It was this post on reddit, that made me rebuild this website and dedicate it to interesting facts and infographics. Some of you might think, why on gods earth did you choose “The decline of Greek Yogurt” posts on reddit as a start for this website?
Well it’s not about the Greek Yogurt itself – we don’t even have this term in Europe, but it’s the bigger picture in this case. The decline of mentions on the reddit sub: nutrition shows us other interesting data points as well. Such as the general decline of yogurt sales in America, which could also lead to the realization to short companies that sell this product or are in some other way involved in the performance of sales.
What can we learn from the declining mentions of the term “greek yogurt” on reddit.
Of course this is not an issue of black or white. There’s a lot of grey mixed in between. But let’s start with some numbers:
Total U.S. retail sales were $8.8 billion in 2017, up from $8 billion five years earlier, according to the market research firm Packaged Facts. It is forecast to leap to $9.8 billion by 2022.
Now you might be surprised to see the market research firm came up with a forecast that sales will increase. Well we also have this research by Mintel:
Predicts only $8.2 billion in sales by 2022 — a decline of 3.5 percent from the present. Mintel also observed that consumers were eating slightly less yogurt on average in 2018 than they were in 2017.
The mentions on reddit are declining a lot. Are the real world sales going to follow?
The difference in predictions come from two points of views. Greek yogurt giant Chobani’s chief marketing officer Peter McGuinness claims “yogurt could someday reach $13 billion”. Yet he also acknowledged that “yogurt companies had essentially created their own problem by clobbering customers with way too many yogurt options at once“.
We see that there is some overlap with the sales and the amount of mentions on reddit – yet it’s by far not as steep as the graph might suggest. This makes sense. People usually post more about new, exciting things and less as they become more common.
The actual growth of decline of yogurt sales are of course not what I was interested in – rather the information collected by the awesome Joe Hovde, who runs a blog named Residential Thoughts.
A blog that is focused on data in tech, economics and the world. I’m sure I’ll use some of his future posts in features on this website again, as it’s exactly the kind of interesting knowledge I want to bring attention to. Make sure to visit his website, it’s full of these kind of data-driven posts.
Back to our initial yogurt theory. We see a pretty huge and steady decline of mentions of the term “Greek yogurt” on reddit – a website that is big enough to give us a good sample size to make assumption about the global (but mostly US) amount of yogurt consumption.
In this article you’ll find a lot of other interesting data-sets and their real world consequences.
Bottom line: The analysis of mentions on reddit can definitively give you a good idea if there’s a trend growing or declining. Yet,
