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Good morning.
The Daily Trend Report. Every weekday morning, giovanni gallucci and a rotating cohost (Chloe Dawn on clean label food and beverage, plus Rachel Donovan or Alexis Parker on social media) synthesize the day's cross-LLM trend reports into three operator stories: social media, clean label food and beverage, and content, social, and AI. Tight, specific, no filler. For owners, founders, marketing leads, and operators in clean-label CPG.
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| ai-assisted content
alexis parker: Good morning. This is Alexis Parker, sitting in with giovanni gallucci and Chloe Dawn, and this is the Daily Trend Report.
giovanni gallucci: Morning, Alexis. Morning, Chloe.
chloe dawn: Morning. Alexis, Ruby was wearing a bandana from that vintage table in Alpine.
alexis parker: Four dollars. She picked it. I just carried the cash.
chloe dawn: I spent my Saturday reading the date stamp on every egg carton at the market. Nobody asked me to.
giovanni gallucci: Good, because that's half of today. Facebook lets people type what they want in the feed, shoppers stopped trusting the grocery store, and Pringles found a use for a funeral director.
alexis parker: Kendall put this one in front of me, and two outlets carried it the same morning, Social Media Today and MediaPost. Facebook now lets people steer their Feed and their Reels by typing. You open a little chatbot-style box and write what you want more of, or less of, in plain English.
giovanni gallucci: So instead of tapping a menu of topics, you write a sentence.
alexis parker: A sentence. More cast iron cooking, less celebrity gossip. And the ranking adjusts around it. Instagram already had a topic picker for Reels. Facebook skipped the menu and handed people a keyboard.
chloe dawn: Twenty years of guessing what I want from how long my thumb sits still, and now they just ask me. Bold.
alexis parker: Here's the dumb take already making the rounds. Nobody uses those controls. Meta shipped show more and show less buttons on Reels years ago and most people never touched them. So who cares.
giovanni gallucci: Half of that is right. Most people won't type a single prompt. The other half is wrong, and it's the half that costs you reach.
alexis parker: Go on.
giovanni gallucci: Even if a small slice of people use it, every prompt teaches the system which words go with which posts. Somebody types brisket, the system has to go find posts that say brisket. Whatever it learns from that matching leaks into everybody's feed, prompt or no prompt. So the question for a brand is simple. When a person describes what they want in words, is there a word in your post for the machine to grab?
chloe dawn: And for most brands there isn't. I scrolled a snack brand yesterday. Fall vibes, a leaf emoji, and a photo of a sweater.
giovanni gallucci: Fall vibes matches nothing a hungry person has ever typed. Nobody opens Facebook and writes, show me more vibes.
alexis parker: So who's set up to win this?
giovanni gallucci: The small operator, and most of them have no idea yet. A butcher in Fort Davis posting how he dry-ages a brisket for twenty-one days is already using the exact words somebody types. A farm that names its tomato varieties is already findable by the gardener who wants those tomatoes. The national brand with an agency calendar recycling one mood post across five product lines gives the system nothing to hold.
alexis parker: Which is the opposite of how most of us were trained. For ten years the advice was a clever hook, trending audio, keep the thumb still for two seconds.
giovanni gallucci: That still works on a scroll. A sentence is a different test. When the viewer starts writing their own feed, the post that wins is the one that says plainly what it is about, in the caption, on the screen, and out loud.
chloe dawn: Out loud? The system listens?
giovanni gallucci: Meta already reads captions and on-screen text, and spoken words get transcribed. So you've got three places to put the noun. Most brands use zero of them.
alexis parker: What about the brand that sells one thing? A hot sauce company doesn't have fifteen subjects.
giovanni gallucci: Then it has an easier job. It picks the three subjects its best customers would type. Smoked jalapeño. Breakfast tacos. Gifts for a dad who puts hot sauce on everything. Then it posts against those three for a month and stops wandering.
alexis parker: And the brands that post about everything?
giovanni gallucci: They get read as nothing. Fifteen themes in a quarter tells a system you're not about any of them. Three themes tells it exactly who to show you to.
chloe dawn: How would a brand even know if this is touching them?
giovanni gallucci: Run a month of plain first lines against a month of clever ones. Same product, same time of day, only the first line changes. Then look at how many of the views came from people who don't follow you. If the plain ones pull more strangers, you have your answer, and it cost you a rewrite.
alexis parker: And for the creators listening, the bio counts too. Say what you make and who it's for, in words somebody would type.
chloe dawn: So the plain caption wins and the clever caption loses.
giovanni gallucci: The clever caption can stay. It just has to come after the noun. Put the brisket first and the joke second, and you get both.
alexis parker: One more caveat for the record. No usage numbers came with this. We don't know how many people will type anything.
giovanni gallucci: Agreed, and you don't need the number. Writing the noun first costs nothing, and it already helps you in search, on YouTube, and in the AI answers. Facebook just added one more place that pays for it.
giovanni gallucci: Three moves before we move on.
giovanni gallucci: One. Rewrite the first line of your next ten captions so the first five words name the thing, in the words your customer would type.
chloe dawn: Two. Say the subject out loud in the first second of every Reel, and put the same word on screen as text.
alexis parker: Three. Sort last quarter's posts by subject, keep the three your best customers would type, and post only against those for thirty days.
chloe dawn: Travis and Kendall both flagged this, and it explains my egg cartons. Gallup asked Americans whether they're confident the food in most grocery stores is safe. Sixty-five percent said yes. Last year it was seventy-three. In 2019 it was eighty-one.
giovanni gallucci: That's sixteen points in six years.
chloe dawn: And it's the lowest Gallup has ever recorded. Confidence that the federal government can keep the food supply safe is at forty-seven percent. For the first time, a majority, fifty-three percent, said they have not much confidence or none at all.
alexis parker: A majority. That's a vote, and they voted no.
chloe dawn: Gallup ties a lot of it to the cyclospora outbreak this summer. More than twelve thousand people sick across twenty-one states before it wound down in September. And here's the number for anybody who sells food. Seventy-three percent said they avoided certain brands or types of food after a recall or an advisory this past year. In 2024 that was fifty-three.
giovanni gallucci: So shoppers didn't just lose faith. They changed what went in the cart.
chloe dawn: Right. And I already know the dumb take, because I saw a brand post it. Find the competitor with the recall and post about how your stuff is clean.
giovanni gallucci: That's the worst thing you can do with this, and it'll come back on you. The day you build content on somebody else's recall is the day your own lot code becomes everybody's favorite screenshot. Never use a competitor's bad week as your marketing. Never make a safety claim you can't document.
alexis parker: Then what's the play? Because the reflex answer is film the farm.
giovanni gallucci: Film the farm is fine, and every brand in the aisle is about to do it. I want something smaller and more useful. Teach people how to check.
chloe dawn: Check what?
giovanni gallucci: Your package. Look at what that seventy-three percent is doing. They're reacting to a recall they heard about on the news, with no idea how to tell whether the thing in their pantry is the thing in the headline. So they throw out the whole category. Your brand included.
chloe dawn: Because nobody ever told them what the stamp on the bottom means.
giovanni gallucci: Nobody. Every pack in America carries a code, a date, a plant number, and to most people it's hieroglyphics. The brand that spends forty seconds teaching a shopper how to read its own package becomes the brand that shopper can check. That's a trust move, and a big company with legal sign-off on every sentence will take a year to make that video. A three-person salsa company can shoot it this afternoon.
alexis parker: And that lives where? Pinned?
giovanni gallucci: Pinned on the profile, and posted again any week the news is about food safety. You're handing your customer the tool before they need it.
alexis parker: One platform or all of them?
giovanni gallucci: Start on Facebook, because that's where the shopper over forty who reads the recall news is scrolling at night. Then cut the same forty seconds for Instagram and TikTok. One shoot, three places, same words.
chloe dawn: And people will ask about specific dates in the comments.
giovanni gallucci: They will, and you answer every one by name. Each answered question under that video is one more person who knows how to check you before they throw you out.
chloe dawn: What else do people not understand about how their food gets handled?
giovanni gallucci: Plenty, and every category has its own version. Why the lid on a jar pops. Why your cold brew has to stay cold. What pasteurized means on your bottle and what it doesn't mean. Each one of those is fifteen to forty seconds of teaching nobody else in your aisle is doing.
alexis parker: I like that it reads like homework instead of a warning.
giovanni gallucci: It's respect. You're treating a nervous customer like an adult who can read. And it lines up with what the independents already have. A short supply chain fits in one video. Big Food's supply chain runs through six countries and a blender, and nobody's explaining that one on camera.
chloe dawn: They'll try. Somebody's going to slap safe and trusted on a can next spring.
giovanni gallucci: Let them. Shoppers in that poll already told you what a slogan is worth. Sixty-five percent and falling. A video that shows them how to check is worth more than a word on a can.
giovanni gallucci: Three things you can do before lunch.
giovanni gallucci: One. Shoot forty seconds this week on how to read the code stamped on your own package, what each part means, and pin it to your profile.
chloe dawn: Two. Pick one thing about how your product is made safe that shoppers never see, why the jar seals, why it stays cold, and teach it in a short video.
alexis parker: Three. When a recall hits your category, post that day showing exactly where to look on your pack, and say nothing about anybody else's.
giovanni gallucci: Eddie flagged this one, Jayme had it too, and it's the best piece of brand lore I've seen used in a year. Pringles is giving one fan a final resting place.
alexis parker: Say more, because that sentence is a lot at six in the morning.
giovanni gallucci: It's called Once You Drop. One winner gets a metal urn shaped like a Pringles can and a two-hundred-year supply of chips. You enter by signing a digital will and taste-ament at OnceYouDrop dot com before October twenty-second.
chloe dawn: A will and taste-ament. Somebody in that meeting got a raise.
giovanni gallucci: And the spot stars Dan the Funeral Man, who's a working funeral director with a following he built on TikTok.
alexis parker: So why does this land and not read as a cheap Halloween stunt?
giovanni gallucci: Because it's true. Fredric Baur, the man who designed the Pringles can, died in 2008, and his family buried part of his ashes in one. That fact sat in the brand's own history for eighteen years. Somebody finally went and picked it up.
chloe dawn: Did it work?
giovanni gallucci: Early. No entry numbers yet. But it got picked up by Adweek and a string of local TV news sites within a day, and you can't buy local news with a media plan. Watch the entries and the stitches before the twenty-second.
alexis parker: And the funeral director is the key, because he's credible.
giovanni gallucci: He does the job for real, so the joke has a floor under it. If they'd hired an actor in a black suit, it's a sketch. With Dan it's a guy who handles the subject every day, being a little funny about it.
chloe dawn: Here's the pushback I'd expect from a small brand. That's a billion-dollar chip with an agency. We don't have a dead inventor in a can.
giovanni gallucci: You have something. Every brand that has been around longer than a year has a weird, true fact sitting in a drawer. The first batch that burned. The label that got printed upside down and shipped anyway. The delivery van with a name. The recipe card with a coffee ring on it from somebody's grandmother. Brands post the mission statement and leave the weird fact in the drawer.
chloe dawn: How do you find it if you don't know it's there?
giovanni gallucci: Ask the people who've been around longest. The first employee, the driver, whoever answered the phone in year one. One question. What's the strangest thing that ever happened here? Write down every answer. Three of them will be posts, and one of them will be your Pringles can.
alexis parker: So the move is lore over vibes.
giovanni gallucci: The move is a fact nobody can copy. Anybody can make a spooky Halloween post. Nobody else can tell your upside-down label story, because it didn't happen to them.
alexis parker: And the other half of this week's lesson came from Chicago.
giovanni gallucci: Go ahead, it's yours.
alexis parker: October eighth, the Bulls posted their new warm-up jackets. The sponsor mark, Plus500, is visibly bigger than the Bulls logo. Fans flooded the replies comparing it to the Jordan-era gear and blaming the league for sponsor creep. Adweek wrote a piece saying the backlash misreads a partnership that goes back to 2022.
giovanni gallucci: Adweek can be right on the contract and it doesn't change a thing. The fans weren't reading a contract. They were reading a picture, and the picture said the team was the fine print.
chloe dawn: Which is the same lesson as Pringles, upside down.
giovanni gallucci: Same lesson. Pringles put its own story in the middle of the frame and let a partner help tell it. The Bulls let the partner become the story. When you do a collab, a co-branded drop, a sponsor shout-out, your mark has to read as the host at thumbnail size, on a phone, in a hurry.
alexis parker: Small brands do that to themselves all the time. The retailer logo bigger than the product. The festival banner eating the booth photo.
giovanni gallucci: All the time. And they never notice, because they look at it on a laptop at full size. Your customer sees it at the size of a postage stamp, between two other posts, half awake.
chloe dawn: So find your weird fact, cast somebody with a reason to be in it, and keep your name the biggest thing in the frame.
giovanni gallucci: That's the whole assignment. Go find the dead inventor in your own drawer. Figuratively.
giovanni gallucci: Here's what to do with all of that.
giovanni gallucci: One. Write down five odd, true facts from your brand's history this week, the kind you tell at dinner and never post.
chloe dawn: Two. Pick the strangest one and build one post around it, with a person who has a credible reason to be in it, the way Pringles cast a working funeral director.
alexis parker: Three. Before any partner or sponsor post goes live, look at it on your phone at thumbnail size, and if their logo wins, resize it.
giovanni gallucci: That's the show. Tomorrow on this feed it's Social Media Train Wrecks, the week's worst food and beverage brand moves, taken apart.
alexis parker: Ruby will be listening in her new bandana.
giovanni gallucci: If your customers are posting your product and nobody on your side answers, reposts, or says thank you, I run community management and UGC for food and beverage brands, plus the creator partnerships that grow it. Over fifteen years doing social media in food and beverage. Find me at gallucci dot net or DM at gallucciNET on Instagram or LinkedIn.
chloe dawn: See you Friday.
giovanni gallucci: Take care, everybody.