Master the food industry each week—before your coffee cools.
Today’s Bite is Sponsored By:
60-SECOND APPETIZER
Short on time? This section’s got you covered.
🥵 The Hot Store Overhaul: Brutal global heatwaves are forcing supermarkets into a massive technological redesign with 45°C-ready fridges to stop food spoilage.
🌍 The Trillion-Dollar Snack Hunt: Big food brands are shifting billions into Africa, Asia, and Latin America, ditching Western markets to design snacks for the global south.
🎮 Hershey’s Genius Pokémon Pivot: Hershey Canada teamed up with Pokémon for limited-edition wrapper hunts, a masterclass in nostalgia marketing that gamifies grocery shopping.
🌱 Packaging's Next Wave: Biotech startup Kelpi is partnering with packaging giant Amcor to test seaweed-based coatings that replace plastic linings and keep paper fully recyclable.
🌭 "Hot Dog Summer" is Everywhere: A 20-year-old Jennifer Coolidge movie quote has gone viral on TikTok, driving millions of posts and spiking summer BBQ menu demands.
☕ The $50 Billion Coffee Fraud: A massive shadowy industry is capitalizing on climate shortages by secretly blending up to 10% of ground coffee with cheap fillers like twigs and corn.
GLOBAL GRUB
The current global forces shaping our food industry ecosystem.
How Climate Change is Redesigning the Grocery Aisle
Supermarkets have officially become the next critical battleground for climate adaptation, forced into a massive technological overhaul by the brutal, record-shattering heatwaves currently baking the globe. As intense summer heat pushes indoor store environments to their absolute limits, retail giants can no longer just worry about crop failures upstream; they are scrambling to combat soaring indoor temperatures with heavy-duty, 45°C-ready refrigeration systems engineered to prevent catastrophic food spoilage during grid strains. This infrastructure crisis connects climate reality, retail economics, and advanced cooling technology in a way that every shopper sweating in a grocery aisle immediately understands. Beyond upgrading physical compressors, chains are deploying predictive algorithms to manage chaotic, weather-driven demand spikes—like sudden, massive runs on ice cream, ice, and cold drinks the moment a heat advisory drops. Ultimately, these recent extreme weather events prove that protecting our food system requires fortifying the very storefronts we buy it from, turning the humble grocery run into a high-tech survival strategy for a rapidly warming world.
Big Food’s New Passport: The Trillion-Dollar Snack Hunt
Big food brands are shifting billions of dollars into Africa, Asia, and Latin America to escape flat sales and inflation in Western markets, targeting a trillion-dollar growth opportunity by 2030. This pivot forces companies to abandon their old one-size-fits-all strategies and instead create highly affordable, locally inspired snacks and single-serve packs tailored specifically for these rapidly growing populations. This shift is critically important because it completely dictates the future of global food production and supply chains, proving that the buying power of consumers in developing nations now shapes international market trends more than traditional shopping hubs in New York, Paris, or London. As a result, the next generation of iconic global snacks and drinks will be designed first for street markets in Lagos or Jakarta, rather than supermarket shelves in the West.
Gotta Catch ’Em All at the Candy Aisle: Inside Hershey’s Genius Pokémon Pivot
Following a wildly successful rollout in the United States, Hershey Canada has officially joined forces with The Pokémon Company International to turn ordinary snack breaks into a full-blown summer scavenger hunt. This limited-edition crossover is a genius branding strategy because it cleverly taps into deep childhood nostalgia and gamifies everyday grocery shopping. By wrapping classic Hershey’s Kisses in Poké Ball foils that feature the original 151 Kanto region monsters alongside ten elusive Team Rocket variations, the brands turn simple chocolate into highly coveted collector's items. For chocolate bar purists, Hershey's Cookies 'N' Creme and Milk Chocolate with Almond bars are also getting in on the action with 12 character-themed foils apiece. To lean entirely into the gamer fandom, the launch features an interactive digital hub where fans can log their real-world candy stash, track their collection progress, and unlock exclusive online rewards. The special-edition wrappers are rolling out to major grocery shelves across Canada right now, giving fans just a few short summer months to build their rosters before they disappear for good.
ON THE MENU: KELPI
An insider look at the industry disruptors, biggest players, and culinary visionaries.
Packaging's Next Wave
UK biotech startup Kelpi is on a mission to eliminate fossil-fuel plastic packaging by looking directly to the sea. The innovative company specializes in turning sustainably cultivated marine seaweed into high-performance bioplastics that decompose naturally without leaving toxic residues behind. By utilizing seaweed, Kelpi creates a truly circular material that grows rapidly in the ocean, requires no fresh water or agricultural land, and absorbs carbon dioxide as it grows, making it an environmental superstar compared to traditional petroleum-based plastics.
The company's breakthrough innovation is a specialized seaweed-based coating designed specifically for fiber and paper-based food containers. Historically, paper takeout boxes and grocery packaging have been lined with thin layers of plastic to prevent food from leaking or spoiling, which makes the item almost impossible to recycle. Kelpi’s new formula solves this exact issue by matching the protective qualities of plastic while keeping the entire package completely recyclable and compostable.
To bring this technology to supermarket shelves worldwide, Kelpi has officially teamed up with global packaging giant Amcor for rigorous real-world testing. Here is why this partnership is a game-changer for the food industry:
The ultimate barrier: The seaweed coating provides a highly durable shield against moisture and oxygen to keep food fresh and prevent grease leaks.
Seamless household recycling: Because the coating is entirely organic, the paper packaging can be tossed straight into standard paper recycling bins.
Massive commercial scale: Partnering with a giant like Amcor allows this tech to scale rapidly and replace millions of tonnes of plastic-lined packaging.
VIRAL BITE
Everyone and their mom is doing it… so let’s talk about it.
“Hot Dog Summer” is Everywhere
A 20-year-old movie quote is currently driving millions of food-related posts across social media. Jennifer Coolidge’s iconic line from Legally Blonde 2 ("You look like the Fourth of July… makes me want a hot dog real bad") has resurfaced as one of the biggest summer trends, prompting brands, restaurants, and creators to flood feeds with creative hot dog recipes, backyard BBQ content, and specialized summer menus. This viral phenomenon highlights the powerful influence of nostalgic pop culture on modern dining trends, turning a simple movie quote into a major driver for seasonal restaurant sales and grocery store item demand.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A bite-sized serving of the strange, surprising or just plain random facts.
Up to 10% of ground coffee is adulterated with fillers like twigs and corn, driven by a massive, shadowy industry capitalizing on high prices and climate-driven shortages. This $50 billion fraud involves blending cheap agricultural waste with premium beans to deceive global suppliers.
Sponsored: Take Your Food Business to the Next Level with Parkway Advisory
Growth creates complexity. The model that helped a food business get started is rarely the same model required to scale it.
Parkway Advisory helps food businesses at strategic inflection points create clarity, install operating discipline, and build the structure required for sustainable growth.
Built as an operator-led advisory platform, Parkway supports founders, ownership groups, leadership teams, and investors navigating expansion, succession, customer concentration, margin pressure, capital decisions, or M&A readiness.
Our work goes beyond traditional consulting. We combine strategic analysis with practical food-industry experience across manufacturing, commercial execution, procurement, governance, and organizational design. The result is advice that connects the boardroom to the plant floor.
Parkway Advisory supports strategic growth planning, leadership and governance, KPI dashboards, management cadence, commercial diagnostics, capital allocation, procurement improvement, and value creation execution.
We also bring a next-generation approach to advisory work, using sharper data, AI-enabled workflows, and structured decision tools to help leadership teams move faster, see the business more clearly, and focus resources where they matter most.
Whether your brand is preparing for its next stage of growth, evaluating new channels, strengthening leadership structure, or getting ready for investment or acquisition, Parkway Advisory helps turn ambition into an executable plan.
Ready to take your food business to the next level?
Visit parkwayfoodgroup.com to learn more.
See you next week!
Copyright (C) 2026 behind the bite. All rights reserved.
You are receiving this newsletter because you are a food pro.