Food Brands Resist Monopolies

John Coogan shares insights about the challenges of scaling food brands into monopolies, drawing from his experience as co-founder of Soylent. He explains how food's role in personal expression makes it difficult to create dominant market players.

Key Points:

• Food as Personal Expression

  • Food choices are deeply tied to personal identity and signaling
  • As soon as everyone adopts one food trend, people want to do something different
  • This constant "ping-ponging" makes it hard to maintain market dominance

• Brand Value Limitations

  • Very difficult to create "one brand to rule them all" in food
  • Even strong initial adoption can be temporary due to identity signaling
  • Food brands struggle to develop lasting monopoly power

• Soylent Case Study

  • Initially had strong identity signaling value in tech
  • Signaled values like:
    • Being in tech
    • Valuing productivity over taste
    • Having contrarian views
  • Signal value was powerful but temporary, lasting about a year

• Business Implications

  • Hard to accrue monopoly power in food industry
  • Difficult to disrupt established food companies like Nestle
  • Food companies need to constantly evolve with changing consumer preferences
  • Network effects are harder to achieve compared to technology companies

The core challenge is that food's role in personal expression creates natural limits on brand scaling, making it difficult to build lasting category dominance even with strong initial adoption.