“People are laughing me about refrigerators,” Tassos Stassopoulos said. “I have an obsession with refrigerators.” As founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos pioneered an unusual strategy: peering into refrigerators in homes around the world to predict the future and monetize his insights.
By the time of his refrigeration discovery in 2009, Stassopoulos had already earned a reputation for his unconventional process: while other investors typically relied on market data and forecasts from large consumer goods companies to infer what people in, say, India, might start buying in the future, Stassopoulos spent days traveling around the country asking them questions. He found the ethnographic process fascinating and immersed himself in it, visiting informal settlements and working-class neighborhoods to talk to people for hours — but he still didn’t get the information he wanted. “The problem is that I was asking people, ‘OK, let’s assume you get a raise. How will your diet change?’ Everyone was like, ‘I wouldn’t change anything,'” Stassopoulos explained. “But we know that as people become wealthier, their diet changes.”
One afternoon he was in the city of Aurangabad, a few hundred miles inland from Mumbai, interviewing a woman who had given him exactly that answer. Her family was quite impoverished, and what they had at home was very established—pulses, rice, and pickles. On impulse, Stassopoulos asked the woman if she would mind taking him shopping. He gave her a few rupees and followed her to a corner store, where she bought Cadbury chocolates, Coca-Cola, and a few packaged savoury snacks—foods that were very different from the food she was currently feeding her family, but that Stassopoulos had repeatedly documented in the fridges and cupboards of people one socioeconomic class above hers. “I realized the answer was the fridge!” he said. “The fridge could tell me how people would behave if they had a little extra money—before they knew it themselves.”
Stassopoulos began grouping his photos of refrigerators by income to see how their contents evolved. It was a journey that began with a impoverished family buying their first refrigerator. “For them, it’s an efficient appliance,” Stassopoulos said. They employ it to store ingredients for established meals or leftovers. As they entered the middle class, the refrigerator began to stock up on treats and international brands—pliable drinks, beer, ice cream. “For the first time, you have disposable income,” Stassopoulos said. “You want to provide all the things your family didn’t have before, and you want to show off.”
When the family becomes really wealthy, their refrigerator will change again. While one brand of ice cream in the freezer used to be a family delight, multiple ice cream brands show that frozen desserts are now so normal that individual family members may not like their favorite flavors. “Before it was just, Yes, we can get ice cream” he said. “Now it all comes down to I: I like chocolate and AND I don’t like strawberriesIngredients from different cultures, as well as products advertised as healthy — fat-free, diet or probiotic — also appear on the refrigerator shelves of people at this income level, reflecting, Stassopoulos says, a desire for self-improvement and an underlying shift toward individualistic, Western values.
The top of his pyramid is reached when the refrigerator contains food that expresses collective virtue: fair-trade, organic and cruelty-free products in reusable packaging. “The Nordics are here,” he said. “India is mostly in the efficiency stage, China is in the indulgence stage, and Brazil is already in the healthy development stage.” Based on Indian refrigeratornomics, he decided to invest in milk processors, companies that turn milk into butter, cheese, yogurt and ice cream. He predicted that these were the products that Indian families would add to their diets as incomes rose – and recent data showing double-digit growth in sales of value-added dairy products, not to mention above-average returns, proved him right.