“People make fun of “I’m obsessed with refrigerators,” said Tassos Stassopoulos. “I’m obsessed with the refrigerator.” As founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peering inside household refrigerators around the world to predict the future and monetize those insights.
By the time of his refrigeration revelation in 2009, Stassopoulos had already earned a reputation for his unconventional process: while other investors typically relied on market data and the forecasts of big consumer products companies to deduce what people in, say, India might start buying in the future, Stassopoulos spent days traveling around the country, asking them himself. He found the ethnographic process fascinating and dedicated himself to it, visiting informal settlements and working-class neighborhoods to chat with people for hours, but he still couldn’t get the information he wanted. “The problem is that I asked people: ‘Okay, let’s say they increase your salary. How will your diet change?’ Everyone said, ‘I wouldn’t change anything,’” Stassopoulos explained. “But we know that as people get richer, their diet changes.”
One afternoon he was in the city of Aurangabad, about two hundred miles inland from Mumbai, interviewing a woman who had just given him exactly that answer. Her family was quite poor and the little food he had at home was very traditional: legumes, rice and pickles. On a whim, Stassopoulos asked the woman if she would mind taking him shopping. He gave her a few rupees and followed her to the corner store, where she bought Cadbury chocolate bars, Coca-Cola, and some packaged salty snacks, items that were very different from the food she was currently feeding her family, but which Stassopoulos had repeatedly documented. in the refrigerators and closets of people of a higher socioeconomic class than her. “I realized the answer is the refrigerator!” he said. “The refrigerator could tell me how people would behave once they had some extra money, before they even realized it themselves.”
Stassopoulos began grouping his refrigerator photos by income to see how his content evolved. What emerged was a journey, which began with the acquisition of his first refrigerator by a poor family. “For them, it’s an efficiency device,” Stassopoulos said. They use it to store either the ingredients to make traditional dishes or the leftovers from those dishes. As they rise to the middle class, the refrigerator begins to include candy and international brands: soft drinks, beer and ice cream. “For the first time you have some disposable income,” Stassopoulos said. “You want to provide all those things your family was previously deprived of and you want to show off while you do it.”
Once a family becomes truly wealthy, their refrigerator changes again. Where one brand of ice cream in the freezer was a treat for the whole family, multiple brands of ice cream reveal that frozen desserts are now normal enough that family members may dislike each other’s preferred flavors. “Before, it was just, Yes, we can get ice cream.,” he said. “Now it’s all about me: YO like chocolate and Yo I don’t like strawberry.” Ingredients from different cultures, as well as products marketed as healthy (fat-free, diet or probiotic foods) also appear on refrigerator shelves at this income level, reflecting, in Stassopoulos’s rubric, a desire for self-improvement and, below it, a transition towards Western individual values.
The top of his pyramid is reached when a fridge contains foods that express collective virtue: fair-trade, organic, cruelty-free products in reusable packaging. “That’s where the Nordic countries are,” he said. “India is mostly at this efficiency stage, China is at the indulgence stage, and Brazil is already at the healthy stage.” Based on Indian fridgeomics, he decided to invest in dairy processors — companies that turn milk into butter, cheese, yogurt and ice cream. He predicted that these were the items Indian families would add to their diets as their incomes rose, and recent data showing double-digit growth in sales of value-added dairy products, not to mention their outperforming returns against the benchmark, have proven him right.