UNSTUCK Recap: What You Read The Most In 2024

Yes, it’s that time of the year.

We’ve gotten our Spotify Wrapped, and maybe even shared it depending on whether the results make us look cool or weird (although you can always blame the kids for tainting the algorithm rankings). Critics are compiling their Best of 2024 lists for every imaginable category.

And here at UNSTUCK we're also practicing what we preach. You, the reader, showed us what mattered the most when it comes to consumer-centricity in sustainable food with your clicks and eyeballs. 

Here are the UNSTUCK top 5 most read articles of the year.  

#5: Why Most Alt-Protein Research Is Bollocks, And The Answers To Three Key Questions To Improve It

Swearing may have helped with the clicks, but the strength of our feeling about the state of research in the industry justified it and got you reading. Perhaps the biggest lesson the sustainable foods industry has learned the hard way is that consumers act emotionally, not rationally, when it comes to buying food. It’s the reason “the same but sustainable/ethical” doesn’t work, and why most industry research that keeps telling us that it will, is bollocks.

#4: Vaping Took Off By Reframing Its Category, Here's How Sustainable Food Can Emulate Its Success

Our first guest author, Michelle Roberts, unpacked the most impressive category reframe of the century. Both mobile phones and the internet were decades in the making, but within just a few short years, e-cigarettes became double the size of the tobacco industry. Understanding their approach to selling “better” rather than selling “instead” is crucial for any marketer wanting to drive real category change. 

#3: Blended Meat Saved The World Once, Can It Do It Again?

While SPAM, the original blended meat, saved armies and helped win World War 2, the current batch of blended meat products falls far short. Based on what the industry can make, rather than what consumers want, they remain a solution looking for a problem. The only way out will be to stop thinking commodity, and start thinking value-add. In other words, exactly what trained marketers should be doing to grow your business.

#2: Brands doing different right

We started UNSTUCK with a resolution to stop thinking parity, and start thinking difference. This year, we’re finally starting to see businesses using this crucial mentality as their starting point in powerful ways such as the CEO of Vow declaring he’s in business to remind people “what it’s like to taste something new for the first time”, Tindle’s new launches focusing on “doing what regular meat can’t”, and B2B ingredients players like Vivici framing their offerings as “a new standard of protein” (Disclaimer: Vivici is a client of the authors).  

#1: Are Your Customers F*cking Idiots?

Sure, the judicious use of an f-bomb or five helps get attention. But the underlying point about the fallacy of following prophetic visions and the importance of actual customer-orientation couldn’t be more serious. We were heartened to feel the sentiment finally surfacing both on and off the stage at last months’ Singapore Agrifood Innovation Week conference. About f*cking time if you ask us.

Thank you for being part of the debate this year. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading UNSTUCK at least as much as we have writing it. Stay tuned for how we’ll be helping you to turn many of these ideas into action, drive consumer behavior change and build commercial businesses in the new year.