May 15, 2026 | The Product Manager’s Journal
The Take
Trevean got named in the industry literature this week. I’m still figuring out how to feel about it.
A trade write-up on Smart Packaging 4.0 cited Trevean by name as the real-world example of NFC-enabled spice traceability. Not as a footnote. As an example. The kind of citation a brand spends years trying to engineer with PR, and that you can’t actually engineer at all, because the moment anyone notices you’re trying, it stops working.
I read the paragraph three times. Then I sent it to Rushi. Then I went and made coffee, because I didn’t know what else to do with the feeling.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. We haven’t broken out commercially yet. Our lids aren’t even in production. Our website is half-built. The personas I described in Issue #6, Busy Beth and the Apartment Cook and the Sous Chef, still mostly exist as documents on my hard drive rather than people we’ve shipped to in volume. By any reasonable metric, Trevean is not the company you’d expect to see held up as the industry example. And yet, in the way that industry literature gets written, by analysts trying to point at the cleanest version of an idea so the rest of the category can be compared to it, Trevean is now what they point at.
The PM lesson here is uncomfortable, and I want to write it down before I forget it.
Positioning isn’t what you say about your product. It’s what someone else, in a forum you didn’t pick, says about your product when they’re trying to explain a category to a third party. That’s the only positioning that compounds. Everything else is marketing copy waiting to be ignored.
The mechanic, in case it’s useful to anyone reading this who is earlier in their company than Trevean, is: we picked one hard thing, NFC-enabled provenance from farmer to jar, and we built it before we built anything else, including the website that explains why anyone should care. We talked about it constantly. We wrote about it on every public surface. We refused to dilute the story with adjacent feature work that would have been easier and more obviously “marketing.” When an analyst eventually sat down to write a section on NFC smart packaging in food, the search for an example surfaced the company that had been talking about it the longest, most consistently, and with the most physical receipts.
You don’t pick the moment you get cited. You pick whether you’ve been doing the thing long enough that, when somebody goes looking for an example, you’re the easiest one to find.
The uncomfortable part. Being named the example is also a clock starting. The literature points to a version of you that was true the day it was written. The work for the rest of this year is making sure the version of Trevean that ships actually clears the bar set by the citation. Industry validation is a debt instrument. You can borrow against it for a while. The interest is paid in shipping.
No blog post from me this week, deliberately. Some weeks, the right move is to write more. Some weeks, the right move is to put the keyboard down, sit with the moment, and go fix the thing the literature said you were good at.
Spice Route Signal
The McCormick + Unilever foods deal is officially done. $44.8 billion. The biggest spice and condiment transaction in history.
Cash stands at $15.7B, stock is valued at $29.1B, and total sales are around $20B. By year three, it is expected to reach about $600M annually. Hellmann’s, Knorr, and McCormick’s spice portfolios now fall under the same ownership, marking a significant shift in the seasonings market. This change has prompted the entire premium segment to rethink its stance, highlighting exciting new opportunities.
Quick context worth carrying. McCormick’s own stock dropped 8% in January on weak 2026 guidance, citing trade headwinds. The Unilever deal isn’t a flex from a position of strength. It’s a defensive consolidation by a category leader that read the same trends I’ve been writing about for six months: commodity scale is no longer the moat it was, premium DTC is fragmenting the top of the funnel, and traceability-led brands are starting to win the shelf conversations that used to belong to incumbents by default.
Here’s the read-through for anyone in the premium tier, which is to say anyone reading this who is not McCormick:
The next 18 to 24 months are the window. When two organizations this large combine, the senior leadership spends a year and a half integrating systems, renegotiating contracts, deciding which SKUs survive, and managing the cultural collision between two very different company DNAs. They are not, during that period, also running fast in the premium tier. The people who would normally be in the market with new launches are in conference rooms, drawing org charts. Premium DTC challengers, Burlap & Barrel, Diaspora Co., Spicewalla, and Trevean, just got a quieter aisle to run in.
The companies that act decisively in that window are the ones who will look, in retrospect, like they had information no one else did. They didn’t. They just understood what “big company busy” means. When the giants merge, the small don’t get crushed. They get the next twenty-four months.
The PM lesson is the same one I keep landing on: the calendar matters as much as the strategy. Knowing when to run is half the game.
From the Trenches
Lid samples arrived. The architecture works. And I’m starting a new thread that will occupy me for the rest of 2026.
First, the lid. The bamboo-faced lid with the NFC tag adhered directly to the underside, and the cork liner, sandwiched separately, came in from China on Monday. I sat at my kitchen counter on Tuesday morning with a stack of test lids and a fresh phone, and I tapped. The phone found the tag in roughly 0.4 seconds. The reads were clean. The cork is still sealed. The bamboo face still looked like bamboo. Three suppliers sent essentially the same solution, with subtle differences in adhesive and tag thickness that I’ll narrow down over the next two weeks.
The US supplier, in case anyone is still rooting for them: still silent. Going on three weeks now. I’m done waiting. The math was clear two weeks ago. I just wanted to give it one more chance, which is its own kind of cognitive bias, and I’m calling it.
For the record, I have not opened the lid render file once this week. Beth. It worked.
Now the new thread. Agentic commerce.
Food Navigator ran a piece in April that I keep going back to. The headline framing is “a third shelf shaped by AI-driven agents,” and the argument is straightforward: by late 2026 and into 2027, a meaningful fraction of premium-CPG discovery will occur through AI shopping agents for users, rather than through Google search, Instagram, acting on behalf of grocery store endcaps. The agent reads the product page, evaluates the structured data, compares it against the user’s stated preferences, and produces a shortlist for the human to pick from.
That changes the writing assignment. Almost every premium spice brand on the internet, including a version of Trevean two months from now, is being written for humans alone. Beautiful prose, evocative photography, and founder story above the fold. None of that is what an AI agent reads. The agent reads schema markup, structured ingredient lists, machine-parseable provenance claims, and consistent metadata across pages. The brand that writes both layers, the one for humans and the one for agents, gets shortlisted. The brand that only writes one of them doesn’t.
I spent four hours this weekend auditing our in-progress site for agent-readability. We are nowhere close yet. We are also further along than 90% of the premium spice category because we already have the NFC data structure designed and the provenance fields typed. I think this will be the single most important strategic project for the back half of 2026, and almost no one in our segment is writing about it. Which is exactly the conditions under which a small company gets to build a real moat.
More on this in coming issues. The first artifact I’ll share is the schema we’re shipping with.
From the Rack
Sumac. The Middle Eastern spice that the West forgot for a century, and the one most quietly responsible for Persian Sunrise being the blend on the right side of 2026.
Sumac is made from the dried, ground berries of Rhus coriaria, a shrub native to the eastern Mediterranean and Iran. It has been used in Persian cooking for at least two thousand years, predates the introduction of lemon to the region, and is the source of the deep red dust you’ll see on kebabs, fattoush, and any properly built za’atar blend.
The interesting thing about sumac, from a product perspective, is that it solves a specific functional problem most Western kitchens never noticed they had. It delivers acidity without liquid. If you want to brighten a grilled vegetable, a piece of fish, or finished rice, lemon juice gets you most of the way there, but it also gets the plate wet. Vinegar has the same problem. Sumac brightens without changing the texture of what it touches. Persian and Levantine cuisines figured this out and built entire dish architectures around it. North American cooking, for most of the 20th century, didn’t, because we were swimming in lemons and pretending vinegar was the answer.
Three years ago, almost no American grocery store carried sumac in the spice aisle. Today, most of them do, because the Middle Eastern flavor wave that Innova and Supermarket Perimeter both flagged as 2026’s #1 ethnic flavor trend has been pulling sumac into the mainstream conversation. Persian Sunrise leans on it heavily, alongside specific Iranian saffron, dried lime, rose, and a small amount of pistachio, which is debated every time the blend is revisited.
The PM lesson buried in this is one I keep returning to. Sometimes the feature you didn’t know you needed has been in a competing product for two thousand years. The work of a good PM isn’t always to invent. Sometimes it’s to import. The trend reports point to “Middle Eastern” as if it’s a new discovery; it isn’t. We’re just finally paying attention to a kitchen that solved a problem we didn’t know was solvable.
If you’ve never cooked with sumac, the easiest entry point is to sprinkle it on a sliced cucumber with olive oil and salt. Eat that with bread. You will understand the entire trend cycle in about three minutes.
On My Desk
“Spice: The History of a Temptation” by Jack Turner.
I’d been meaning to read this for years and finally pulled it off the shelf because the McCormick news this quarter made me want to understand the long arc of the category I’m running a company inside of.
Turner’s argument is that the European obsession with spices, the one that funded shipping fleets, wars, colonies, and the entire age of exploration, was never really about taste. Or not only. It was about status, medicine, religion, and, yes, sex; medieval Europeans believed certain spices were aphrodisiacs and prescribed them accordingly, sometimes from the pulpit. Cinnamon and pepper were carried in liturgical processions. Cloves were nailed into oranges and worn as scented amulets. Royalty served peppered wine to flex wealth, the way somebody now orders the $400 bottle to communicate exactly the same thing in a different idiom.
Two passages stayed with me.
The first is the price collapse. Black pepper in 14th-century London was worth its weight in silver. By 1700, after the Dutch and Portuguese trading companies had hammered open the supply routes, pepper was a household staple, and the colonial structures built to extract it had to find new reasons to exist. The scarcity that made the commodity valuable was the same scarcity that made the trade architecture lucrative. Once the bottleneck broke, the entire empire built on it had to pivot or wither, and most of them withered later than they should have, because empires are slow to admit when the conditions that made them necessary have evaporated.
I keep thinking about that as I look at the McCormick-Unilever deal. The biggest spice transaction in history just closed. A combined $20B in revenue. They are not building the 2026 spice empire. They are consolidating the empire that was built when commodity scale was the moat, in a year when the conditions that made commodity scale a moat are visibly eroding. AI agents will route around shelf placement. Consumer trust is shifting from brand recognition to verifiable provenance. The architecture that worked when nobody could verify a jar will look strange when everybody can.
The second passage. Turner notes that the spices Europeans most desperately wanted, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and mace, were the spices that did something the food in front of them didn’t. They covered up rancid meat, sure, but more importantly, they transformed gray peasant gruel into something a wealthier person would plausibly eat. The aspirational use of a spice has always been: the same dinner, but the version a different kind of person would serve.
That is, embarrassingly, still the entire premium spice category. The idiom has changed. Psychology hasn’t.
About 400 pages. Reads in two weekends. The medieval recipe excerpts alone, ground peacock with rose water and saffron, baked in pastry shaped like a swan, are worth the price of admission.
That’s the Rack
Thanks for reading Issue #7. 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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Question for you this week: where in your category is the moat already eroding underneath the incumbents? What conditions used to make their advantage real, and which of those conditions still hold? Hit reply. I read every one. And if your company has been named in industry literature recently and you have thoughts on how to not let it go to your head, please send those too.
The PM’s Spice Rack is published weekly on The Product Manager’s Journal and on LinkedIn. Subscribe to get it in your inbox.
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