't work it would be like kind of milk likee consistency so it's pretty thin but it never set fully and so I just started wondering what's the difference and the only thing I could point to was this local milk was pasteurized and the store brand was highly or ultra pasteurized and so I was wondering if that was the issue well they should take all the ultra pasteurized milk and throw it out I mean it's just awful years ago milk killed people right cuz it can go bad there's a reason for it and it's a health reason and it'll keep a long time besides the flavor problem I have heard that ultra pasteurized milk in particular is problematic you know it's all about the proteins in the milk getting denatured it's sort of like you know a tangle or a nest of dried pasta right and then you cook it and it all untangles and then it can reconnect right the casings denat they relax and they reconnect to form a structure which makes something thick like a custard or yogurt also we're using whole milk I would assume when you bought it at the supermarket yeah yeah my guess is the fat content of the milk you buying from the farm probably is even better but it's something about heat and casine and protein and something's going on there so it's hard for it to come back together to create that essentially gel Sarah yeah I agree I mean Ultra pasturized milk is heated to a really high temperature for only a couple of seconds but it's like 28 280 and so that really changes its nature also gives it sort of a cooked cheese taste I've had problems also with ultra pasteurized cream and trying to whip it and having it go to butter before it ever becomes cream so I think we agree with you that you've isolated the culprit it's the ultra pasteurized milk so you got to just avoid that you know I grew up on raw milk it has a taste and if you buy even pasteurized milk there's not much flavor in it either and my guess is I wouldn't make yogurt unless I could get really good milk right what's the point yeah I agree so I'm with you yeah I guess I'm lucky that I got this pasteurized milk if I would have failed the experiment the first few times I probably would have given up and not made yogurt right I mean real yogurt is phenomenal thanks Steve Take Care thank you for taking the call love your show take care okay bye-bye this is M Street radio if you're having trouble in the kitchen Sarah and I are here to help please ring us anytime 855 426 9843 that's 855 426 9843 or just email us at questions milil radio.com welcome to Milk Street who's calling hi this is terrie from Virginia how are you good how about you all pretty good how can we help you I had a question about aprons and how long with heavy use they should typically last I'm uh I am here I'm car's husband Daniel and I am the primary cook in the family and I am the one who is pretty quickly destroying every apron that we get so we're trying to settle just how long these aprons should be lasting I think I've gone through about four in the past five years so we're just kind of trying to settle a debate about if that's unreasonable or not well I mean the first question is what kind of apron are you buying if they're made out of flower sacks I guess they wouldn't last but I mean they're two kinds that will last essentially forever like a wax cotton right the kinds of things you buy with like a British hunting jacket or something I have one like that and I don't think you could destroy that no matter what you cook like and the other is a leather there's a place that makes leather aprons that's not going to fall apart if not then just get a really really super heavy almost canvas style fabric let me just ask when you cook what are you doing to destroy these aprons work from home and love to cook and I'll say that I am in this these aprons you know several maybe two hours a day on average I've had a variety of aprons I've had a few durable uh Chef's Works ones I think I had one of the milk Street kaf ones which was my favorite but you know all them sort of uh eventually got holes in the front of them I mean I don't know how how often are you washing them Carrie probably not as often as I should but I think maybe every couple weeks they just go through on their own or with Rags you know I'm not bleaching or anything you could look at it differently you know the other point of view is you're basically saying an apron lasts a year right you've gone through four aprons in a few years something like that yes that's not so bad if you're expecting it to last five years maybe it's your expectations that are the issue here it's not the apron yeah no let let me ask a question your husband does all the cooking or most of the cooking most of the cooking but with a capital m and he does the dishes too I acknowledge I'm very spoiled buy him an apron every birthday well and I'll say this Carri is about to have our fourth child so she puts in more than enough work around I'm happy to keep going through these aprons too yeah you got off easy you did actually now I'm Switching gears here yeah it's more uh a debate we were having about how often with the typical use one does go through them I was wondering if the aprons that you all use in your recipe development that are getting used all day every day or as those got they get trashed we end up with dozens and dozens of them for two hours a day to use one apron for a whole year is great perfectly fine perfectly fine all right guys okay enjoy thanks for calling thank you very much you take care bye you're listening to Milk Street radio coming up the story of the world's first supermarket and much more that's in just a [Music] moment this is most radio I'm your host Christopher Kimble my next guest is Benjamin lore he's the author of The Secret Life of groceries the dark Miracle of the American Supermarket Benjamin welcome to Mill Street hey thanks so much for having me excited to be here um grocery store super markets you have some terrible things to say about them you have some really interesting things to say about them so let's go back early on to the early 19th century you make the case the cardboard and corrugated cardboard in particular had a lot to do with the growth or the invention of the supermarket yeah uh I mean the revolution in packaged Goods that happens in the mid 19th century really changes everything and and you don't really think of cardboard boxes being the stuff of revolutions but this is like we're talking invention of the wheel type stuff for the gateway to modern society here suddenly you have a way of making small individuated products and prior to that grocery stores existed in bulk it was all giant barrels of dried fruit that the grocer would ch out from behind his counter uh and then Along Comes the individual container and it really shifts how consumers interact with goods and and this is not just cardboard there's Innovations in Canning in glass and when you have individual products they need a name on them they need some type of identity and that really gives birth to the brand and gives birth to the idea of a consumer who goes in looking for a particular item you're not looking for crackers you're looking looking for UTS you're looking for Nabisco and you point out this is amazing in 1900 Nabisco is selling more than 100 million boxes of Unita biscuits a year yeah and Unita biscuit comes from this possibly apocryphal story where Robert gar from Brooklyn invents the first automated cardboard box uh distribution center and Nabisco comes to him with these biscuit products and he goes you need a name for these biscuits and they don't think that this is an important thing so they just slap the name yita onto the box and it goes on to be what you just said this humongous Blockbuster product so because people could suddenly ask for something by name instead of just getting biscuits it's interesting though if if you look at studies time and time again they tell us that we think we want choice but some of the happiest people in the world are the people with the least amount of choice oh 100% like if you came from Russia you know mid-century or even back back in the 80s or 90s and you show up at a supermarket you know like Chris Chef did at one time and the 30,000 or 40,000 SKS would be confusing oh 100% look I think you hit the nail in the head with the disorientation that this world produces when people walked in the first generally recognized like first Supermarket this is 1930 in Queens a gentleman named Michael Cullen opens this thing up it's only 6,000 square feet it's tiny like right now you have 100,000 square foot super stores but so this 6,000 foot when people first walked in they complained about being dizzy from the options Housewives would turn to their husbands and say I'm going to faint these are like from press reports um there was a sense of overwhelm in 1956 when the first American style Supermarket opens overseas in Rome this is again straight from press reports people were shrieking with the light a woman started running and down the screaming This Must Be Heaven and you know the pope a few days later makes an announcement from the holy sea on this like miraculous thing so disorientation and overwhelm are exactly one what the store Constructors were going for but two what was created so you present two sides of the supermarket I I guess the argument here is on one hand the supermarket American Supermarket is an amazing concept with anywhere from 10,000 to 50 or 60,000 SKS uh you get relatively fresh food you're not probably getting poison too often it's an amazing thing on the other hand there is a real dark side so let's start with the dark side well the dark side of this Supermarket is that it really reveals a lot of our what I would call her preferences right people are constantly choosing based on price they're making Cho choices on convenience and quality high quality they want high quality low price and extremely convenient and if you notice those three things don't quite mesh they don't go together you don't get all three at once sorry uh and when you start demanding all three at once it Cascades through the system and it gets taken out in ways that I think we all don't like to look at or think about but it gets taken out of the environment and it gets taken out of Labor well you talk about this individual in the Thai shrimp industry ton Linn right he's in the quote is he's led to a room with 25 others the door is opened he's locked in it is only now looking around at the 25 other men in the room the tunlin realizes something is wrong and that something was pretty horrific right yeah yeah tunlin is a trafficked migrant who essentially gets sold onto a boat he becomes I mean there's really no other word in the English language to use but slave labor he is beaten to work he's not paid he watches men around him who his friends get killed and and kicked off the boat he's he's imprisoned um it's not an exchange like a indentured servitude where if he works long enough he'll get off he's just kind of captured and forced to work uh and and it's it's pretty hard to reconcile this stuff is happening and and that it's connected to the supply chain and I think what's really interesting is it's connected to the supply chain in a way that nobody wants but nobody can get rid of and and that's kind of a profound point so let me ask this question we all know the retail Supermarket business is a very low margin business 1 to 2% yes so this is a cycle where you have to buy cheap in order to maintain even a a tiny little margin to make a profit that seems to be the cycle here right so how how does that get solved it's really hard or it doesn't get it doesn't get solved and I mean look first of all there are people working within the food industry who are desperately trying to solve this problem and I don't mean to undercut them but I have low confidence in most of their ability to do this at scale the book is intentionally written without the like last chapter that every non-fiction book has where it's like oh and here's the solutions for a better world because I was like I'm not comfortable putting that in there I don't want to be another voice saying oh by the way if you just do this one thing we can figure out how to solve everything but I think what's been under discussed is right now the way quality and food standards are enforced in this country has largely been privatized into an audit system that is a joke and nobody will really stand up and give a a Full Throttle defense of the audit system so we need systems in place I think the government is probably the place that would do that um there are ways of like raising worker Voice through unions and collectives that I think have some real power that don't involve the government for people who steer away from that but you know we we need to put some enforcement teeth into the food system right now you can abuse people in food and like the only people who will show up are Auditors but if you're using trafficked um labor you don't need an auditor up you need a policeman to show up and you need somebody who can enforce that with the law and I guess that's missing in this picture like a a regulatory structure that enforces some standards that we all believe in okay so so let's chat about Trader Joe's uh your story about Trader Joe's I just love the story because you know the little guy wins so um Trader Joe's I'm quoting you has the single highest sales per square foot of any retail grocery chain basically doubling its nearest competitor Whole Foods it does that business while absolutely dominating rankings for customer satisfaction and employee well-being so there are chains that really seem to be doing many things right so could you just quickly tell the story of Trader Joe's sure and I should caveat like I think Trader Joe's does some amazing things right I don't think that any of the problems we discussed in terms of like the overseas supply chain they do better than anyone else um they're absolutely caught in that same Dynamic what Trader Joe's does right um well they I think Joe Kum who founded Trader Joe's back in the mid-60s it really approached groceries completely different from the dominant model and he does that around quality he does that around understanding food and he does that more than anything by understanding the people who are going to buy Trader Joe's so whether you love Trader Joe's or hate Trader Joe's there is like a Trader Joe's person like think everyone can can kind of like picture who the Trader Joe's person is and Joe Kum who founded Trader Joe's pictured that person obsessively he went around and did demographic surveys of Southern California and he took all of that and he founded his store based around some observations that he was making at the time the biggest one of which was was that the GI Bill had just passed America was just exiting Korea and entering Vietnam and he saw that a whole new generation of soldiers were going to be coming home from Vietnam and getting a college education and that college educated people were going to want new things and they were going to become this overeducated underpaid class of people well he he also but the other thing he you write about which I thought was the most interesting is the correlation between education and alcohol consumption yes is about as perfect as one can find in marketing and so from booze and travel it was just a small leap to Tiki so the first store you know had ship spells ores netting half a rowboat employees wore Polynesian shirts and Bermuda shorts the manager was called Captain the assistant manager first mate Etc so he he really went down the rabbit it wasn't just they're going to be educated want do things he turned that into an actual experience right yes 100% And he got himself educated on alcohol in a way that transformed so Trader Joe's in California was founded around alcohol and Joe learns about it obsessively he starts going to every ventner and getting bottles and then uncorking them around headquarters and they would do tastings and and it's it's a depth of of food knowledge that if you're a traditional grocer you never develop because you're treating food like a product and you're competing for it on price and what Joe started doing was saying you know what I'm not going to compete on price I don't even want to shove the same items that my competitors are shelving I want to shelf items that are distinct and therefore people can't make a price judgment because they can't straight up compare it and he does this first and foremost with wine learning a lot about wine but he goes right down the line and you see it like a shift from olive oil where he can't really compete to avocado oil or peanut butter where it's absolutely impossible to compete with like GIF and Skippy Trader Joe's is the first place to start making almond butter on mass um and it really invents almond butter as a consumer item because they just couldn't compete on price with peanut butter but they knew that this kind of overeducated Under Paid consumer would be tantalized by the idea of a slightly adjacent product like almond butter so here's a guy who comes along and does the impossible right he's going to get outrun by 7-Eleven and he just comes up with an idea well hey maybe we should give people something more interesting and something what they want and we'll charge more money because we're not competing on price and we get to pay our employees and have a decent wage Etc so there is hope there right I mean that sort of makes sense in Costco I just read they have a tiny percentage of the SKS that Walmart has for example but they sell 15 times more of every product uh so they have unique SKS things that maybe are harder to find and again a very high wage per employee yeah so those are two very successful examples yeah they really inent reinvent the the groc I mean I could have written a book on on their or chapter on them as well the whole club membership scheme where you you're not playing the game of price competition because the the person you're serving is the people who are in your Club you're in the Costco club and the most important thing is to get the Costco club members to renew their membership and so then 85% of their profits come from the membership exactly and so if the club membership is like yeah we want to shop in a place where people make a decent wage and we don't want to have a scandal attached to this club where there's um you know shrimp tainted by slave labor like Costco has a different incentive structure for enforcing higher qualities of standards ethics again I don't think I don't know enough about Costco frankly to to speak with authority on them I don't think that they're somehow um have escaped from all the ills of of global grocery but the the club model is is fascinating and well worth exploring well on that note on that slightly hopeful note the well worth exploring uh little piece of optimism I don't know if that well I mean you know 100 years ago or back in the 50s and 60s everyone was predicting people millions of people would be starving by the year 2000 right and modern Agriculture and distribution supermarkets essentially solve the problem yeah and also I think look every time you walk into a supermarket you are walking into a miracle you're walking into something that would stagger the greatest Kings Emperors right through history had nothing like this and it's something that's right 10 minutes from your house you walk in and you're struck by incredible abundance and I think there's something to be grateful for there even if there is an incredible Dark Side um I don't think it's responsible to overlook the miracle that it that that does exist Benjamin it's been an up and down discussion I think we ended with an up thank you so much thank you so much for having me it's been a real pleasure that was Benjamin lore author of The Secret Life of groceries supermarkets are all about Choice some carry over 50,000 different products yet a study published by Harvard Health says the choice can lead to unhappiness if you have too much of it the more choices there are the smaller percentage that seem to be just right now as a kid I remember four TV stations CBS NBC ABC and channel 13 The Late Show played the same movie every day for an entire week today there are 599 scripted TV series 500,000 movies and 200 streaming services Amazon has over 12 million products that's why when I go out to dinner I choose restaurants with limited menus I just can't stand making the wrong choice you're listening to Milk Street radio after the break our Supermarket predictions for this year that's coming right up I'm Christopher Kimble you're listening to Milk Street radio right now I'm joined by Andrea Hernandez to share her predictions for the grocery store this year Andrea is the founder of snackshot a food and beverage newsletter on substack Andrea welcome to Milk Street thank you so much for having me I'm so excited so let's get into your list of food predictions uh it's just really a great list first off gorgeous packaging and pretty Pantry labels you know I see this all the time uh like with canned fish for example the packaging is just getting better and better yeah I like to say we're living Andy warhol's biggest dream like if you think about it him in the 60s he started experimenting with mundane canuts like Campbell sort of like as an art and what's crazy and I I I like try to tie it back to like how Millennials grew up as the Instagram generation like everything like the foodie culture everything became about like signaling and it's so funny how that culture permeated into consumer packaged goods and even so how we're building and designing our houses so back in 2021 Pinterest like wrote about how cabinets are going out of style what people are pinning and searching for in like their home renovations in the kitchen is like going bare shelves and why do you want to have bare shelves is because you want your pantry items to be seen like the fact that we have pretty canned beans like there's a called Heyday and if you look at it like the packaging is all pretty it's very like Millennial coed even hindes and these bigger brands are updating their packaging because they realize that they can trojen horses with Aesthetics it's like oh that's what Millennials want we'll give it to them uh Savory drinks veggie spritzes hot sauce seltzers I this is something I know nothing about tell me about yeah so I guess it's because of the whole like anti-sugar and like sugary drink kind of like Crusade but it's been fascinating to see this sort of rise in the Savory palette profile it's kind of like rebranding a V8 but making it Millennial like cool um there's this company called salare that they're literally doing um like carrot celery spritzes like literally sparkling water that's like flavored with vegetables and you have this drink called Ora Bora this brand they literally for Thanksgiving last year they launched and it went like viral so funny they launched this um green bean casserole Spritz I will tell you it's surprisingly really good and then this year they did this olive oil Spritz that also tasted very Briny you obviously have the rice of pickle seltzers pickle everything you you mentioned here in terms of cocktails the peing Tom and I I love old Fashions it's an oldfashioned made with duck Cofe absin and lapsing tea I'm not sure if I really want duck cfee flavor in my oldfashioned but I do like the idea of of less sugary drinks that's that's good um so grocery stores you say now are Brands so yeah there was the& and cinin and all these other things but now I guess you're saying like aroan which by the way in La is I have to say an amazing story I I I went I was out there a couple years ago and I every night I go back to the store for an hour and just walk around because it was so incredible but all of these stores now these grocery stores as brands do they all have a very clear point of view about merchandising and and product selection and who they're going after yeah I feel like everybody's trying to be sort of like the aroan I like to call the aroan followers I like to call them snack boys so it's like these people actually care that they're spending $22 on a jug of raw milk and they want people to know it but but to be fair I I'm I'm going to have to defend them for a second I I will say that the selection of products you don't find anywhere else and yes insanely priced but as a shopping experience it is pretty amazing yeah they actually have like this like sort of cohesive brand experience from like the way that they design the store how they Place their prod the veggies have to be like aesthetically pleasing yeah and like the fact that every grocer has merch now like it used to be like a grocery it's a utility right you just go there and you get what you need but now the whole experiential grocer kind of movement where it's like the actual branded merch the the tote bag the like actual selfie mirror that people can post that they went like imagine your parents like taking a picture at the grocery store and like actually like that's something that is just so unheard of by the older Generations but that's so common that we have taken something that was very functional it was like it serves this purpose and now we've added on this like sort of EXP experiential level to it there's even a grocery store that I saw that's opening in Georgia that's going to have a mini golf they're like really banking on like we want you to live inside this grocery store so like whatever we have to do to get you to spend more time here well I you know okay I can play both sides of this I'll argue on one hand you know there's no reason a grocery store has to be boring right I mean you can turn anything in entertainment and I think as a culture were really good at even going to the gas station making that fun um so I you know I I see no reason to criticize companies for doing that because it's it's good business on the other hand it makes you think that the consumers us um we don't have any other experiences in our life right like like buying stuff is about as good as it gets in terms of you know we're we're not out there fishing or hunting or we're not fixing our car we're not driving across the country or whatever we used to do our our experiential life is extremely limited and maybe we've simply transposed that to the $24 miso you're buying an arrow on right I mean I mean that that that's your experience is in shopping now that's the main place other than social media that's the main place where you're having experiences so it's very smart business but I think it also feels a need right yeah I do believe that but it's so funny because I do think as our generation untethers from like organized religion um I actually did this whole deep dive on the rise of like spiritual Beverages and snack so like you can find some chocolate bars and Whole Foods that says like this chocolate bar was made with like this hurts and it's meant to rise your vibrations um there is like like Palos Santo brood water you can now find Cava sparkling Cava is like supposedly a psychoactive like root you can actually find this brand called Leo all across New York even inside like LaGuardia but it's funny to see like the way that our generation again is really trying to bring these things that are like ancient Traditions like you know instead of a shaman you have aroan you know like you can just go and get it from your local grocer at this point well and some of it's pure I mean you have to go back to the late 1800s with all of these you know medicinals yeah I joke that you know because of all the rise of like the functional drinks like honestly at this point I'm not surprised if Coke would just like do a whole 360 and just be like yeah we're putting cocaine back in Coca-Cola or or hint at it yes that's even better so the thing that occurs to me if I was one of these food manufacturers is because of social media and other things the rate of change is now exponential right so how do you manage a bread I mean just think of Kelloggs in 1896 it was two Kellogg Brothers um so they had a good 100-year run where things were pretty stable at least for a lot of that time and you could add new products but it was a pretty predictable business now things change every six months every year every two years I mean three years from now if I call you up we have the same conversation you're going to have a very different list of Trends so it's going to be pretty hard for food manufacturers to create new lines design everything get shelf space and then two years later whoops you know all of a sudden Coss is has has fallen off the radar screen yeah it's really interesting because the snack daddies like I like to refer to them or big food companies they're realizing now like they can't innovate fast enough like you said everything's changing so fast like oh everybody's doing adaptogenic nut Butters okay let's try to do our ourselves um and so like they realized that they can't innovate fast enough so they are like shedding things and I actually spoke to someone at Pepsi Ventures about this it was really inter interesting cuz they're like we're going to wait it out they're like we're before we get into you know I don't think Pepsi is going to be like launching uh you know a sea moss drink anytime soon because they actually are trying to see whether is this a fat or not so like a lot of these snack daddies are realizing like oh we could also just see if things reverse and just go back to how things were so I guess just give it time Andrea this was this was fun thank you so much no thank you so much for having me that was Andrea Hernandez founder of snackshot that's it for this week's show please don't forget you can find more than 250 episodes of mil Street radio wherever you get your podcast you can find more about milkstreet at 177milkstreet docomo classes and get free shipping on all orders from The Milk Street store you can also learn about our latest cookbook Milk Street simple please check us out on Facebook at Christopher Kimble mil Street on Instagram at 177 Milk Street we'll be back next week and thanks as always for [Music] listening Christopher Kimble's Milk Street radio is produced by Milk Street in association with gbh co-founder Melissa baldino executive producer Annie Sina senior editor Melissa Al son producer Sarah clap associate producer Caroline Davis with production help from Debbie Paddock additional editing by Sydney Lewis audio mixing by Jay Allison and Atlantic public media in woods Massachusetts theme music by cheop crew additional music by George brle egof Christopher kimbell's Milk Street radio is distributed by [Music] PX oh