🍋 Who controls our food supply now?

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Read time today: 2:59 min

Hi friend,

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

Welcome to the 27 new readers who joined in the last two weeks. You are in good company.

As always I hunted down five insights about food business and food innovation that deserve your attention.

Here they are:

For 50 years, food ran on free markets and just-in-time supply chains. Efficient, yes. But fragile.

Then the shocks hit at once: trade wars, a tariff rate at a 90-year high, and conflict near the Strait of Hormuz, where a third of global fertilizer inputs flow.

The global food import bill hit a record $2.2 trillion in 2025. Food prices are still 35% above 2019.

The report's argument: countries are quietly reclaiming tools they were told to abandon: Public food reserves, supply management, and strategic stockpiles.

India spends ~$24B a year on a public food system that holds nearly a billion people's grain. Canada's supply-managed dairy stayed stable during the 2024-25 bird flu while global market prices swung.

Resilience means pricing in the cost of a shock the market ignored. And luckily the policy tools to respond already exist.

Efficiency optimized for calm seas. We're not in calm seas anymore.

Read the full report here.

Grocery retail runs on 1-3% margins. That's the constraint that explains almost every decision retailers make.

Amazon built a $47B advertising business on top of its digital retail operation. Now physical retailers are asking the same question: can we monetize attention in the store the way we already do online?

Patent US 2025/0216863 A1 is where that logic leads. An autonomous cart with displays, speakers, cameras, and microphones. It tracks what's in your cart, where you are in the store, and who is nearby. It serves targeted ads in real time.

Whether we like it or not, physical retail is becoming an ad platform just like the digital world already is.

I’m curious to learn what that will mean for brands trying to win on shelf. And for consumer happiness.

Stop trend-chasing. Start pendulum-watching.

Scientists from Northwestern University analyzed 37,000 images of women's clothing and historical patterns back to 1869. Their finding: the 20-year fashion cycle is mathematically real.

Three levers drive it:

↳ Generational rebellion: Every generation rejects the symbols of the one before it. Give it 20 years and those same symbols feel safe again to the next one.

↳ Nostalgia timing: It takes roughly two decades for something to move from tacky to retro.

↳ Fluent novelty: The winning revival isn't a rerun. It's the familiar with a modern twist. The 90s espresso martini, reborn with artisanal cold brew.

For food brands the question is simple: what was dominant 20 years ago that today's market has rejected? That might be your next opportunity.

Check out the study here.

A small coffee shop in Minnesota called Little Joy Coffee created a raspberry Danish latte. House-made raspberry syrup, two espresso shots, cream cheese cold foam. Labor-intensive enough that they told people not to make it at home.

Then they gave the recipe to anyone who asked.

Over 400 cafés around the world have now added it to their menu. The map of participating shops has over 2 million views.

The owner's logic: most of their 136k Instagram followers will never visit Minnesota. So why protect a recipe they can't serve them?

This move is smart. Little Joy got global distribution without spending a dollar on expansion. And went viral in the meantime.

Turns out giving something away can build a brand faster than protecting it.

Check out the story here.

On OpenAI's Instagram they posted a funny prompt to turn anything into a crappy hand-drawn looking image like this:

The prompt is this:

Redraw the attached image in the most clumsy, scribbly, and utterly pathetic way possible. Use a white background, and make it look like it was drawn in an old computer painting program with a mouse. It should be vaguely similar but also not really, kind of matching but also off in a confusing, awkward way, with that low-quality pixel-by-pixel feel that really emphasizes how ridiculously bad it is. Actually, you know what, whatever, just draw it however you want.

So I decided to try it on a picture of the VITAMIN C homepage.....

⬇ ...and got this 😂 ⬇

Stay awesome,
Lia

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