Trends & Artefacts: zebra striping edition
In this week’s edition of Trends & Artefacts, we round up the snackable trends, stats and insights from around the world, including:
Knix Brings Dads Into the Period Conversation
Sainsbury's Swaps Brown Eggs for White
Zest Maps Revives Social Food Discovery
Explainer zebra striping
Starbucks Revives the Unicorn Frappuccino for One Weekend
Knix Brings Dads Into the Period Conversation
Period underwear brand Kt by Knix is hosting a Toronto event pairing beer and burgers with a live conversation about menstruation, aimed specifically at dads and father figures. The event reflects a broader shift in expectations around fatherhood, with millennial and Gen Z dads increasingly seeking active roles in aspects of parenting that were once coded as maternal. As brands find commercial footing in that space, is "girl dad" culture shifting from a social media identity to something with genuine behavioural change behind it?
Sainsbury's Swaps Brown Eggs for White
Sainsbury's is switching its own-brand eggs to white shells, citing a 12.7% lower carbon footprint linked to smaller hens that consume less feed. The move reverses a decades-long consumer preference for brown eggs, which became associated with naturalness despite offering no nutritional difference. As supermarkets embed sustainability deeper into product decisions, how much are shoppers willing to let go of aesthetic assumptions they never knew they had?
Zest Maps Revives Social Food Discovery
Credit card data is becoming a restaurant guide. Zest Maps auto-logs your dining history via bank transactions to build a personalised map of where to eat next, surfacing what friends are actually visiting rather than what they choose to post. As location-sharing fatigue grows, can a niche, trust-first network do what Foursquare couldn't sustain?
Explainer zebra striping
A third of UK adults now alternate alcoholic and soft drinks on a night out, a practice called zebra striping. It can lower peak blood alcohol and reduce total consumption, but it is not a hangover cure as hangovers stem from how much you drink overall, not how you pace it. As moderation becomes a mainstream social behaviour, what does that shift mean for how nightlife and drinks brands position themselves?
Starbucks Revives the Unicorn Frappuccino for One Weekend
Nine years after becoming one of the first viral food moments of the social media era, Starbucks is bringing back the Unicorn Frappuccino for a single weekend this summer, following a preview appearance at Coachella. The one-weekend format keeps the scarcity logic that made the original sell out intact, turning nostalgia into a controlled cultural event rather than a menu comeback. As brands learn to treat limited returns as media moments in their own right, is the product almost beside the point?
