April 2, 2026 | The Product Manager’s Journal
THE TAKE
A $65 billion flavor company was born this week, and nobody in our industry should be sleeping on it.
McCormick just announced it’s combining with Unilever’s entire food business in a $44.8 billion deal. When it closes (expected mid-2027), the combined entity will own McCormick, French’s, Frank’s RedHot, Old Bay, Cholula, Knorr, Hellmann’s, and dozens more. This is the kind of market gravity that reshapes how spices get sourced, priced, and sold worldwide.
Since Monday, I have kept thinking about what this actually means. Three things stand out.
First, this is a product manager’s case study in consolidation strategy. Many of us have personally been through this scenario with grave results. Meaning sionora, good luck finding another job. When two companies of this size merge, the playbook is predictable. Rationalize the supply chain. Centralize procurement. Cut $600 million in annual costs (their words, not mine). That sounds great on an earnings call, but on the ground, it’s a different story. It looks like fewer suppliers are getting bigger contracts. It looks like sourcing decisions are driven by volume pricing rather than by quality or origin (as seen with Broadcom’s actions toward VMware resellers). It looks like the kind of efficiency that makes spreadsheets beautiful and spices forgettable.
If you’re a PM at a smaller company watching this, the lesson is clear. You cannot compete on scale with a $65 billion company, and you should stop trying. Your differentiation lives in the places they can’t go. Transparency. Traceability. Relationships with farmers that aren’t mediated by three layers of procurement.
Second, the farmers. This is the part that keeps me up at night. I just got back from Tuscany (more on that below), and I sat across the table from people who grow the ingredients that end up in jars on grocery shelves. When a company the size of this new entity renegotiates supplier contracts, and they will, the small farms are the ones who feel it first. Margins get squeezed. Terms get extended. The relationship becomes transactional in a way it wasn’t before.
I’m not saying McCormick is going to be a bad steward. They’ve done good work on sustainability. But consolidation works a certain way. Scale pulls toward efficiency; efficiency pulls toward treating everything the same. And the farmer growing incredible oregano on a hillside in Calabria doesn’t fit neatly into that model.
Third, and honestly? This is good news for brands like Trevean. Every time the big players consolidate, they create more distance between the consumer and the source. More opacity. More abstraction. And consumers are paying attention. The same week this merger was announced, I had three separate conversations with people who told me they had started reading the backs of spice jars. Not the nutrition label. The origin.
The gap is widening between “we source responsibly” as a line on a corporate website and actually letting someone tap their phone and see the farmer, the field, the whole story for themselves. Deals like this one make that gap wider.
If the giants are merging around you, don’t panic. Get closer to your customer. Get closer to your source. Build the thing they can’t build, which is trust that someone can actually verify.
FROM THE TRENCHES
I’m writing this with dirt still metaphorically under my fingernails.
The Tuscany trip was amazing. I went because Issue #1 was all about the idea that you can’t build a product you’ve never touched at the source. I needed to put that into practice.
It started at Mercato Centrale in Florence, and I’ll be honest, it was a letdown. The market is beautiful, but it’s almost entirely tourist-facing now. Very little in the way of natural, single-origin spices. I came prepared with a ten-category question set I’d built for exactly this kind of environment, designed to force signal through specificity. Questions like “Where exactly is this grown?” and “Is this your own production or sourced through a distributor?” and the one that usually changes the conversation: “Do you have a higher-quality batch you keep for chefs or regular customers?” But at Mercato Centrale, the conversations were flat. Vendors weren’t interested. Most of what was on display was packaged blends with vague origins. I’m still going to publish that question set as a resource because it works everywhere else, but the market itself was a reminder that tourist infrastructure and sourcing transparency don’t really coexist.
Which is exactly why the farm visits hit so differently. From Florence, we visited several working farms in the provinces of Siena and Arezzo. Agriturismi are the kind of places that offer stays, meals, and sometimes tours or foraging experiences. Real people growing real things. Spannocchia stood out because it grows fennel and harvests juniper berries on the same property, which is rare. Most juniper harvesting in Tuscany is done by small-scale foragers on common land or private hillsides. There’s an elderly couple, the Pastorini family, who harvest in the hills above Arezzo and gather around two tons annually by hand, beating ripe berries into baskets and leaving unripe ones on the branch. That level of care is the opposite of centralized procurement, and it’s exactly what makes the ingredient worth using.
One farmer, when I asked about his relationship with his current distributor, said something I haven’t stopped thinking about: “They buy my oregano. They don’t know my oregano.” Sad, it’s that distribution layer that strips away the story, and it’s the story that gives the product meaning.
We ended the trip in San Gimignano, visiting saffron producers. I came home with a new blend concept in my head that I’m calling Tuscan Dusk. More on that soon.
I also spent a very long layover outlining Q3 priorities for Trevean. The blog now has 75+ published posts, the email capture infrastructure is fully live, and I’m seeing the first signs of organic search traffic picking up from the SEO work we started last quarter. Small numbers, but the trajectory is right.
SPICE ROUTE SIGNAL: THE DESIGN FREEZE
This week, I published a new post called “The Night We Stopped Changing the Lid,” and it’s the most personal piece I’ve written for the blog so far.
The short version: Rushi and I spent four hours arguing about the lid on our spice jar. Not the spice inside it. The lid. We had a beautiful custom-molded NFC option and a practical adhesive alternative. We were stuck in a design spiral, circling the same decision with diminishing returns.
We froze the design that night. Adhesive tags. Done. And the six weeks that followed were the most productive stretch of the entire project.
The post walks through why design freezes scare PMs (it’s fear, specifically the fear that you’ll freeze the wrong version), how to run one without killing momentum, and the practical steps that made ours work: setting the date early, writing down exactly what “frozen” means, communicating it to everyone who touches the product, and building a parking lot for deferred ideas instead of a trash can.
I also built two free resources you can download:
Design Freeze Field Guide (PDF):
How to Stop Building and Start Shipping (PPTX):
Read the full post: The Design Freeze Process.
ON MY DESK
This week’s pick: Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.
I picked this back up on the flight home from Italy, and it reads differently now than it did five years ago. Moore’s core argument is that the gap between early adopters and the early majority is where most products die. Reading it while processing the McCormick/Unilever news made something click for me. When the mainstream market gets swallowed by a mega-merger, the chasm gets redefined. The early majority for transparent, source-verified food isn’t the same early majority it was two years ago. The window is opening. About 250 pages. You’ll finish it in a week.
THAT’S THE RACK
Thanks for reading Issue #2. I’m Dan Blizinski, founder of Trevean Spice and the person behind The Product Manager’s Journal, where I write about PM frameworks that come from actually building things, not just theorizing about them.
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What do you think the McCormick/Unilever merger means for small brands? Drop it in the comments or send me a message. I read everyone.
The PM’s Spice Rack is published weekly on The Product Manager’s Journal and here on LinkedIn. Subscribe to get it in your inbox.