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Every few months there are new sustainability stories of the world’s largest brands trying to create less wasteful packaging. Coca-Cola announced a new lighter bottle design this week and a few months ago began a trial shipping label-free bottles of Sprite. These types of initiatives are common in the packaged food industry, but what if other industries could greenlight … Read more
Trader Joe’s doesn’t seem like an evil brand. Their personality-driven backstory offers an irresistible underdog mentality that drives rabid brand fans who celebrate every new product arrival. Unfortunately, a story released this week reveals that many of their ethnic private label products may be blatantly stolen knock-offs of product ideas from small brands who had been negotiating with TJs before … Read more
Pasta boxes are the perfect packaging to reuse. Pasta leaves no residue, and the boxes are generally large enough to fit other items. That’s clearly the inspiration for a new campaign from Barilla that promotes box reusability in time for Global Recycling Day. The campaign casts tidying guru Marie Kondo as the spokesperson and their campaign video starts … Read more
Everything is connected. That’s what you might start thinking after reading this fascinating story about why eggshells are chipping more. During the avian flu, many farmers lost a lot of their chicken population and so hens are being kept “in production” for longer. Usually, a chicken makes it until about age 2 but today there are … Read more
If you have ever been to another region of the world and been curious about how they ended up with the various flavors of crisps (chips to Americans) that are on store shelves, you’ll find this article very interesting. It asks and answers everything you’ve wondered about how various flavors get reduced to the flavored … Read more
This week Wendy’s unintentionally stirred up some trouble as headlines popped up online that the fast-food chain was testing “surge pricing” similar to Uber where they would charge more for food when demand was highest. The chain quickly backtracked with the relatively bone-headed explanation that they were actually using it to offer “discounts during slower … Read more
Boomers love wine, but that may not be enough to keep it flying high. A new report of sales figures from 2023 shows that spirits outsold wine for the first time in 45 years. Combined with a story I shared recently about how Gen Z is not drinking as much alcohol as previous generations, it seems … Read more
Welcome to a case study on why facial scanning is a bad idea. Supermarkets in the UK have been experimenting for the past year with technology that estimates the age of shoppers by scanning their faces at checkout. Apparently “Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Co-op have already successfully trialed the technology which allowed anyone that is estimated to … Read more
The 90s were a decade for grunge music and inventive beverages. The Orbitz was a soft drink described rather unappetizingly as “a lava lamp you could drink” and featured floating sugary chunks of tapioca in a more disgusting precursor to the Boba tea craze. While this concept of floating chunks of something in a drink … Read more
Beer is a category that has long been defined by the tastes great less filling debate. As a result, it’s easy to think that disruption would be nearly impossible to achieve through product alone. In the last several weeks, I’ve discovered several new product examples that the opposite is true. I’m a beer drinker. I’m … Read more
Non-Obvious Thinking is my latest book about the 4 secrets of becoming a non-obvious thinker - released 10/01/2024.
Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company and the 3-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of ten books.
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In addition to Non-Obvious Thinking, Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.
