Horizon Scans for better-for-you CPG brands
Founders know their product. Investors know what gets bought. A Horizon Scan puts both views in one document, so a brand doing under $10M in sales and the investor looking at it can work from the same map.
Data services sell you scanner numbers. Trend services sell you the shifting consumer. Neither tells you what those numbers mean for the decision you're making this quarter. A Horizon Scan interprets the data for one brand and one question, so you can see which way to go. It's built only when someone asks for it. And it informs decisions before resources are allocated.
Founders usually piece this picture together themselves, between production runs and buyer calls. We hand it back in a week, sourced and organized.
What's on shelf today tells you who's there. Where the category came from and what's forming at its edges tells you where it's headed and where there's still room.
A founder walks into an investor meeting knowing what will be asked, and the investor knows what the shelf looks like. With a distributor or a chain buyer, the same scan shows where your product fits the set they're planning and why it earns the space.
We don't claim to be neutral. We don't work with extractive companies, or with companies that make their profits from making people unhealthy. Every scan is written for brands trying to feed people well and for the investors backing them. We believe in generative organizations: good people doing good things, so they can better serve the people who rely on them.
Hypenotic is a Certified B Corp. If your organization screens for impact, our filter already matches yours.
The same signal means something different depending on who's reading. Every scan carries the founder and investor lenses. Where the next step is a grocery shelf, it adds the retail buyer's.
Every scan reads the market from where it stands today. South is the past, East the present, West what's emerging, North the future. Each direction ends with its move: the one thing to do about what it found.
Where the market came from and which brands opened it, so you can see the contours of the landscape you're entering.
Key players, formats and price points. Who's winning, who's overextended, and where store brands are taking market share.
Who the category serves, who it misses, and what the missed shoppers want.
What's pushing the category forward and what could stall it, including claims and regulatory risk. Signals are sorted by how fast they move.
Who invests in brands under $10M in sales in this category, what they paid for, and the questions a fund will ask before it writes a check.
Where there's room, what it would take to hold it, and the noteworthy signals worth acting on now.
Each scan arrives as a web document you can share, brief a team from, or bring to a buyer or investor meeting. It stays private to you for six months.
Each one uses the full method. Read them the way you'd read one about your own category.
A niche import that became a grocery staple in under a decade. Who got there first, where the price pressure is, and what a buyer would need to see before backing a founder-led brand.
Read the scan →How cuisines leave the international aisle, which ones have a breakout brand, and which still have cooks and first customers but no brand.
One of its moves: build the sales record in DTC before you pitch retail, and bet long on cuisines that governments have already paid to make familiar.
Read the scan →The jar everyone already owns, in the most crowded aisle in the store. What makes certain brands durable, which kinds of brands are still growing, and where a new brand can still stand out.
Read the scan →Pickles & Soup and Hypenotic build every scan together. Rick brings the operator's view. Hypenotic brings the research and foresight method.
Founder Coach and Brand Builder
Rick founded the premium pickle pioneer Rick's Picks and took it from a Brooklyn apartment kitchen to a global planogram with Whole Foods and foodservice with Shake Shack and Sweetgreen. Then he sold it.
He guides brands through the strategy → finance → operations → marketing continuum, leveraging hard-won experience to build growth intelligently, decisively and thoughtfully.
Barry Martin founded Hypenotic in 1998. It's a Toronto strategy and communications firm that helps good people do good things, so they can better serve the people who need them. Its food work runs the whole chain: conservation agencies helping farmers get more from their soil, farmers, dairies and a LEED-certified cheesemaker, national and provincial agribusiness, CPG naming, packaging and store displays, and an independent grocer built around small brands.
On the other side of the system, it has worked with food banks and a program that feeds 100,000 kids a day, sat on public policy food councils, and runs a not-for-profit that matches new farmers with farmers starting new ventures.
Strategy and Foresight Lead
Twenty years in advertising on large and small food and beverage brands. For fifteen of them, he also ran a café and restaurant.
He studied strategic foresight, has co-founded and sold three businesses, and is active in the Service Design Network, the Association of Professional Futurists and the Association of Registered Graphic Designers.
The Horizon Scan reads the whole category. When your question is narrower, such as how your offer compares or what competitors are saying, we build a specific scan around that one question.
Political, economic, social, technology, legal and environmental signals, filtered for your brand's situation.
Best for brands with international supply chains, where tariffs, trade rules, currency swings and sourcing risk can change the cost of every jar.
Your core promise against the competitors' promises: the gaps, the overlaps, and the positions nobody has taken.
Channels, claims and tone, and where competitors are spending their attention and money.
Start with a short call about the brand and the category. Rick will confirm fit and scope before anything is commissioned. Most scans take one week.
Book a call with Rick → rick@picklesandsoup.com