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Read time today: 2:17 min
Hi friend,
It’s Friday morning. You are reading VITAMIN C 🍋.
Welcome to the 25 new readers who signed up in the last two weeks. You are in good company.
As always I hunted down 5 food insights that deserve your attention.
Here they are:
1. [Science | Report] 🧠 Your plate changes taste
We were talking about plates at the dinner table the other day, which made me think of this 10y old research again.
Researchers served identical cheesecake on different plates. On a white, round plate, participants rated it roughly 20% sweeter and 30% more intense.
Another Oxford study found that even the weight and colour of a spoon changed how people perceived yoghurt. Cheese tasted saltier when eaten from a knife.
For anyone developing food products, that’s a useful reminder: people never experience a recipe in isolation. There’s always a plate, package, spoon, glass, room and expectation around it.
2. [Insight] 📦 Why boxed wine is winning
I’ve always associated boxed wine with cheap supermarket shelves and questionable university parties.
Apparently, that image needs updating.
Boxed wine sales were up more than 144% YoY in June, while brands like Gratsi are putting premium natural wine into beautifully designed boxes and selling hundreds of thousands of cases.
And the format suddenly makes a lot of sense.
Lower packaging and shipping costs
Roughly four bottles per box
Stays fresh longer after opening
A much smaller carbon footprint than glass
The interesting part is how little the underlying format changed.
What changed was everything around it: wine quality, design, positioning and cultural permission.
Sometimes innovation is simply noticing that an old format has been carrying the wrong story.
3. [Insight] 🥤One of the world’s best-known packages began as a mistake
By 1915, Coca-Cola wanted a bottle so distinctive you could recognize it in the dark, or even from a broken piece on the ground.
Designer Earl Dean went looking for images of the coca leaf and kola nut.
He couldn’t find them.
Instead, he found an illustration of a cocoa pod and used its ribbed shape as inspiration.
There was just one problem: Coca-Cola contains no cocoa.
And yet that mistake helped create one of the most recognizable packages in the world.
A nice reminder that creativity often starts when you stop looking for the “right” reference.
4. [Insight] 🟡 My feed turned monochrome
Suddenly, these beautifully monochrome images keep smiling back at me from my feed.
Green collages of broccoli, spinach, algae and matcha. Red worlds made from tomatoes, berries and chillies. Yellow ones built from eggs, corn and turmeric.
This trend is called color hunting: picking a color and collecting everything around you that fits it.
And food might be the perfect playground for it.
What I like about the trend is its simplicity. One visual rule turns completely ordinary foods into something you want to inspect.
5. [Fun] 🍝
Italian pasta producer Barilla created Spotify playlists that are the exact length of time it takes to cook different types of pasta.
• 621.566 Spotify followers
• 110M+ views on TikTok
Check it out here.
Stay awesome,
Lia
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