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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, I saw you and Ruby on Highland at six this morning. She was walking you.
alexis parker: She found a tumbleweed she believes belongs to her. We negotiated for ten minutes and I lost.
giovanni gallucci: Today, Google wants to write the feed itself, FDA wants Big Food to show its homework, and a party punch brand finally listened to a three-year-old joke.
alexis parker: Travis brought me a Search Engine Journal piece, and Jayme flagged the same thing an hour later. Google has four open job listings tied to Discover, the feed on your phone that sits under the search bar. One is a staff machine learning engineer on a team that, quote, leads by recommending AI-generated content.
giovanni gallucci: So the feed that used to send people to your blog post wants to write the post itself.
alexis parker: That's how I read it. Another listing is a principal design lead, two hundred seventy-five to three hundred eighty-two thousand base, to build what Google calls a proactive, hyper-personalized concierge experience.
chloe dawn: A concierge. Nothing says personal like a hotel lobby run by a server farm.
giovanni gallucci: How big is Discover, for the folks who never think about it?
alexis parker: Google cites more than five hundred million daily users. Recipe blogs, local news, hobby sites, small brands with a good photo and a sharp headline. A lot of them have lived off Discover traffic for years.
chloe dawn: And it's been creeping this way for a while. AI previews on trending topics last October, a dive deeper test in September.
alexis parker: There's one line in the design listing I'll give them credit for. It says keep human voices and sources central.
giovanni gallucci: That's a nice sentence to put in a job post. The person who wrote it doesn't control the budget.
alexis parker: Here's the dumb take I keep seeing already. Discover is dead, quit posting, AI ate the internet.
giovanni gallucci: That's the panic version, and it's wrong. Google can summarize what's been written. It can't summarize what hasn't been written yet. The brand that keeps putting first-hand stuff into the world, things somebody had to be standing in a room to see, keeps having something worth sending people to.
chloe dawn: Okay, but if the summary answers the question, why does anybody click through to me?
giovanni gallucci: Some won't. Plan on losing a slice of that traffic. The question is what you do with the people who still show up, because right now most brands treat a stranger from Discover like a tourist. They read, they leave, and nobody ever learns their name.
alexis parker: That's the part that bugs me. We built a whole decade of marketing on rented rooms. Facebook, then Instagram, now the Google feed. Every one of them changed the lease on us.
alexis parker: I watched this happen to the music blogs in Chicago. An aggregator would lift the review, write two lines on top, and the kid who stood in the pit with a camera got nothing. The blogs that lasted had a mailing list and a reason to be on it.
giovanni gallucci: So give the visitor a key to a room you hold. A broadcast channel on Instagram. A WhatsApp channel. An email list if your crowd reads email. Somewhere the landlord can't swap your post for a summary overnight.
chloe dawn: Why does that beat just getting more followers on the main account?
giovanni gallucci: Because a follow on the main account still runs through the feed, and the feed decides whether they see you. A broadcast channel sends a notification. One is a flyer on a bulletin board at the post office. The other is a note slid under the door.
alexis parker: And the channel needs a reason to exist, or it's the feed again with fewer people in it.
giovanni gallucci: Right. Give it one job. First look at anything new, a full day early. A restock, a new flavor, the farmers market table you'll be at on Saturday. People join a channel for an advantage. Nobody joins for a second copy of the feed.
chloe dawn: So what does a small brand post that a summary can't copy?
giovanni gallucci: Anything that required a person to be somewhere. The pallet that showed up short and how you sorted it out. The shelf at the store in Alpine that just started carrying you. The answer you gave a customer at the counter, filmed right after they left. A model can rewrite every recipe on the internet. It can't stand in Alpine.
alexis parker: It also can't get bossed around by a dog over a tumbleweed, which is the only first-hand content I produced this morning.
giovanni gallucci: Post it. That counts.
giovanni gallucci: OK, three quick takeaways before we move on.
giovanni gallucci: One. Open a broadcast channel on Instagram this week and give it one job: anything new shows up there a full day before the feed sees it.
chloe dawn: Two. Once a week, post something that only exists because someone from the brand was standing there with a phone. No stock, no rewrite of somebody else's article.
alexis parker: Three. On the posts strangers find you through, end the caption with one plain reason to follow, what they'll get next week that a summary won't give them.
chloe dawn: Jayme put this one in front of me. On Wednesday, FDA runs a public webinar on its proposed GRAS rule. GRAS stands for generally recognized as safe, and for decades it's run on the honor system.
giovanni gallucci: Walk people through the honor system, because most operators have never had to think about it.
chloe dawn: A company decides an ingredient is safe, writes up its own justification, and maybe tells FDA, maybe doesn't. Telling them has been voluntary. The proposal from August would make companies file how they reached that call, for new ingredients and for the ones already in your pantry, and the usage details would go into a public database.
alexis parker: Wait, the ones already in use too? So stuff that's been on shelves for twenty years gets paperwork?
chloe dawn: The reasoning gets filed, yes. The Environmental Working Group counted a hundred and eleven chemicals that reached American food this way without an FDA review. EWG is an advocacy group, so weigh the number like one. The mechanism they describe is just the law as written.
giovanni gallucci: Who ends up paying for this?
chloe dawn: Whoever has the long ingredient deck and the self-certified additives. Look down the snack aisle and tell me who that is. Mostly the biggest companies in it. If your label reads tomatoes, salt, chile, you've got nothing to file.
giovanni gallucci: Funny how the brands with forty ingredients are the ones discovering a deep personal interest in administrative law.
chloe dawn: Oh, they'll fight it. The Congressional Research Service already questioned whether FDA can require this without Congress passing a new law. And Peter Lurie at CSPI pointed out that companies still won't have to prove an old additive is safe. They only have to show their reasoning.
alexis parker: So it might never happen.
giovanni gallucci: It might get tied up for years. That doesn't change much for us. Once a public database is even being argued about, shoppers start asking the question out loud. What is this thing, and who decided it was fine? The trade groups will spend next year on lawyers. A small brand gets to spend it answering that question on camera.
chloe dawn: I'm already seeing the dumb version of this. Clean-label brands, go post a video dunking on Big Food's additives.
giovanni gallucci: Skip it. Dunking turns you into the angry account, and nobody buys from the angry account twice. Answer for your own panel and let the shopper do the comparing in the aisle.
alexis parker: What does answering for your own panel look like in a feed, though? Nobody's going to sit through somebody reading an ingredient list.
giovanni gallucci: One ingredient per clip. Fifteen seconds. What it is, what it does in this product, and what would happen if you took it out. The citric acid keeps the salsa from going brown. The sunflower lecithin keeps the chocolate from going chalky. Plain words, no lab coat.
chloe dawn: And the boring ones too? Salt?
giovanni gallucci: Especially salt. When a shopper sees you bothered to explain the salt, they stop wondering what you're hiding behind the hard words.
alexis parker: Do you show the actual ingredient, or just talk about it?
giovanni gallucci: Hold it up. The sack of citric acid, the tub of lecithin, whatever came off the truck that week. People have read these words on packages their whole lives and never once seen what they look like. That first look is half the clip.
chloe dawn: A girl stopped me in the grocery aisle at Porter's last week, my flash still popping from a shoot, and asked if I knew what xanthan gum was. She'd been standing there googling it for five minutes. That's the customer.
giovanni gallucci: Then put the clips where she'll find them. One Highlight on Instagram, or one pinned playlist on TikTok, named after the question people actually ask. What's in it. Why is that in there. Now your whole panel sits one tap from the profile, and you filed your homework before anybody asked you to.
alexis parker: And the timing lines up with Wednesday.
giovanni gallucci: The webinar's on Wednesday, so people will be talking about additives all week. That's your week to have the answers already sitting there.
chloe dawn: I'd watch a whole playlist of that. Ten clips, ten ingredients, and I'd know the brand better than its own sales rep.
giovanni gallucci: Three things you can actually do today.
giovanni gallucci: One. Pick the ingredient people ask you about most and make a fifteen-second clip on what it does in that product. Next week, do the next one.
chloe dawn: Two. Save every one of those clips in a single Highlight or pinned playlist named after the question shoppers ask, so the whole panel is one tap from your profile.
alexis parker: Three. On Wednesday, post a plain photo of the back of your pack with one line in the caption, the ingredient count. Let the comments do the comparing.
giovanni gallucci: Travis brought me this one out of Food Dive, and I laughed out loud at my desk. Back on April Fools in 2023, BeatBox, the party punch that comes in a box, posted a fake flavor with Cinnabon.
alexis parker: The cinnamon roll punch.
giovanni gallucci: The cinnamon roll punch. It was a joke. Fans didn't take it as a joke. They kept asking for it, and last week BeatBox and Cinnabon announced it's real. BeatBox Cinnamon Roll.
chloe dawn: Cinnamon roll in a party punch. My blood sugar just filed a complaint.
giovanni gallucci: Fair enough. But look at what happened. A brand posted a product that didn't exist, and the replies told it to go make the thing. That's the cheapest product research anybody has ever done.
alexis parker: And it took them three years.
giovanni gallucci: That's my problem with it. BeatBox is majority owned by AB InBev. A company with that kind of money had a public, timestamped, written list of people asking to buy something, and it took three years to say yes.
chloe dawn: So why does a small brand get to move faster on this?
giovanni gallucci: Because nobody has to take it to a quarterly portfolio review. The founder reads the replies on a Tuesday night and has a test batch by the next month. At a big company, a joke has to clear legal twice before it's allowed to become a product.
alexis parker: So the advice is post fake products? Because that can go sideways fast.
giovanni gallucci: It can. The April Fools cover is what kept it safe for them. Nobody felt lied to. The version for a small brand is simpler and more honest. Post the mock-up and say plainly that it doesn't exist. We're thinking about this. Would you buy it?
chloe dawn: Doesn't that kill the surprise of a launch?
giovanni gallucci: It trades it. You give up the surprise and get a list of people who already said yes, in public, with their names on it. Surprise is nice for a day. A list keeps paying.
alexis parker: What does the mock-up need to look like? Most small brands don't have a render team sitting around.
giovanni gallucci: A photo of the can with a hand-written label taped on it. A phone shot on the kitchen counter. The rougher it looks, the more people believe you mean the question. If it looks finished, they assume it's coming whether they ask or not, and then they don't ask.
chloe dawn: I'd comment on that. A taped label on a can in good window light beats half of what I see brands post.
alexis parker: Which platform does the mock-up go on?
giovanni gallucci: Wherever your people already comment. For most food brands that means Instagram, and a carousel works best. First slide is the taped can, second slide is the question in plain type. On TikTok, hold the can up and ask it out loud in ten seconds. Don't run it as an ad. Paid reach brings in strangers who say yes to anything free.
chloe dawn: And Stories?
giovanni gallucci: Stories get the poll sticker. Yes or no, would you buy it. The carousel gets the real comments, the ones with reasons in them, and the reasons are what you build from.
alexis parker: And the replies turn into receipts.
giovanni gallucci: They turn into the launch. Screenshot every comment that asks for it. When the thing ships, the first post is those screenshots stacked up, with the date on the oldest one. Your customers built this, and there's the proof.
chloe dawn: And tag them. If my comment showed up on a launch post, every person I know would hear about it by lunch.
giovanni gallucci: Tag them by name on day one. The people who asked first are your launch crew. They'll do more announcing than any paid post you could buy.
alexis parker: What about the ones that flop? You post the mock-up and three people care.
giovanni gallucci: Then you saved yourself a production run. Three comments is an answer too. Post the next idea next month. A brand that runs this every month learns more about its customers in a year than most of them learn from a focus group.
chloe dawn: Do you say so publicly when it flops?
giovanni gallucci: One line. You didn't want this one, fair enough, here's the next. People like a brand that can take a no.
alexis parker: That's more grace than BeatBox showed the joke for three years.
giovanni gallucci: Here's what to actually do with all of that.
giovanni gallucci: One. Post a rough mock-up of the flavor or product you're kicking around this month. Say plainly it doesn't exist yet and ask who'd buy it.
chloe dawn: Two. Screenshot every reply that asks for it, with the date. When it ships, those screenshots are your launch post.
alexis parker: Three. On launch day, tag the first people who asked, by name. They'll announce it louder than any ad you could pay for.
giovanni gallucci: That's the show. Tomorrow on this same feed it's Shelf Life, one food and beverage brand taken apart start to finish.
alexis parker: Ruby and I will be listening on the walk.
giovanni gallucci: If your brand is launching a channel, or restarting one that went quiet, and every post sounds like a committee wrote it, I build the brand voice and the content plan that make it sound like you. 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 Wednesday.
giovanni gallucci: Take care, everybody.