Supermarkets are entering the age of TikTok. Previously, food trends trickled down from celebrity chefs, glossy magazines and global brands. Now, a single home chef with a smartphone can spark a global trend before the week is out.
This creates a jarring collision between the instantaneous digital world and the slower, physical world of the CPG supply chain. Digital trends can emerge, peak, and vanish in weeks, while physical supply chains are governed by immutable realities like production lead times and quarterly planning cycles. This conflict exposes the vulnerabilities of systems designed for stability in an era now defined by instability.
How hype disrupts the aisles
Viral food trends are typically driven by products with strong visual novelty, simplicity, and often a “challenge” to be attempted. A good example is the sudden obsession with baked feta pasta in 2021. Within days, feta sales in some regions jumped over 200%, leaving shelves bare, and supply planners baffled. This represents a new demand signal that is fundamentally different to traditional patterns in that it is a near vertical, volatile spike that vanishes as quickly as it appears. This complete lack of historical precedent renders conventional planning functions, heavily reliant on time-series forecasting, entirely obsolete when it comes to viral demand.
Engineering virality: The rise of the ‘trendable’ product
The most forward-thinking brands are no longer just reacting to trends; they are proactively engineering products designed to become viral sensations. This strategic shift links product development to social media shareability. In this new playbook, R&D teams are becoming part creative agency, part cultural trend forecaster.
The M&S “Red Diamond Strawberry & Crème Sandwich” is a prime example, visually engineered to be “TikTok friendly” by tapping into the existing Japanese ‘fruit sando’ trend and adapting it for a local audience. By launching it as a limited-edition item, M&S created urgency and drove sales without a long-term commitment. This proactive approach shows that R&D cycles are becoming faster and more consumer-led than ever.
The supply chain shockwave: From empty shelves to excess stock
The unpredictable nature of viral demand subjects the entire supply chain to an extreme version of the “bullwhip effect”, where small shifts in consumer demand are massively amplified upstream. This shockwave has cascading impacts across core functions:
- Procurement: The sudden, un-forecasted demand creates chaos for raw material suppliers. The viral “Dubai chocolate bar”, for instance, contributed to a 35% price hike for pistachios, impacting not just the trending product but all other businesses reliant on that commodity. This transforms a TikTok trend into a real-world economic event
- Manufacturing: Production schedules can be thrown into disarray as companies scramble to re-engineer lines. This causes operational inefficiencies, potentially increasing overtime costs and an increased risk of quality control failures. Manufacturing capacity can often become the process bottleneck, limiting a brand’s ability to fully capitalise on the viral demand surge
- Logistics: The impact can be clearly seen in empty retail shelves, damaging customer satisfaction. This is often followed by the opposite problem: warehouses become clogged with excess inventory when the trend collapses, tying up capital and space, and leading to excess waste
Building the agile supply network: From reactive to predictive
To thrive amid viral demand, companies must consider redesigning their supply chains for agility rather than static efficiency. This requires a strategic focus across several key areas:
- Demand sensing (planning): The solution for broken forecasts is to replace them with real-time demand sensing. This involves using AI and machine learning to analyse a wide array of external data streams: social media sentiment, search trends, and PoS data, enabling the generation of “early-warning” signals. The most prepared companies in this space will develop “what-if” scenarios to model responses to various levels of demand surge, allowing for rapid, pre-planned execution
- Procurement and raw materials planning foresight: Shifting procurement from reactive to predictive means using the same data signals as marketing and planning teams, including social media trends and search data, to forecast surges in ingredient demand before they hit sales data. Agile, pre-negotiated contracts with multiple suppliers allowing for flexible volume and rapid scaling, combined with small, rotating ingredient buffers, can give brands the raw material head start needed to capitalise on viral moments without overcommitting
- Integrated collaboration: Agility is impossible in a siloed business. Success requires deep, transparent data sharing and integrated business planning between CPG brands, their suppliers, and retail partners to create a unified view of the supply network that can react to the speed of the market
- Distribution: investing in additional capacity in warehouses and distribution schedules to prioritise picking and loading of on-trend product will help ensure that it gets out to customers.
Moving beyond the buzz to sustainable value
Navigating this new landscape also means acknowledging the hidden costs. The volatility of viral trends can increase packaging waste from single-serve convenience formats and lead to significant food waste within the commercial supply chain. When overstocked products become obsolete, the burden shifts from the consumer’s fridge to the company’s balance sheet.
Ultimately, the strategic goal is not to “manage” the hype, but to convert fleeting attention into enduring brand value. The mochi ice cream brand, Little Moons, provides a masterclass. After going viral with a young TikTok audience, the company used consumer data to identify its true high-value demographic, affluent 30 and 40 year-olds. They correctly identified the viral moment as a massive, free awareness campaign, then pivoted their marketing strategy to target this more valuable customer base, converting a fleeting trend into sustained, long-term growth. Those who are successful in this new landscape will be the ones who can ride the viral wave without drowning in its undertow.
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