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“People make fun of me about the fridges,” said Tassos Stassopoulos. “I am fridge-obsessed.” As the founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peeking inside refrigerators in homes around the world in order to predict the future—and monetize those insights.
By the time of his refrigeration revelation in 2009, Stassopoulos had already gained a reputation for his maverick process: Where other investors typically relied on market data and forecasts from big consumer-products companies to deduce what people in, say, India might start purchasing in the future, Stassopoulos spent days traveling around the country, asking them himself. He found the ethnographic process fascinating and threw himself into it, visiting informal settlements and working-class neighborhoods to chat with people for hours—but he still wasn’t getting the information he wanted. “The problem is that I was asking people, ‘OK, assume you get a salary increase. How will your diet change?’ They’d all say, ‘I wouldn’t change anything,’” Stassopoulos explained. “But we know that as people get richer, their diets change.”
One afternoon he was in the city of Aurangabad, a couple hundred miles inland from Mumbai, interviewing a woman who had just given him that exact response. Her family was quite poor, and what little food she had in the house was very traditional—pulses, rice, and pickles. On a whim, Stassopoulos asked the woman if she’d mind taking him shopping. He gave her some rupees and followed her to the corner shop, where she bought Cadbury chocolate bars, Coca-Cola, and some packaged savory snacks—items that were very different from the foods she currently fed her family, but that Stassopoulos had repeatedly documented in the fridges and cupboards of people one socioeconomic class above hers. “I realized that the answer is the fridge!” he said. “The fridge could tell me how people would behave once they had some extra money—before they even know it themselves.”
Stassopoulos started grouping his photographs of fridges by income to see how their contents evolved. What emerged was a journey, starting with a poor family’s acquisition of their first fridge. “For them, it’s an efficiency device,” said Stassopoulos. They use it to store either the ingredients to make traditional dishes or the leftovers from those dishes. Upon their ascent into the middle class, the fridge starts to include treats and international brands—soft drinks, beer, and ice cream. “You have some disposable income for the first time,” said Stassopoulos. “You want to provide all these things that your family was previously deprived of, and you want to show off while doing it.”
Once a family becomes truly affluent, their fridge will shift again. Where one brand of ice cream in the freezer was an indulgent treat for all the family, multiple brands of ice cream reveal that frozen desserts are now normal enough that individual family members can dislike each other’s preferred flavors. “Before, it was just, Yes, we can get ice cream,” he said. “Now it all becomes about me: I like chocolate and I don’t like strawberry.” Ingredients from different cultures as well as items marketed as healthy—fat-free, diet, or probiotic foods—also show up on refrigerator shelves at this income level, reflecting, in Stassopoulos’ rubric, a desire for self-improvement and, beneath it, a transition toward individualistic, Western values.
The pinnacle of his pyramid is reached once a fridge contains foods that express collective virtue: fair-trade, organic, cruelty-free products in reusable packaging. “This is where the Nordics are,” he said. “India is mostly in this efficiency stage, China is at the indulgence stage, and Brazil is already on the healthy stage.” Based on Indian fridgenomics, he decided to invest in dairy processors, companies that turn milk into butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. He predicted that these were the items Indian families would add to their diets as their incomes increased—and recent data showing double-digit growth in sales of value-added dairy products, not to mention his above-benchmark returns, have proven him correct.
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Fridge signals can also tell him where he needs to divest. “In the past, I used to invest in Yum China,” he said, naming the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell in that country. “And when I was looking at fridges there in 2014, I started getting really worried.” Buckets of KFC had been replaced by green curry and sushi: For upper-middle-class households in China, this international cuisine was a mark of sophistication, and the less affluent were bound to follow in their wake.
As a society embraces refrigeration, in other words, its entire diet shifts—in ways Stassopoulos has learned to both foresee and exploit. In the United States, this transition took place long enough ago that very few people from the icebox age are alive to notice the enormous changes it has wrought. What we eat, what it tastes like, where it’s grown, and how it affects both our health and that of our planet: These have been entirely transformed by manufactured cold. Nearly three-quarters of everything that Americans consume today spends some time in the cold chain, the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk, and more chilled on their journeys from farm to fork. In the developing world, that infrastructure “is rudimentary to nonexistent,” says Toby Peters, the world’s first professor of cold economy, at Birmingham University. While the average city dweller in the Netherlands uses about 33 cubic feet of space in the cold chain, urban residents of Egypt or Uganda make do with 2 cubic feet or less. India is thought to have about 9,000 refrigerated vehicles serving a population of 1.4 billion; the French, despite numbering just 68 million, rely on a fleet 15 times the size.
But as Stassopoulos has discovered, that is changing almost overnight.
This kind of research may pay off in the end, but it is certainly not fast or cheap. Stassopoulos estimates that each study takes months of planning, days of interviews and documentation on the ground, and weeks of analysis upon his return. To understand how it worked in practice, I followed along remotely from my home in Los Angeles as Trinetra conducted its latest study in Indonesia. This was Stassopoulos’ fourth visit to the country, which many investors see as an exciting but challenging market: The median age is 31, and despite political instability and historic underinvestment in a social safety net and tertiary education, Indonesia’s economic growth is so robust that nearly a quarter of the population is expected to join the consumer classes in the next six years. Stassopoulos’ objective was to understand the values of the country’s youth and, in particular, those right on the cusp of middle-class status.
When I talked to Stassopoulos immediately before his departure, he told me that for weeks, a local team had been going house-to-house, screening candidates to find a dozen who fit the profile and have never been interviewed before—and a dozen more as backups. A few days later, from the busy port city of Surabaya, Stassopoulos sent me video footage of one of the interviews.
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The subject, whom I’ll call Aminah, was a baby-faced 28-year-old with a 2-year-old son. (For reasons of privacy, these are not the interviewees’ real names, but all other details of their lives are accurate.) She was a full-time housewife who gave up her job as a receptionist at her husband’s request, prior to their marriage. Apologizing for the mess, Aminah walked Stassopoulos and his colleagues through the contents of her small fridge-freezer, answering their questions about the rationale behind each item.
One shelf held two different brands of margarine, which she explained was because she buys whichever is on promotion; next to them was a single-serving pouch of coconut milk for curries, which she said is much less work than buying an actual coconut for fresh milk. Squeezable yogurt, dates, a bag of Nashville-style chicken wings from Indonesian fast-food chain Hotways, frozen shoestring potatoes, crème-filled cookies, and several premade spice mixes rounded out the tour. Stassopoulos asks Aminah to imagine herself in 10 years’ time and describe what would be in her fridge. “Well, the refrigerator itself is going to be different, and it’s going to be double doors, maybe,” she said, looking into the distance wistfully. “And there’s going to be a bunch of snacks in there. In the freezer, there would be the ice cream my child likes.”
A few days later, in Jakarta, Stassopoulos visited a smiley debt collector in his early thirties—I’ll call him Bima—who asked his new wife, Rani, for permission to show the Trinetra team their fridge. “I don’t have a lot right now, so I’m kind of embarrassed,” Rani said. A row of flavored syrups and a carton of chocolate soy milk filled the shelves in the door. “We also have vitamins,” said Bima. “And this is a diet drink for my wife—Cool-Vita.” The freezer section was empty and almost fully frosted over, but the fridge also contained cookies-’n-crème yogurt, candy, coffee creamers, chocolate pudding mix, chicken, mayo, and a tiny green pot of a natto jelly—a gift from a former colleague who visited Japan. “I really like when my nephews and nieces come to my house and they see a lot of food, you know,” Bima said.
Toward the end of the conversation, when Stassopoulos asked him about his future, Bima said he hoped to have twins and a fridge filled with snacks, ice cream, chocolate, and jelly. Rani, who tentatively said she hoped to go back to work after having kids, as long as Bima is OK with it, said she’d prefer to have healthier food. “Because I sometimes watch on YouTube about what people eat abroad,” she continued. “Like, I think their cheese is really, really creamy, really natural, really good. And more fruits, like strawberry—that is not available in Indonesia.” She picked up her phone. “They have these accounts on TikTok or Instagram where people open their refrigerator and it’s just filled with everything.”
Stassopoulos is likely unique in deriving his investment strategy from multiweek fridge-peeping expeditions, but, as Rani proved, his approach taps into one of humanity’s most broadly shared compulsions. “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” said famed French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Show me your fridge, and I’ll show you who you really are, replied the internet. Bookshelves are abstract and, often, carefully curated; bathroom cabinets are too intimate. It is the humble fridge that offers a window onto the 21st-century soul.
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When I caught up with Stassopoulos after his team’s first day of analysis back in London, he seemed exhilarated. As they sifted through their observations, the Trinetra team had already extrapolated some trends: Young, aspirational Indonesians seemed to be highly motivated by price but also the desire to experience new things while indulging and bettering themselves. For the women, efficiency was even more of a priority. “They’re looking for hacks,” said Stassopoulos, reminding me about the frozen shoestring potatoes, chocolate pudding powder, and spice mixes he’d seen in Indonesian fridges. “There is this conflict: being a good wife and mother, cooking good food for my family, versus saving time.”
The fridge has often been perceived as a time-saving device. A 1911 US Department of Agriculture report blamed the limited variety of foods available pre-refrigeration for forcing women to slave away in the kitchen for hours, turning sturdy, year-round ingredients like cabbages, root vegetables, and sugar into preserves, pickles, relishes, and interminable quantities of coleslaw. Most households grew their own produce, too. By the 1920s and ’30s, as domestic fridge adoption took off, women defected from the home toward paid jobs—in small numbers at first, then, following the Second World War, en masse. Working to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables from elsewhere had almost entirely replaced the labor of growing, harvesting, and processing one’s own.
Similar transitions have taken place elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, rates of home freezer ownership and married women in the workforce rose in lockstep from the 1970s. New combination fridge-freezers were marketed as a “time machine” that could provide a “mini-supermarket” at home for the working mother, stocked with heat-and-eat foods such as burgers, pizzas, and fish sticks. Similarly, anthropologist Harold Wilhite noticed that, in the late 1990s, advertisers in India began describing refrigerators as the key to helping women balance “the modern demands of efficiency with the cultural expectations on caring for family”—and, by the early 2000s, young housewives in his neighborhood in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, in the coastal state of Kerala, India, were renouncing long-standing traditional beliefs that only freshly made food was healthy, even if it meant defying their mothers-in-law.
Beyond food, Stassopoulos has found that fridge acquisition is a reliable herald of growth in a country’s insurance and private-tutoring markets. “With a fridge, women can work outside the home, and that’s when they get a say in the household finances,” he told me. “Women tend to think more long-term than men—they think about education for their kids, they want to be prepared for a rainy day.”
Trinetra is a certified B Corp, meaning that it is audited for its beneficial impact on social and environmental issues, and Stassopoulos has remained in touch with many interviewees for years, funding philanthropic endeavors in the communities he has visited. Nonetheless, all of this research is ultimately intended to generate investable opportunities—though Stassopoulos told me that, if he ends up with just one new company to add to his portfolio after this most recent trip, he’ll be happy. While he and his team continued to analyze their observations, his instincts told him that the squeezable yogurt product he’d seen might be a gold mine. “It’s a snack, it’s something that they view as both healthy and nutritious, and it’s full of sugar so it’s got that aspect of indulgence,” he explained. “I went to the store, bought every flavor, and tasted every single one of them.”
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Stassopoulos, who confessed to holding Trinetra’s fridge ethnography debriefings at his home purely for the excuse to cook, is a self-described foodie, health nut, and former vegan. But he makes no judgment on the changes in consumption that a fridge both enables and reflects. “If they want to eat it, I don’t have a problem with it,” he said. “The important thing is, where is the trend going?”
The fridges that hold such lucrative insights promise their owners access to better, healthier lives, while helping them (if female) manage the double burden of economic independence and patriarchal expectation. But for all refrigeration’s advantages—the efficiencies, the ability to save leftovers and prevent waste, the seasonless abundance—it also locks its users into a system that has enormous, if routinely overlooked, harms. Most urgently, and most ironically, the more we cool our food, the more we warm our atmosphere. As the developing world undergoes the transformation that the United States experienced during the 20th century, we are long overdue a full accounting of the cold chain’s costs, as well as its benefits. After all, while ice cream definitely needs to be kept cold, there’s no reason that chicken, yogurt, and strawberries do; they just need to be preserved. The fridge of 10 years’ time might not be a fridge at all.
This article has been adapted from Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, by Nicola Twilley. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Nicola Twilley, 2024.
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