The Best Place to Build Food Brands
Is LA really a food city?
Some cities are known globally for their food scene. If you ask people what they consider the top food cities in the world, you mighy hear Paris and Tokyo mentioned. Probably London, Copenhagen, Hong Kong. Barcelona. Mexico City. New York & San Francisco in the US. Maybe even Chicago.
LA rarely appears on the World’s 50 Best list (and that’s fine, we’ve got our own thing going here).
But for building food brands, there’s no better place to be.
The 75 Fastest Growing CPG Brands in the US
Retailers don’t like to share data. As a brand, it’s often hard to get a good read of your own performance, let alone get a view of which emerging brands & categories are growing and which aren’t.
But one company is willing to share some data and (lucky for us!) it’s a company that touches 75,000 retail locations in the US. No, not that one, silly! We’re talking about Instacart.
Instacart started tracking - and sharing - a list of the 75 fastest growing, emerging CPG brands across the US. 69 of which are food & beverage brands.
Something in the Water
Yes, it’s technically true that you can launch a brand from anywhere nowadays. But in some places, there seems to be something in the water.
6 of the 69 Food & Beverage brands on the list are headquartered New York. 7 brands brands from Colorado. And a whopping 22 in California.
No. of Brands on the Top-list by State
That’s pretty much what you’d expect from New York - it has 6% of the US population, 8% of US GDP, and takes up 8% of the fastest growing brands list.
But brands from Colorado are pulling more than their weight. They are less than 2% of the population and less than 2% of the economy, but make up 11% of the list.
California is 12% of the population, 15% of the economy, but Califrnian brands make up 32% of the list.
[Food] Brands are Built in LA
We don’t make many appearances on the World’s 50 Best list but doing our own thing as a foodie city seems to be doing wonders for launching food brands.
The Greater LA area produced more fast growing food brands than any other metro area in the country.
No. of Brands on the Top-list by Metro Area
14 of the 75 fastest growing, emerging CPG brands in the US over the past year have come from LA.
12 of those are food brands.
Who Made the List?
We do a run-down of LA’s fastest growing food brands in the next post.
You can find it here.
