How culture triumphed at Expo West

Plus why racism & differentiation threaten the future of food

Last week, I saw the future of the food, and it was both inspiring and worrisome. 

In the next five to ten years, American palates will be enlivened by a new generation of globally-inspired brands with a modern, progressive take on food. But, during that same time span, there will also be a wave of entrepreneurial failure driven by lack of differentiation that leads to mediocrity…and helped along by racism.

Here’s what Natural Products Expo West — the CPG industry’s most important trade show, held last week — taught me about the future of food.

TL;DR — What I Learned at Expo West

• American palates continue to shift rapidly toward global cuisine that’s rooted in heritage with a modern aesthetic, and those brands won at Expo.

• Founders and innovators need to have more honest conversations about whether their ideas are differentiated enough to succeed. The barriers to entry in many categories have reached an all time low, which means the requirements for differentiation have reached an all-time high.

• Racism is impacting who can innovate — and who cannot — in our beloved industry, and so we need to support antiracist initiatives like (included), Project Potluck, the JEDI Collaborative, Target Forward Founders and others.

The Triumph of Global Culture

Miguel Garza, Co-Founder and CEO of Siete Foods, told me a story that illustrates the cultural transformation that we’re witnessing in the food industry. All in the same afternoon at Expo West, three different globally-inspired brands, each of them reflecting their founder’s personal story, hosted happy hours at their booths – and the energy was palpable. The music, the food, the diversity, the vibes: they were unprecedented at a trade show notorious for its whiteness.

I felt the same shift. The standout product at the show? Shanghai-style soup dumplings by Xiao Chi Jie (sub-branded MiLa) that, out of the freezer, tasted like they had been freshly made in Chinatown. Winner of the coveted Pitch Slam? Maazah, a Halal chutney brand founded by Afghan sisters using their mother’s recipes and supporting the Malala Fund for Afghan girls. The standout packaging transformation? Mission-driven spice company Diaspora Co shifted from minimalist glass jars to vibrant tin boxes that managed to elevate the brand’s aesthetic and also reduce COGS.

Then there were the small things. A Dozen Cousins recreating a Brooklyn streetscape, complete with food cart and boom box. Modern takes on Taiwanese bubble tea, like TWRL’s canned beverage or Bobabam’s instant boba mix or UN!TE’s bubble tea flavored snack bar. Overhearing the Fly By Jing team talk about someone crying with joy when they saw the company’s booth, overcome by everything that the brand and its founder Jing Gao have come to mean.

The future of food has arrived…and it is full of global flavor and cultural swagger.

The Triumph of Mediocrity

Sadly, there was another theme at Expo West: mediocrity.

Let me set the stage first. Being an entrepreneur or innovator is hard. Very hard. I am both a founder and innovator myself; Smoketown’s clients are nearly all founders. Many of us risk our entire livelihoods to chase an idea that is deeply meaningful to us.

In addition to that, the natural products industry attracts entrepreneurs with big hearts and big commitments to making the world a better place. It’s an industry full of love and joy and mission, so it’s natural for us to root for everyone.

But I also have to be honest. I am worried that we’re five to ten years away from a tsunami of failure, heartbreak and wasted capital in the food & beverage industry. We have reached peak proliferation of me-too innovation and undifferentiated brands.

Dozens upon dozens of sparkling waters, functional beverages, puffs and bars of all kinds, plant-based this, plant-based that. Everywhere. All the time. All at once. Rarely differentiated, and thus totally reliant on spending huge amounts of money on marketing and trade.

What happened?

Frankly, the barrier to creating a new food or beverage brand might be too low. The ecosystem of co-manufacturers, food scientists, graphic designers, distributors and drop-shippers is so vast that the jump from idea to product is short…perhaps too short.

That short jump encourages founders and innovators to skip two crucial steps: generating empathy for the consumer problem that needs to be solved, and then finding a truly differentiated and delightful way to solve that problem. Why do consumers need another brand of X, Y or Z? What consumer problem is being solved in a unique way? How widely felt is that problem? 

A truism: If the barrier to entry in a category is low, then the requirements for differentiation are high…or else you need to be prepared to out-spend and out-execute everyone else. I fear that too many of my fellow entrepreneurs and innovators had neither differentiation nor deep pockets…and thus failure is almost certain.

Another Triumph: The Racist Allocation of Wealth & Capital

But there was one more dynamic within the sea of same: its whiteness.

This one could sting if you haven’t read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility or Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist or otherwise thought deeply about the role of white (male) privilege in America.

By the end of day four at Expo West, it seemed clear that white founders, especially white men, must be facing lower barriers to entry than the rest of us. The sameness seemed to be concentrated among white-owned brands. Difficult to measure, of course, but other data that I’ve seen would validate what I saw.

If true, it’s consistent with the way structural racism works in America. The wealth gap means that, on average, white folks have more net worth and better credit scores with which to realize their ideas, even if the ideas are undeserving. We also know that nearly all early stage and institutional funding goes to white founders.

Taken together, it means that white (male) founders face a particular kind of risk: the risk of over-confidence, in which privilege gets misread as destiny and certainty.

So What?

So what does this all mean? I offer three takeaways.

First, American palates continue to shift rapidly toward global cuisine that’s rooted in heritage with a modern aesthetic, and those brands consistently won at Expo.

Second, founders and innovators need to have more honest conversations about whether their ideas are differentiated enough to succeed…or just mediocre.

Finally, racism is impacting who innovates — and who does not — in our beloved industry. For white founders, this means being careful to avoid over-confidence, and it means taking differentiation even more seriously. For all of us, it means supporting initiatives like (included), Project Potluck, the JEDI Collaborative, Target Forward Founders, Pronghorn and others.