“Individuals make enjoyable of me concerning the fridges,” stated Tassos Stassopoulos. “I’m fridge-obsessed.” Because the founder and managing companion of Trinetra, a London-based funding agency, Stassopoulos has pioneered an uncommon technique: peeking inside fridges in houses around the globe with a purpose to predict the longer term—and monetize these insights.
By the point of his refrigeration revelation in 2009, Stassopoulos had already gained a fame for his maverick course of: The place different traders sometimes relied on market information and forecasts from large consumer-products corporations to infer what individuals in, say, India may begin buying sooner or later, Stassopoulos spent days touring across the nation, asking them himself. He discovered the ethnographic course of fascinating and threw himself into it, visiting casual settlements and working-class neighborhoods to talk with individuals for hours—however he nonetheless wasn’t getting the knowledge he wished. “The issue is that I used to be asking individuals, ‘OK, assume you get a wage improve. How will your weight loss plan change?’ They’d all say, ‘I wouldn’t change something,’” Stassopoulos defined. “However we all know that as individuals get richer, their diets change.”
One afternoon he was within the metropolis of Aurangabad, a pair hundred miles inland from Mumbai, interviewing a girl who had simply given him that precise response. Her household was fairly poor, and what little meals she had in the home was very conventional—pulses, rice, and pickles. On a whim, Stassopoulos requested the lady if she’d thoughts taking him buying. He gave her some rupees and adopted her to the nook store, the place she purchased Cadbury chocolate bars, Coca-Cola, and a few packaged savory snacks—objects that have been very completely different from the meals she at the moment fed her household, however that Stassopoulos had repeatedly documented within the fridges and cabinets of individuals one socioeconomic class above hers. “I noticed that the reply is the fridge!” he stated. “The fridge may inform me how individuals would behave as soon as they’d some more money—earlier than they even comprehend it themselves.”
Stassopoulos began grouping his images of fridges by revenue to see how their contents advanced. What emerged was a journey, beginning with a poor household’s acquisition of their first fridge. “For them, it’s an effectivity machine,” stated Stassopoulos. They use it to retailer both the components to make conventional dishes or the leftovers from these dishes. Upon their ascent into the center class, the fridge begins to incorporate treats and worldwide manufacturers—delicate drinks, beer, and ice cream. “You might have some disposable revenue for the primary time,” stated Stassopoulos. “You need to present all this stuff that your loved ones was beforehand disadvantaged of, and also you need to exhibit whereas doing it.”
As soon as a household turns into really prosperous, their fridge will shift once more. The place one model of ice cream within the freezer was an indulgent deal with for all of the household, a number of manufacturers of ice cream reveal that frozen desserts are actually regular sufficient that particular person relations can dislike one another’s most well-liked flavors. “Earlier than, it was simply, Sure, we will get ice cream,” he stated. “Now all of it turns into about me: I like chocolate and I don’t like strawberry.” Components from completely different cultures in addition to objects marketed as wholesome—fat-free, weight loss plan, or probiotic meals—additionally present up on fridge cabinets at this revenue stage, reflecting, in Stassopoulos’ rubric, a want for self-improvement and, beneath it, a transition towards individualistic, Western values.
The top of his pyramid is reached as soon as a fridge incorporates meals that specific collective advantage: fair-trade, natural, cruelty-free merchandise in reusable packaging. “That is the place the Nordics are,” he stated. “India is generally on this effectivity stage, China is on the indulgence stage, and Brazil is already on the wholesome stage.” Primarily based on Indian fridgenomics, he determined to put money into dairy processors, corporations that flip milk into butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. He predicted that these have been the objects Indian households would add to their diets as their incomes elevated—and up to date information displaying double-digit progress in gross sales of value-added dairy merchandise, to not point out his above-benchmark returns, have confirmed him appropriate.
