The Attention Economy Ate Big Food

Why attention became food's scarcest ingredient

In November 2016, I wrote an essay asking whether Big Food would become infrastructure platforms for small brands—like Amazon Web Services for startups. Would large corporations provide production, distribution, and marketing backbone rather than developing their own products?

Major food companies were hemorrhaging market share to nimble startups. Small brands stole consumers with authentic stories and innovative products. Big Food's response? Buy everything.

I suggested this acquisition frenzy might evolve into something radical: What if big companies became the infrastructure that enabled cool instead of trying to buy it?

Nine years later, that vision was both prescient and limited.

The Arms Race Never Ended

Big Food never stopped acquiring. The pace accelerated, with established players paying premium prices for emerging brands.

But look at what they're buying. These aren't product or patent acquisitions—they're purchasing pre-existing relationships with millions of minds. Every small brand that captures consumer imagination becomes an attention-harvesting machine. Their social followers, email lists, and loyal customers represent something more valuable than factories: proven ability to convert attention into revenue.

Here's what my 2016 prediction missed: I assumed Big Food would choose between acquiring brands and becoming infrastructure. Instead, they're doing both—plus something I never saw coming. They're attention aggregators, accumulating customer relationships like private equity firms accumulate assets.

The Platform That Never Was

The infrastructure-as-a-service model I envisioned never materialized for CPG brands. While restaurants underwent digital transformation, packaged food companies faced different realities.

What emerged was fragmentation. Contract manufacturers multiplied. Co-packing facilities expanded. Third-party logistics proliferated. Infrastructure exists, but it's scattered across hundreds of companies rather than consolidated in corporate giants.

This happened for good reason. Big Food's factories were optimized for their own products. Distribution networks were locked into retail relationships. Opening these systems to competitors created more complications than opportunities.

The real story wasn't about physical infrastructure—it was about attention infrastructure.

The Attention Wars

Since 2016, social media became the operating system for culture. It shifted presidential elections. It determines which brands survive. For CPG companies, social presence isn't optional—it's existential.

Successful food startups now begin with Instagram accounts, not factories. They build communities before products. Manufacturing can be outsourced, distribution negotiated, but attention must be earned post by post.

The pandemic accelerated this shift unexpectedly. When lockdowns hit, every CPG brand rushed direct-to-consumer. The promise: cut out middlemen, own customer relationships, capture full margins. Reality hit hard. Customer acquisition costs skyrocketed. Digital advertising became a bidding war. Building audiences from scratch became prohibitively expensive.

The pandemic didn't kill retail—it reminded everyone why gatekeepers matter. Grocery stores, with limited shelf space and established traffic, are incredibly efficient attention aggregators. One retail placement delivers more eyeballs than months of Instagram ads.

The New Symbiosis

This reality rewrote the relationship between big and small. Startups build with acquisition in mind—not as defeat but as strategic scaling. They're not trying to topple Big Food. They're building features for Big Food's operating system.

Small brands convert cultural moments into customer relationships. They spot trends before focus groups. They build communities around oat milk or whatever comes next. They're attention miners, extracting value from cultural veins big companies can't see.

Here's the crucial insight: Big Food can reverse-engineer almost any successful startup's product. That artisanal granola? Those plant-based nuggets? Any food scientist worth their salt can replicate them within months. But they can't reverse-engineer trust. They can't replicate authentic community connections. They can't manufacture the attention these brands command.

It's not the food that's most important—it's the attention.

Small brands became Big Food's R&D department in the truest sense. They're market validators and attention gatherers, testing concepts faster than corporate labs. When they succeed, they bring proven attention-capture algorithms, validated segments, and engaged consumers.

The infrastructure startups need—cloud computing, fulfillment networks—is available on demand. But what they provide—cultural relevance and concentrated attention—is priceless. Small brands need big companies' distribution. Big companies need small brands' followers.

This symbiosis explains why acquisitions haven't slowed. Big Food isn't buying innovation—they're buying cultural relevance and the ability to speak authentically to consumers who ignore traditional advertising.

The Real Platform Play

My 2016 prediction was right and wrong. Big Food became platforms for small food—just not through shared factories or open networks. They became platforms through M&A departments functioning like venture capital, retail relationships serving as attention aggregators, and marketing machines scaling niche brands into household names.

The disruption wasn't Big Food becoming AWS. It was realizing that in an attention economy, distribution isn't about trucks—it's about capturing consumer focus. Physical infrastructure became commoditized. Attention infrastructure became everything.

In 2025, Big Food already is a platform—through acquisition, amplification, and portfolio cultivation spanning every cultural niche. Winners aren't those with the best recipes or supply chains, but those who understand attention is the new oil, and small brands are the most efficient extraction machines.

What radical prediction about food's future will seem quaint in 2034? Whatever it is, it will probably involve technologies and business models we haven't invented yet. The pace of change will make these past nine years look glacial.

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Here’s More!

• My Book - Mise: On the Future of Food

• My Podcast - The Tomorrow Today Show

• My Instagram - The Book of Mise

• My Consultancy - Mise Futures