This week: shopping is getting handed to bots, Gen Z is trading big milestones for spontaneous trips, and people want proof a human made the thing. Plus a chart on our sinking faith in food safety.

The shopper is now a bot

TikTok, DoorDash, and Kroger are adding AI discovery, shopping assistants, and one-click checkout. Meanwhile, websites are deciding whether to let those agents in at all. If AI agents start choosing products, brands need to be easy for them to find and trust.

TikTok to add AI-powered discovery and one-click checkout · Retail Dive

How Kroger, Giant Eagle and DoorDash are building their agentic AI assistants · Modern Retail

The next hurdle for AI agents: getting websites to let them in · TechCrunch

Gen Z trades milestones for moments

Eight in ten Gen Z workers now earn money outside their main job, and 83% have put off a major financial goal, according to a new Goldman Sachs survey. Nearly four in ten name housing as their biggest obstacle to saving. So the money goes to things they can enjoy now. Gen Z takes spontaneous trips far more often than travelers overall, and half would skip meals out to get the next trip on the calendar sooner.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management 2026 Retirement Survey · Goldman Sachs

Gen Z’s new American Dream: Skip the mortgage, book the flight · Fortune

Owning a Home Feels Out of Reach, So Gen Z Is Spending Big in Another Area · Entrepreneur

Forget jet-setting. ‘Lore-tripping’ is the weird new way Gen Z is traveling · Fast Company

Proof of human is the new premium

People say they hate AI slop, and they keep using AI every day. Meanwhile, LibreOffice now sells “no AI” as a feature, and creative shops are fighting slop with real people on camera. As more of the feed gets automated, showing the human hand behind the work is turning into a trust signal.

People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough? · MIT Technology Review

LibreOffice says ‘no AI’ is now a software feature · TechCrunch

Red Antler-owned Creator Studio Wants to Fight AI Slop With UGC · Adweek

Chart of the week

Gallup’s new poll finds just 47% of Americans have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the federal government to keep the food supply safe. That’s a record low, down from 85% in 2004. For brands, safety and sourcing claims carry more weight with shoppers right now than they have in decades.

That’s the week! Tell me what you’re watching.

Last week I spent an afternoon breaking down an old crate in the backyard and fishing out off-cuts of lumber collecting dust in my workshop to make a gardening bench with a little water basin for my son. I had this vision of a space for him to get his energy out while I’m puttering around outside on the weekends.

One of the goals with labor like this is to get out of my own head, so I didn’t spend a ton of time planning things. Instead I made some quick sketches in my notebook, watched a few youtube videos, and got to work.

Here’s the thing about building something with your hands: you quickly realise that it’s really just a never-ending series of questions where, unlike in my strategic work, your choices have immediate, concrete results.

Where do I want the basin to sit? Should I make it inset? How would I go about building an inner box to hold the basin? Do I have the lumber for that? Could I use nails here instead of short deck screws? What if I made the table two heights, one that he could grow into?

There weren’t any right or wrong answers here. Just lots of questions with a bunch of solutions at my disposal.

That’s what I find so invigorating about working with my hands: this process of question and answer forces my mind to expand, to think in new ways, to home in on what I actually want to accomplish. I’ve found that after working with my hands, I ask better strategic questions and more creative solutions in my work.

It doesn’t matter what you make. It could be a table, a blanket, or a herb garden. The point is the process.

Make something with your hands.

I used to approach shopping as part obligation, part scavenger hunt for fun-looking treats. Now, with a 20-month-old in tow, my relationship with the grocery store has taken on a more… adversarial posture. As I walk through the aisles, I’m always wondering how many of those items shouting at me from the shelves are genuinely good vs. selling me a bill of goods.

As a strategist, I’m acutely aware of how design affects consumer choice. As a parent, I’m experiencing that reality more intensely than ever. I can only imagine how pronounced this sense of being at war with each aisle will become when my little boy starts pointing at products from the comfort of his shopping cart perch and demanding I buy them—or, scarier yet, when he starts recognizing his favorite characters on the boxes of what always tend to be least-healthy options in any aisle. (Side note: the use of characters to target children is so effective it’s banned in some countries, including Mexico under their Food Labeling and Advertising Law.)

It’s not just the products themselves putting me on high alert. The grocery store can be weirdly intimate—a place where your community gets to peek directly into your habits and lifestyle. Sometimes I feel like every shopper has a pair of binoculars pointed right at my open pantry, and that whatever I put in my cart becomes a referendum on myself and my choices as a parent.

Maybe this all sounds a bit dramatic, but we know from research that parents really do carry the weight of other shoppers’ expectations as they stroll the aisles. Recent parent interviews I facilitated for a multivitamin brand even revealed that moms will often hide less healthy items in their carts while keeping healthier options up front in the open.

That pressure to reach for the organic bone broth that’s four bucks more than the store brand? It’s all part of an internal struggle to do right by our families that follows us as we check items off our list.

This is in part just being a parent, but I also think my industry has a responsibility to understand and respect the tradeoffs that consumers are making every day: between healthy choices and realistic budgets, between kids getting a win and parents feeling good about what they’re putting on the table.

The truth is, I’m not always buying the premium/organic/feel-good option, because we don’t have an infinite grocery budget. Sometimes, my kid is going to get the treat he’s been frantically pointing at from the shopping cart. These are tradeoffs I and many parents like me are willing to accept, and it’s the job of brand builders to respect these tradeoffs in their work.

What does that mean in practice? Well, I’m still figuring it out. What I know is this: parents are smart, and we can spot the difference between being appeased and actually being understood. The brands that invest the time in understanding parents will earn our trust.

I first started going with my son. It’s a perfect little outing. Seven minute walk. Stroller parking right in front. A reading room and plenty of books to bring home and be repurposed as weaponry by my wonderful, feral child.

But these library trips quickly became an indispensable tool in my strategic work, especially in the early discovery phase of any project.

I rarely go with a specific list of books to check out. Instead, I keep an eye out for books articles and other media in four genres:

Genre 1: Media directly related to whatever category the brand I’m working on is in. If I’m working on a granola brand, for example, I look for stuff specifically about breakfast and cereal. This might include anything from a book on the history of American breakfast foods to a literal granola recipe book. The goal is to quickly get trusted information about a category from a diversity of perspectives.

Genre 2: Media adjacent to that brand’s category. This could be books on sourcing, materials, complementary categories, downstream categories, relevant trends, etc. I want to better understand the broader ecosystem of the category. What are the inputs, where are the vulnerabilities, the critical points in the supply chain? To go back to the granola example, this means I might pick up a book on organic or regenerative agricultural practices.

Genre 3: Books and magazines the brand’s target audience might have on their bookshelves at home. This can feel a bit abstract, but the goal is just to better understand the everyday experiences and perspectives of the people we’re designing for, beyond the confines of the traditional consumer research I often have at my disposal. For granola, I’m probably browsing popular health and wellness magazines, cookbooks, self-help books, and maybe even parenting books.

Genre 4: Browser’s choice. I’ll go find interesting-looking books in a section completely unrelated to the category I’m working in. Maybe I’ll grab a book about fables, or architecture, or mushroom foraging. The goal is to find non-obvious connections. This is a fantastic way to tap into different writing styles, descriptive language, and, if I’m lucky, unexpected analogs I can use to frame my work. That random book of folklore I grabbed from the shelf might have beautiful ways of talking about connection to place—something that makes a lot of sense for a granola brand that’s deeply tied to its community.

Strategists are professional borrowers. We love lifting ideas from one domain and adapting it for another. I can’t tell you how many times I found a brilliant anecdote or case study in a fashion magazine or scientific journal that inspired a new way of thinking about a consumer brand.

That said, having such a broad variety of inputs can be overwhelming, and I’m working on a piece that will outline the methods I use to synthesize a variety of inputs like these. For now, I’m focusing on the collection.

Most often I’m skimming with a notebook next to me. I’m writing down interesting quotes, facts, words and sentences I enjoy. An old mentor used to call this process “brailling,” or reading by feel. Literally, anything that makes you stop and say, “Whoa, that’s interesting.” Did you know that Judean palm date seeds, once completely extinct, can lie dormant for thousands of years buried under long forgotten cityscapes and spring to life when placed in potting soil? Well, now you do. What was I going to do with that information? Who knows! That’s the magic of this work.

Be curious. Go to the library.

Disclaimer: All writing conceived, edited and published by humans. AI is great, just not for writing.

There’s no right or wrong way to do a store walk, but there is a common way. Working on an ice cream brand? Head over to the freezer aisle, pull out your phone, and start snapping pictures of pints. Want to know what’s happening in fiber? Walk the store and identify how fiber claims are showing up across categories.

This is valuable, but it’s barely scratching the surface.

The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. That may seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget when we’re walking down those aisles.

The objective when doing a store walk is to see differently. Or, really, to see in as many different ways as possible. In doing so, we get closer to how actual people experience the products around them.

Here are some of the ways I try to see differently on my own store walks. Test them out for yourself and see if they help you notice things you’d otherwise miss. Think of these as little challenges you can do each time you go into the store. (And be sure to bring a notepad to document what you see!)

Seek patterns across categories:

1. Find all the objects you can that feature a specific color.

2. Look for every permutation of a particular shape.

3. Go find everything with a cow on it.

4. Document the (seemingly) identical. As you move from store to store, take pictures of the “same” thing: the entrances, signage, shopping carts, shelf tags, even the paper bags. The more abstract you get the more fun you’ll have. Focusing your attention on one thing will help you notice the differences between them.

5. Take your focus off of what’s on the shelf and instead turn your attention to who’s shopping a particular aisle or category.

Change your perspective:

• See like a child would. What does the store look like from three feet high?

• Put on blue light blocking glasses and notice what brands/claims start to stand out.

• Take a store walk hungover. What products appeal to you? What makes you nauseated?

• Construct a short story through images, characters, or products that catch your eye. Establish a beginning, middle and end. Is it a love story? A high stakes heist? Imagining what happens next in your short story will require you to quickly find and draw out key details around you.

Use ALL your senses:

• Instead of relying on just your eyes, take an auditory snapshot of each store. You’ll learn different things about an environment by asking what it sounds like. What conversations do you overhear? Is there music playing? Are phones ringing?

• Find similar textures in different parts of the store. Are there specific finishes being used in certain categories? What does premium feel like in each category? What does value feel like?

Some of these activities may seem silly, but trust me–they work. We often have to trick our minds in order to see familiar things anew.

This is how a strategist moves beyond just documenting what’s showing up in a particular category to finding the uncommon connections that can inspire new approaches to brand work.

Disclaimer: All writing conceived, edited and published by humans. AI is great, just not for writing.

I took a trip to the Oregon coast last week with the family, and we stopped at the Tillamook Creamery. My son loved the cheese samples, I geeked out on the branding genius (and also loved the cheese samples). Seriously, this place is a masterclass in brand storytelling.

You immediately feel like you’re walking into a kind of historic institution and that, just by being there, you’re part of its mission.

Tillamook is a farmer-owned co-op that started in 1909 with ten dairies putting in ten dollars each. One of the first things you see at the creamery is a visual chronology of that history. There are pictures of farmers and their families, Tilly the cow mascot, “Cheese Girls” at the state fair, quality inspectors in crisp uniforms. The message you get is: We’re proud of our deep, hard-earned history, so you should be too.

Upstairs there’s an interactive education center with a life-sized plastic cow and illustration of the feeding process. There were smiles on every kid’s face in that room as they moved through each part of the farmer’s journey and even got to practice with a real milking machine.

We then walked through a hall filled with giant windows looking down on the factory floor, where real cheese makers were hard at work. It wasn’t a show; they were literally making the product that goes on grocery store shelves. Window after window we watched the entire process, all the way to shrink wrapping the final packaging.

Next we stopped by the sample station, where our son chomped away on a little hunk of cheddar and we stuffed ourselves with cubes of truffle-infused cheese. By this point, we were fully bought in. Naturally, we headed straight for the gift shop, where my wife immediately picked up a block of that same truffle cheese and a t-shirt for our little boy. I scoured the special reserve cheeses proudly displaying the Morning Star, the ship Tillamook’s original families built and used for dairy transport more than 150 years ago. In lieu of a bag, we put all our souvenirs in a repurposed mint chocolate chip ice cream tub and headed on our way.

Years ago in grad school, I remember a definition I was once given for branding was “manufactured meaning.” That definition never sat well with me. Is that our job? To manufacture meaning? Out of what?

At Tillamook, the word I kept returning to was “real.” The history, the people, and, most importantly, the food. It all felt real because it was real. There was no meaning to manufacture, because meaning was already there.

The factory told the story of a community that cares about what they make as much as you care about what’s on your kid’s plate. It told a story of hard work, community values, and a commitment to quality, and that’s a story any visitor would want to be a part of. That’s the magic of a brand that lives by what it stands for.

It doesn’t take a 100 years or a co-op to earn that kind of brand love. What it does take is commitment to a set of values, and the willingness to invest in the few things that matter most to you.