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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
[INTRO]
[HOST] Good morning. This is giovanni gallucci, this is the Weekend Trend Report, the Saturday episode of the Daily Trend Report feed, and Chloe Dawn is here with me.
[GUEST] Morning, Gio.
[HOST] Four trends this week. TikTok Shop has turned into the audition room for big-box shelves. The real recommendation is moving into group chats and maps, where your analytics can't see it. A seal for food that isn't ultraprocessed is racing a state law to the front of the pack. And the shopper is buying smaller, one can and one bag at a time.
[GUEST:mischievous] So, shopping, gossip, labels, and my grocery basket. Very me.
[HOST] Start with the shopping.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 1: The Shelf Holds Auditions On TikTok Now]
[GUEST] Travis and Eddie both had this one. Modern Retail reported that Target is putting a bedding brand called Mellow Sleep into five hundred fifty stores. Tomorrow, October eighteenth.
[HOST] And Mellow didn't exist two years ago. It launched in 2025 on TikTok Shop and its own website. The company says it did a hundred thirty million dollars in its first year and expects to clear three hundred million by the end of year two.
[GUEST:surprised] Bedding. On TikTok.
[HOST] Bedding. And here's how the deal happened. Target called them, last spring, less than a year after the TikTok Shop launch. The co-founder, Jay Yue, said the buyer who reached out was already a fan.
[GUEST] So the buyer found them the same way I would have. Scrolling.
[HOST] Right. And look at why Target wanted it. Its home category fell one point oh nine billion dollars in fiscal 2025, down six and a half percent, and that was the third straight year it dropped more than a billion. The giant is coming to the small brand because the small brand has the thing the giant can't manufacture.
[GUEST] Which is people who actually care.
[HOST] Proof that people care, in public, with a sales number next to it. That's the audition tape. Ten years ago a buyer wanted a broker, a sell sheet and a trade show booth. Now the buyer opens the app on the couch and watches strangers fight over your sheets in the comments.
[GUEST] Okay, but that's home goods. Does it work for food?
[HOST] Travis had the food version the same week. EZ Bombs, the birria seasoning bombs. They started on TikTok Shop and Amazon, and they say they moved more than a million units through TikTok Shop alone in 2025. This week they closed a twenty-five million dollar Series A led by Cavu, and they're already in more than eight thousand stores, including Walmart, Target, Costco and Kroger.
[GUEST:thoughtful] A seasoning ball got there before a lot of brands with a sales team.
[HOST] Because the sales team was a few thousand people cooking birria on camera. And that part is the trend. Clark pulled a Digiday briefing on how TikTok Shop wins happen. Flywheel, which Omnicom owns, looked at affiliate data from a tool called Reacher. Brands sent out one and a half million product samples.
[GUEST] How many posted?
[HOST] About forty-seven percent made a video. About fourteen percent generated a sale. And the smaller creators likely produced more sales per thousand followers than the big ones.
[GUEST:sarcastic] So more than half the free stuff goes into a closet.
[HOST] Into a closet, into a group chat, into a junk drawer. And that is fine, because it's old-school affiliate math. Flywheel's CEO, Deren Baker, basically said direct response is the efficient way to sell if selling is what you want. You send wide, you watch who moves product, and you keep the ones who do. Then you stop sending samples to the people who only post an unboxing and vanish, and you put the money into the twenty who keep cooking with it.
[GUEST] That's a lot cheaper than one celebrity post.
[HOST] It's cheaper, and it's fairer to a small brand. A four-person salsa company can't outbid Big Food for one famous face, and it shouldn't try. It can out-ship them on samples to two hundred home cooks with eight thousand followers each, and pay those cooks a cut of what they sell.
[GUEST:curious] What's the catch?
[HOST] The catch shows up later. A retail exclusive puts the founder on someone else's calendar, and the shelf can squeeze the margin that paid for the samples. But that's a business conversation. On social, the move is simpler. Three things.
[HOST] One. Seed wide and small. Send your product to fifty creators under fifty thousand followers this month, on commission, and expect half of them to never post. Keep a list of the ones who do.
[HOST] Two. Save every creator video that sells, with the date and the numbers, in one folder, and repost the three best ones to your own account with the creator tagged by name. Your feed should look like the evidence.
[HOST] Three. Write the creator brief as one sentence and one shot. If somebody can't explain your product in fifteen seconds while holding it, the brief is too long, so cut it before you send a single box.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 2: The Recommendation Moved Into The Group Chat]
[GUEST] Next one is about where people find stuff. Travis brought a Snap study on Snap Map. Social Media Today covered it.
[HOST] Give me the setup, because the setup is half the story.
[GUEST] More than seventeen thousand map users, ages thirteen to forty-four. U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany and Saudi Arabia. Snap ran it with two research firms, eye square and Horizon.
[HOST] And the headline Snap wants you to read?
[GUEST] Snap says people are two point nine times more likely to say they found their favorite real-world business on Snapchat than on other social apps. And Snap Map has four hundred fifty million monthly users.
[HOST] Now read the line underneath it.
[GUEST:mischievous] Twenty-nine percent use Snap Map to discover businesses. Seventy-six percent use it to see where their friends are.
[HOST] So more than seventy percent of the people on the map aren't shopping it. They're checking whether their friends are at the taco place. And that is the trend. Discovery runs through friends now, not through a business listing.
[GUEST] Which lines up with the other Snap thing. Eddie flagged their holiday guide, "Wrapped in the Chat," eight pages, out October twelfth.
[HOST] Read me the line.
[GUEST] "Holiday shopping is no longer an isolated consumer action." The way Snap tells it, somebody finds a thing, drops it in a small group, and waits for a friend or a sister to say yes before buying.
[HOST:thoughtful] I believe that one, because I do it. Somebody sends me a picture of a hot sauce with three words, "you need this," and I buy it. I never saw an ad. I never searched for it. And the brand will never know where that sale came from. One friend who forwards a hot sauce to everybody she knows can sell more of it than an influencer the brand paid, and the brand has no idea she exists.
[GUEST] Because it happened in a DM.
[HOST] In a DM, in a group text, in a screenshot that got passed around four phones. None of that shows up as a click. It shows up as "direct," or it shows up as nothing, and then a small brand looks at its dashboard and decides social doesn't work.
[GUEST:annoyed] And then they spend the money on ads instead.
[HOST] On ads that the platform can measure, which is exactly why the platform sells them. The trap is that you end up paying for the slice of attention you can count and ignoring the slice that moves product.
[GUEST] So how do you build for something you can't see?
[HOST] You build the post for the trip it's about to take. When I forward your post to my sister, the caption doesn't come with it. Most of the time she gets a screenshot. So the picture has to carry everything. What it is, what it costs, where you buy it.
[GUEST] Most food posts I'd forward have none of that. Pretty pour, no price, no store.
[HOST] And then the sister texts back "where do I get it," the trail goes cold, and the sale dies in the chat. Same with the map. The physical spot, a counter or a cooler or a farmers market table, needs one thing worth a photo, so a regular has a reason to tag where they're standing. And keep your Google listing current, because the map gets them interested and Google still gets them there.
[GUEST:curious] Do the platforms tell you any of this?
[HOST] Some of it. Shares and sends sit right there in Instagram and TikTok insights. Almost nobody reports on them, because a share count looks small next to a view count, and nobody wants to put a small number on the Monday slide. It's the most honest number in the app. Here's what to do.
[HOST] One. Make every product post screenshot-complete. Name, price, and the store or the link, on the image itself, so it still works after it gets forwarded without the caption.
[HOST] Two. Make shares and sends the number you report every week, ahead of likes and follower count. A post that gets sent forty times is doing more for you than one that gets four hundred likes.
[HOST] Three. Give your regulars one thing at the counter or the market table that's worth a photo, and ask them to tag the location when they post it. Then repost the best one every Friday.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 3: The Seal Got There Before The Law Did]
[GUEST] Over to the shelf. Eddie, Travis, Jayme and Kendall all had some piece of this one. The non-ultraprocessed seal.
[HOST] Give me the private one first.
[GUEST] The Non-GMO Project, the butterfly label, launched a Non-UPF Verified seal earlier this year. Food Dive talked to the CEO, Megan Westgate, on the fifteenth. More than three hundred products are verified already. Simple Mills was one of the first, and Chomps and Blue Diamond signed on too.
[HOST] And the number that explains why?
[GUEST] Seventy-two percent of shoppers in their research say they're actively trying to avoid ultraprocessed food. And a lot of them say they can't tell what counts.
[HOST:thoughtful] Hold onto that second half. People want to avoid it and they can't identify it. That gap is where every label fight for the next three years is going to happen. Whoever explains it in plain language first gets to set what the word means for the shopper, long before a regulator does.
[GUEST] Because now there's a government version.
[HOST] California. Governor Newsom signed AB 2244 at the end of September. It creates a voluntary state seal for food that isn't ultraprocessed, run by the Department of Public Health. It passed thirty-two to nothing in the Senate and seventy-two to nothing in the Assembly. It builds on the law from last year that wrote the first legal definition of ultraprocessed food in the country.
[GUEST] When does that seal show up on a package?
[HOST] Not soon. The state has until June first, 2029 to accredit the certifiers. And at the federal level, FDA and HHS sent a proposed definition to the White House budget office as a white paper, and it's still sitting in review.
[GUEST:sarcastic] So the government seal shows up around the time I'm twenty-five.
[HOST] Roughly. Which means the private seal gets three years on the shelf with nobody in its way. And here's the part I like. Westgate has been out there warning against a federal definition that shrinks ultraprocessing down to a few additives or a couple numbers on the Nutrition Facts panel.
[GUEST] Why would it shrink?
[HOST:annoyed] Because the biggest food companies in the country would love a definition narrow enough that their current product squeaks through it. Pull one dye, swap one gum, put a badge on the front. That's reformulation theater, and we've watched it happen with "natural" for twenty years.
[GUEST] And the small brand with a five-ingredient recipe gets the same badge as the giant who changed one thing.
[HOST] Which is why the small brand can't wait for a badge to tell its story. If the only proof you have is a seal, you're one federal rule away from sharing it with a company that runs a thousand ingredients through an extruder. Westgate had a line I liked: "People don't need to become experts in food science." She's right. They need to see it.
[GUEST:curious] See what, though? The ingredient list?
[HOST] Further than the list. The seal is about processing, which means the question has moved from what's in it to what happened to it. And a brand that makes food in a kitchen, or a small plant, can show what happened to it in a sixty-second video. The giant can't, because nobody wants to watch an extruder. Walk me through a cheese puff plant on camera and you know how that goes. Walk me through somebody roasting oats in a commercial kitchen at six in the morning, and I'll watch the whole thing and send it to a friend.
[GUEST] So the factory floor is the content.
[HOST] The kitchen floor, the cutting board, the pot. Here's what that looks like.
[HOST] One. Shoot one sixty-second process video this month, from raw ingredient to sealed package, nothing skipped. Title it with the question your customers type, something like "how our granola gets made."
[HOST] Two. When somebody comments "is this ultraprocessed?", answer with a video reply, in your own plain words, standing next to the stove or the line. Do not wait for a seal to answer for you.
[HOST] Three. If you do go after a certification, film the paperwork, the inspection and the day the result comes back, and post it as a short series. Being one of the first few hundred products is a story only the early brands get to tell.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 4: One Can, One Bag, One Porch]
[GUEST] Last one, and it's my grocery cart. Eddie and Jayme had NielsenIQ data out of Grocery Dive, and Kendall and Clark had the Halloween numbers.
[HOST] Do NielsenIQ first.
[GUEST] Smaller packs are outgrowing the big multi-serve packs in three categories. Soft drinks, ready-to-eat cereal and salty snacks.
[HOST] Three categories where Big Food spent decades training us to buy the family size.
[GUEST] And people don't stock up the way they used to. NielsenIQ estimates about thirty-two percent of in-person grocery purchases are stock-up trips now, and only nineteen percent online.
[HOST] Why?
[GUEST:thoughtful] Smaller households, for one. The average went from two point six people in 2000 to two point five. And twenty-one percent of American households had at least one GLP-1 user as of May.
[HOST] A tenth of a person sounds tiny until you multiply it across the country. And the GLP-1 number is the one that should make every snack brand sit up. One household in five has somebody in it who simply eats less. That person still buys snacks. They buy a smaller bag, they want the protein or the fiber number in plain view, and they're reading the back of the pack a lot more carefully than they did two years ago.
[GUEST] Then Halloween. LendingTree surveyed two thousand people and Retail Dive wrote it up this week. The average plan is a hundred sixty-two dollars, down sixteen percent from a hundred ninety-two last year.
[HOST:surprised] Sixteen percent, two weeks out from the holiday that runs on candy.
[GUEST] And candy is the first thing people are cutting. Thirty-five percent of the people who are buying something say they're skipping candy. Decorations thirty-one, costumes twenty-nine. And almost a quarter say they'll put Halloween on debt.
[HOST] Put those together and the trend is plain. Fewer people per house, fewer trips, less money, smaller appetite. The shopper isn't buying the twenty-four pack anymore. They're buying one can to see if they like it. And the big companies already know this, because their answer for a decade has been to shrink the bag and keep the price. Shoppers noticed. They call it shrinkflation and they post about it. A small brand that sells a smaller pack straight, priced as a first try, is on the right side of that conversation.
[GUEST:excited] Which is good for little brands, right? One can is a low-risk try.
[HOST] It's the best news a small brand has had all year. The single-serve shopper is the one shopper willing to gamble four dollars on a name they've never heard of. The family-size shopper buys what they bought last time. Nobody risks twelve dollars on a stranger. Four dollars, sure. That trial is the opening, and your content decides whether the second purchase happens or the can sits in the door of the fridge forever.
[GUEST] So why does every food account still shoot the giant pack?
[HOST] Because the photographer was told to make it look abundant. Ten bags in a pyramid, a table for twelve, a bowl the size of a hubcap. That photo is talking to a household that's shrinking. The person scrolling at eleven at night is one person, maybe two, wondering if it's worth four bucks. Every food photographer has shot that pyramid. It looks great in a deck and does nothing for the person holding a phone in a one-bedroom apartment.
[GUEST:mischievous] Me. That's me.
[HOST] That's you. So talk to you. Show it at real size in one hand, say the price out loud, and make it about one night, not a party. Three moves.
[HOST] One. Shoot your smallest format at real scale, in a hand, with the price said on camera in the first three seconds. A single can someone can picture in their own fridge outsells a pallet shot.
[HOST] Two. Rewrite your recipe and serving content for one or two people this month. Dinner for two, a snack for one, a single-serve pour. Retire the table for twelve until Christmas, when people actually set one.
[HOST] Three. For Halloween, make one post about the small bag that's worth handing out on one porch, and one for the adults who skipped the candy aisle and still want a treat for themselves. Both are true, and nobody else is saying either one.
[STINGER]
[OUTRO]
[HOST] That's the Weekend Trend Report. If you run a food or beverage brand and you're posting every week to an audience that never seems to grow, the fix is strategy before more posts. I build organic social strategy for food and beverage brands: who your real customers are, where they actually talk about you, and what to post so they bring their friends without a dollar of paid behind it. I've been running social for food and beverage brands for more than fifteen years. gallucci dot net, or DM at gallucciNET on Instagram or LinkedIn.
[GUEST] And tomorrow?
[HOST] Tomorrow in this same feed is The Week Ahead, what's coming this week and what to do about it before it lands. Thanks, Chloe.
[GUEST] Bye, Gio. I'm going to go buy one can of something.