Pain as positioning 🥵

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Read time today: 1:26 min

Hi friend,

It’s Friday morning. You are reading VITAMIN C 🍋.

This week alone, millions of posts about food and business fought for your attention across the web. Most of them weren’t worth your time.

I picked the five that are.

Let’s get into it.

Last week I caught myself jumping between five tabs just to answer one simple question about food access.

And with that I realized a problem. Our food system is fragmented. And so is the data.

The Food Systems Dashboard tries to fix that. It brings together more than 300 indicators from 40+ sources (including UN agencies, World Bank datasets, and others).

For anyone working at the intersection of food, health, and climate, check out the dashboard here.

Dried fruit has long been positioned as healthy, practical, and somewhat conservative.

Final Boss Sour from L.A. is flipping that script.

They take real dried fruit and wrap it in extreme sour coating.

And instead of different flavor variants, they offer experience levels: Level 1 (fun, slightly sour), Level 2 (you’ll feel it) and Level 3 (the real deal, physical pain).

By doing so, they’re plugging directly into gaming culture.

The founders behind the brand are also the team behind Liquid Death, the company that turned canned water into a cultural brand phenomenon now valued at $1.4 billion.

I've always loved sour candy and I'm addicted to dried mango. I need to try this!

More about them here.

Ann-Christin Schulz from Berlin-based food VC FoodLabs shared her top consumer startups to watch in 2026.

The common thread: format innovation, sharper positioning, and community as a growth engine.

Coconut water becomes fibre-first (AV8). Oats turn into a daily gut ritual (Oat Cult).

And that’s only two of them. You can explore all 12 startups here.

In 2026, 85% of babies will be born in Asia and Africa.

This matters for FoodTech.

Because these are also the regions facing the most acute food system constraints:

↳ Limited access to affordable protein
↳ High post-harvest losses
↳ Infrastructure gaps across storage and logistics

And yet, many new products are still built for affluent Western urban niches.

So, before polishing your next premium SKU, ask:

↳ Is this relevant in high-growth regions?
↳ Is it affordable at scale?
↳ Does it solve a structural constraint?

Long-term market growth and systemic impact are converging geographically.

Your strategy should follow that center of gravity.

When a brand becomes cultural, backlash is part of the deal.

Instead of hiding criticism, Oatly staged it.

They launched Fckotatly.com, a site dedicated to everything supposedly “wrong” with the brand.

Stay awesome,
Lia

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