"People make fun of me about the fridges," said Tassos Stassopoulos. "I am fridge-obsessed." As the founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peeking inside refrigerators in homes around the world in order to predict the future—and monetize those insights.
By the time of his refrigeration revelation in 2009, Stassopoulos had already gained a reputation for his maverick process: Where other investors typically relied on market data and forecasts from big consumer-products companies to deduce what people in, say, India might start purchasing in the future, Stassopoulos spent days traveling around the country, asking them himself. He found the ethnographic process fascinating and threw himself into it, visiting informal settlements and working-class neighborhoods to chat with people for hours—but he still wasn't getting the information he wanted. "The problem is that I was asking people, 'OK, assume you get a salary increase. How will your diet change?' They'd all say, 'I wouldn't change anything,'" Stassopoulos explained. "But we know that as people get richer, their diets change."
One afternoon he was in the city of Aurangabad, a couple hundred miles inland from Mumbai, interviewing a woman who had just given him that exact response. Her family was quite poor, and what little food she had in the house was very traditional—pulses, rice, and pickles. On a whim, Stassopoulos asked the woman if she'd mind taking him shopping. He gave her some rupees and followed her to the corner shop, where she bought Cadbury chocolate bars, Coca-Cola, and some packaged savory snacks—items that were very different from the foods she currently fed her family, but that Stassopoulos had repeatedly documented in the fridges and cupboards of people one socioeconomic class above hers. "I realized that the answer is the fridge!" he said. "The fridge could tell me how people would behave once they had some extra money—before they even know it themselves."—Nicola Twilley
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