“People entertain people “You’ve never talked to me about refrigerators,” says Tassos Statsopoulos. “I’m obsessed with refrigerators.” Mr. Statsopoulos, founder and managing partner of the London-based investment firm Trinetra, has pioneered an unusual strategy: peering inside refrigerators in homes around the world to predict the future and then monetize the insights.
By the time of his refrigeration discovery in 2009, Stathopoulos had already earned a reputation for his unconventional approach. While other investors typically relied on market data and forecasts from major consumer goods companies to guess what people in, say, India would start buying in the future, Stathopoulos spent days traveling the country and asking them questions himself. He became fascinated with this ethnographic approach and immersed himself in it, visiting informal settlements and working-class neighborhoods and spending hours talking to people, but still not getting the information he wanted. “The problem was, I was asking people, ‘So suppose you get a pay raise. How would your diet change?’ And they all said, ‘Nothing,'” Stathopoulos explained. “But we know that when people get wealthier, their diet changes.”
One afternoon, in the city of Aurangabad, a few hundred miles inland from Mumbai, Stathopoulos was interviewing a woman who had just given him that exact answer. Her family was very poor, and the few foods they had at home were very traditional: pulses, rice, and pickles. On a whim, Stathopoulos asked the woman if she could take her shopping. He gave her a few rupees and followed her to a corner store, where she bought a Cadbury chocolate bar, a Coca-Cola, and some delicious packaged snacks. They were completely different from what she was feeding her family now, but Stathopoulos had repeatedly recorded them in the refrigerators and cupboards of people one socio-economic class above her. “I realised the answer was the refrigerator!” he said. “The refrigerator tells you how people will behave if they have extra money, even before they know it.”
Stassopoulos grouped the photos of refrigerators by income and began to see how their contents had changed. What emerged was a journey that began with a poor family buying their first refrigerator. “For them, the refrigerator is an efficiency device,” Stassopoulos says. They use it to store ingredients for traditional dishes and leftovers from those dishes. As they move up to the middle class, the refrigerator begins to stock treats like soft drinks, beer, and ice cream, as well as international brands. “For the first time, they have disposable money,” Stassopoulos says. “They want to provide their family with all the things they didn’t have before, and they want to show it off.”
When families become truly affluent, the refrigerator changes again. Whereas having one brand of ice cream in the freezer was a luxury treat for the whole family, with multiple brands of ice cream, frozen desserts are now the norm, and family members may dislike each other’s favorite flavors. “Before, Yes, I can have ice cream.“Now everything myself: I Chocolatey I I don’t like strawberriesAt this income level, multicultural ingredients and products marketed as health foods (fat-free, diet, probiotics, etc.) also appear on refrigerator shelves, reflecting, in Stathopoulos’ words, a desire for self-improvement and the underlying shift towards individualistic Western values.
The top of his pyramid is reached when his fridge contains foods that represent collective virtue: fair-trade, organic, cruelty-free products in reusable packaging. “The Nordic countries are exactly at this stage,” he says. “India is mostly at this efficiency stage, China is at the luxury stage, and Brazil is already at the health stage.” Based on India’s fridge economics, he decided to invest in a dairy processing company that turns milk into butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. He predicted that Indian families would add these items to their diets as their incomes increased, and recent data showing double-digit growth in sales of value-added dairy products and his revenues beating benchmarks have proven him right.
