The Hustle - 😋 The next superfood craze

Happy Trends Tuesday!

Today we’ve got:

• 1 trend alert
• 1 piece of strategic wisdom
• 1 startup sector you should know about 

Let's get to it.

🚨 TREND ALERT

What do acai, goji berries, chickpeas, and kale have in common?

Their popularity has exploded in the last 20 years and each has been hailed as a “superfood”.

Could lupini beans be the next superfood?

With fewer calories than almonds, 3x the protein, and zero net carbs, interest is sprouting. But it's still much lower than other “snack” beans that have gained popularity:

Here’s the crazy thing: There’s only one brand, Brami, that offers snack packs of flavored lupini beans. Predictably, they are dominating Google and Amazon.

So there you have it – an under the radar superfood with growing interest and only one competitor. Get after it.

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🧠 STRATEGY CORNER

A lot of people talk about Instagram best practices, but what does the data say?

Our teammates scraped and analyzed 110m Instagram posts, from 1m+ accounts around the world. Their full report offers a fascinating breakdown on what’s actually goin’ on on the ’gram.

Some highlights:

1. Don’t sleep on carousels: You’ve likely heard that “the future is video” but the data paints a different picture. Median engagements for carousels vastly outperforms video (70 vs 46). The key to a great carousel? Remember it's not a collection of random images — it's a slideshow that tells a story.
   
   

2. The key to captions: The research shows that length doesn’t matter. Engagement hovered around 6%, so long as a post had any caption at all. Two other actionable bits:

   • Hashtags – Maybe ditch ‘em. 11+ hashtags performed roughly equal to zero. But all other hashtag uses had lower engagement. 
   • Mentions – One to five seems to boost engagement. One mention led to the highest engagement on average.
     
     
3. Post timing: Engagement was highest from 6pm to 9pm across any region (people are getting off work, finishing dinner, and settling in for the night). But there are interesting regional quirks – like Miami, where there’s an engagement spike at 9am. So run tests in your* region to see if anything like that exists.

🔥 STARTUP SECTOR YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

Want to do that new viral TikTok dance but don’t have a buddy to back you up on the choreo?

No? Just us? OK… either way, there’s gotta be something you could use a pal for – and post-pandemic, a lot of us have been lonelier than ever.

But startups are here to save the day: New friendship apps are helping people find IRL companionship at the touch of a button.

Read more about the startups getting into the platonic matchmaking biz on The Hustle blog.

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