The Attention Economy Ate Big Food

In November 2016, I wrote an essay asking whether Big Food would become infrastructure platforms for small brands, like Amazon Web Services for startups. Would large corporations provide the production, distribution, and marketing backbone rather than developing their own products?

Major food companies were losing market share to nimble startups. Small brands took consumers with authentic stories and inventive products. Big Food's response? Buy everything.

I suggested this acquisition frenzy might evolve into something radical. What if big companies became the infrastructure that enabled cool instead of trying to buy it?

Nine years later, that idea was both prescient and limited.

The arms race never ended

Big Food never stopped acquiring. The pace accelerated, with established players paying premium prices for emerging brands.

But look at what they are buying. These are not product or patent acquisitions. They are purchasing existing relationships with millions of minds. Every small brand that captures consumer imagination becomes an attention-harvesting machine. Their social followers, email lists, and loyal customers represent something more valuable than factories: a proven ability to convert attention into revenue.

Here is what my 2016 prediction missed. I assumed Big Food would choose between acquiring brands and becoming infrastructure. Instead, they are doing both, plus something I never saw coming. They are attention aggregators, accumulating customer relationships the way private equity firms accumulate assets.

The platform that never was

The infrastructure-as-a-service model I imagined never materialized for packaged-goods brands. While restaurants underwent digital transformation, packaged food companies faced different realities.

What emerged was fragmentation. Contract manufacturers multiplied. Co-packing facilities expanded. Third-party logistics proliferated. The infrastructure exists, but it is scattered across hundreds of companies rather than consolidated in corporate giants.

This happened for good reason. Big Food's factories were optimized for their own products. Distribution networks were locked into retail relationships. Opening these systems to competitors created more complications than opportunities.

The real story was not about physical infrastructure. It was about attention infrastructure.

The attention wars

Since 2016, social media became the operating system for culture. It shifted elections. It determines which brands survive. For packaged-goods companies, social presence is not optional. It is existential.

Successful food startups now begin with Instagram accounts, not factories. They build communities before products. Manufacturing can be outsourced and distribution negotiated, but attention has to be earned post by post.

The pandemic accelerated this shift unexpectedly. When lockdowns hit, every brand rushed direct-to-consumer. The promise: cut out middlemen, own the customer relationship, capture full margins. Reality hit hard. Customer acquisition costs jumped. Digital advertising became a bidding war. Building audiences from scratch became prohibitively expensive.

The pandemic did not kill retail. It reminded everyone why gatekeepers matter. Grocery stores, with limited shelf space and established traffic, are efficient attention aggregators. One retail placement delivers more eyeballs than months of Instagram ads.

The new symbiosis

This reality rewrote the relationship between big and small. Startups now build with acquisition in mind, not as defeat but as a way to scale. They are not trying to topple Big Food. They are building features for Big Food's operating system.

Small brands convert cultural moments into customer relationships. They spot trends before the focus groups do. They build communities around oat milk, or whatever comes next. They are attention miners, extracting value from cultural veins big companies cannot see.

Here is the crucial insight. Big Food can reverse-engineer almost any successful startup's product. That artisanal granola? Those plant-based nuggets? Any food scientist worth their salt can replicate them within months. But they cannot reverse-engineer trust. They cannot replicate authentic community connections. They cannot manufacture the attention these brands command.

It is not the food that matters most. It is the attention.

Small brands became Big Food's research department in the truest sense. They are market validators and attention gatherers, testing concepts faster than corporate labs. When they succeed, they bring proven attention-capture methods, validated segments, and engaged consumers.

The infrastructure startups need, like cloud computing and fulfillment networks, is available on demand. But what they provide, cultural relevance and concentrated attention, is not. Small brands need big companies' distribution. Big companies need small brands' followers.

This symbiosis explains why acquisitions have not slowed. Big Food is not buying innovation. It is buying cultural relevance and the ability to speak credibly to consumers who ignore traditional advertising.

The real platform play

My 2016 prediction was right and wrong. Big Food became a platform for small food, just not through shared factories or open networks. It became a platform through M&A departments functioning like venture capital, retail relationships serving as attention aggregators, and marketing machines scaling niche brands into household names.

The disruption was not Big Food becoming AWS. It was realizing that in an attention economy, distribution is not about trucks. It is about capturing consumer focus. Physical infrastructure became commoditized. Attention infrastructure became everything.

In 2025, Big Food already is a platform, through acquisition, amplification, and portfolio cultivation across every cultural niche. Winners are not those with the strongest recipes or supply chains, but those who understand that attention is the new oil, and small brands are the most efficient extraction machines.

What radical prediction about food's future will seem quaint in 2034? Whatever it is, it will probably involve technologies and business models we have not invented yet. The pace of change will make these past nine years look slow.