Happy Trends Tuesday!

Five years ago, in Tokyo, I fell in love with some black beans. 

They were sweet, chewy, satisfying but not too indulgent… the perfect snack. 

I've been looking for them in the US, but had no luck until recently. The closest thing I found sells for ~$17 (not bad), but the shipping’s costlier than the product. 😤 

Still, I got’em. It’s been long enough. 

The pursuit of these tasty legumes got me thinking about cravings, and people's willingness to pay for them — our topic du jour. 

P.S. If what you're craving is some delicious marketing content, check out Masters in Marketing, our network's latest newsletter. For five minutes a week, it lets you in on the secret sauce of industry titans... for free. Subscribe here. 

In today's email…

• 4 mouth-watering opportunities in gourmet convenience
• How a young Trendster made millions by betting on corporate swag
• What we’re surfin’, from personalized pricing to million-dollar memes

Dig in!

💡 MFM BUSINESS IDEA DATABASE

Here are 50+ startups you could run with, including last-minute gift delivery, “club-ifying” boring businesses, and addressing the pet care frenzy – courtesy of Sam and Shaan of My First Million.

🚀 WHERE TO BUILD NEXT

Fast and fabulous: 4 opportunities in gourmet convenience

What comes to mind when you hear “gourmet”? 

Probably not convenience food. 

But that’s exactly what today’s consumers want — premium morsels served in ultra-convenient formats. 

• Grab-and-go meal sales have risen 72% post-pandemic
• Meal-kit delivery services are a $20B+ market, and growing
• Retail snack sales rose to $214B in 2023

Source: Statista

Meanwhile, consumers are hungry for new tastes and global flavors. Millennials and Gen Zers are leading the hunt for unique, international ingredients. 

One such example is ube, or purple yam, a staple of Filipino cuisine. With an aesthetic appeal and many health benefits, it has been named a leading flavor in 2024.

Ube-tter not miss out on this! Source: Foodaciously

Ube is just one of many up-and-coming ingredients with global influences. 

The trend is clear: Consumers are busy and want to taste the best, fast. Here are four areas of opportunity for entrepreneurs: 

1. Premium snack attack

Snacks, the ultimate convenience food, are ripe for disruption. 

They comprise 27% of all US food & bev sales, and 54% of consumers are snacking to treat themselves. 

Consumers want artisanal, crafty snacks that make them feel good. So start sprinkling in unique flavors, ingredients, and presentations to premiumize your snack offerings.

You don’t have to look at Pinterest to know gourmet cookies are on the rise — just look out your window every time a new Crumbl Cookies opens up: What began as a single family-owned bakery in 2017 has exploded to 800+ stores across North America.

Demand for healthier snacks is up ~252% from last year. Pitch to offices or college campuses, where busy workers and students are too time-strapped to track down healthy munchies. 

2. Get saucy 

The hot sauce market is projected to reach ~$5.1B by 2030, making it fertile ground for bold flavor experiments. 

Sell a subscription box of artisanal sauces — hot or otherwise — from different regions. Tag on an app introducing the ingredients of each sauce, its origins, and the recipes it’s best paired with (we see quizzes, merch, socials… content galore 😍).

Brightland, which sells artisanal olive oil, vinegars, and honey, has 147k+ followers on Instagram and rakes in $5.5m in annual revenue. 

Dip into the sweet, lucrative sauce biz. Source: Brightland

3. Nourish the young

School lunches famously suck. As more health-conscious millennials become parents, they’ll want better options for their children. 

Meal delivery services are popular among busy adults, but not that many cater to kids.

CookUnity, a meal delivery service, lets you choose chef-made meals from a diverse menu of global cuisines. Source: Google Trends

Build a “CookUnity Junior” that targets children’s nutritional needs, like Little Spoon (a baby food delivery company valued at $300m)

Make it available to parents, or partner with local K-12 schools to offer convenient, healthy, and diverse lunch options. Include fun tidbits so the munchkins keep coming back for more (think: healthy Happy Meals).

Elevate their well-being and their palates — no one’s too young to be a gourmet. 

Nibble on nearby niches

Not in the food biz? We gotchu.

There are still plenty of niches you can cash in on — keep reading to see 3+ ways you can take a bite out of this billion-dollar market. 

🗝️ FROM THE ARCHIVE

How A Swag Startup Made $3.3m in Year One

Trendster Michael Martocci went to school to study finance. Instead, he ended up with a side project that would eventually make him millions.

“My buddy and I wanted to get custom flags and shirts made to promote a location-based social media network that we were building on campus, and it just seemed super expensive,” he told Trends in 2021. 

Custom flags cost ~$130, but Michael found them on Alibaba for ~$8. So he started a custom printing website on the side selling flags for half the price. 

It was a good bet — The global custom printing market is fast growing, and expected to reach $11B by 2032.

Source: Google Trends, six-month rolling average

After working for a VC firm in New York, Michael soon found himself back in the merch game. 

“Surrounded by startups, I saw how much they care about swag. It’s one of the first things startups buy when they get funding.”

He also knew that the swag market was (and still is) fragmented. It’s a $26B+ industry in which only one company is making $1B+. The rest is made up of “a ton of small companies that can probably only handle under 50 clients at a time.” 

So in May 2017 he started SwagUp, which focused on providing high-quality branded swag packs to startups for employee welcoming, client gifting, event attendees, and more. 

The business scaled quickly, from ~$5k in sales in their first month to ~$3.3m in their first full year. 

SwagUp now employs 200+ people, has hit $160m in aggregate sales, and raised its first funding after 5 years of bootstrapping success. 

They also provide a white-label swag platform for others to build their own swag businesses, leveraging SwagUp’s packing, warehousing, and distribution infrastructure. 

Oh, and did we mention that Michael is not even 30? Yeah.

An entrepreneur from the start… Some things never change (picture stolen from Michael’s Facebook — with his permission)

There are two rules Michael thought about when scaling his business:

First, eliminate friction. 

SwagUp’s strategy has always been to eliminate friction by giving people the tools and technology they need to purchase and distribute as much swag as possible. 

While it might be attractive to charge clients a subscription fee to use their software, if it means decreasing the number of customers they can acquire, or how fast they can grow revenue, they won’t do it.

“Don’t put artificial friction in the way of letting people get started,” Michael says. “The hardest thing is to acquire customers. Once you’ve acquired customers, then you can probably open up the scale and scope of what else you want to do with them.”

Keep reading to learn Michael's second tip, which helped turn SwagUp from a lean startup using “hacky bootstrappy stuff like Wix and Zapier integrations” to a swag empire with $50m+ ARR. 

🗂️ OPEN TABS

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