Introduction
In 1991, Geoffrey Moore published “Crossing the Chasm,” a guide on how technology companies transition from early adopters to the mainstream. His core insight was that many innovations succeed in attracting a small, passionate niche, but few manage to leap to broad adoption. Without that leap, they stall. While Moore’s original context was high tech (software, hardware, and digital systems), his model offers useful lessons for consumer packaged goods, especially in the food and beverage sector, where the forces that block adoption are different yet analogous.
Today’s F&B entrepreneurs are increasingly drawn to the rhetoric of disruption. Startups pitch plant-based proteins, functional drinks, low-alcohol cocktails, alternative sweeteners and more, often backed by venture capital, influencer campaigns and bold product claims. Yet many stall before reaching the mass market. The Chasm remains. In F&B, that Chasm is bridged not by better algorithms or integration into enterprise platforms, but by taste, price, convenience, trust, and repeat behaviour.
This post is a rant on how Crossing the Chasm can be applied to the food and beverage sector. It focuses on three illustrative categories: functional sodas, NoLo beverages, and plant-based meat. Functional sodas have made credible progress into mainstream adoption. NoLo remains stuck mainly. Plant-based meat, despite massive investment and media hype, offers a cautionary tale of what happens when the Chasm is misjudged. Finally, I argue that PR and significant funding cannot substitute for the grounded work required to cross the Chasm—and many venture capital firms make analogous errors in tech and consumer products.
Reframing Moore’s Chasm for Food and Beverage
Moore’s original adoption curve is based on the diffusion of innovations theory. It divides users into segments: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The critical break is between early adopters and the early majority: early adopters are willing to accept risk, tolerate imperfections, and care about differentiation; the early majority, on the other hand, wants assurance, low risk, simplicity, and reliability. The Chasm lies between these two groups.
In the F&B context, we can reinterpret those roles:
Early adopters are niche, trend-driven consumers—urban, health-conscious, values-driven, curious about new products. They purchase from speciality stores, boutique shops, or direct-to-consumer channels. They tolerate higher prices, novel formats, and taste compromises in exchange for innovation or a sense of virtue.
The early majority are mainstream grocery shoppers. They expect things to deliver reliably, at a justifiable price, in familiar formats, and with minimal friction. They won’t reinvent their routines for a product—they’ll only adopt it if it displaces something they already trust or use.
The Chasm, therefore, is the gulf between “this is cool” and “this is normal.” In F&B, that Chasm is often deeper and more unforgiving than in tech. Why? Because food and drink consumption is habitual, sensory, emotional, and personal. A novel drink may get a trial from early adopters, but to become habitual and scale, it must fit seamlessly into the everyday lives, shopping habits and taste expectations of average consumers.
Several elements of Moore’s model map well:
Whole product concept: In tech, delivering a “whole product” means bundling core technology with installation, support, complementary services and ecosystem. In F&B, the “whole product” encompasses not only the ingredient formula but also packaging, distribution, shelf stability, price elasticity, messaging, usage occasions, and social validation.
Positioning and target segment: Moore argues you must pick a “beachhead” niche, target a particular use case or segment that can act as a wedge into the majority. In F&B, that means finding a compelling occasion or consumer need (e.g., post-workout, mid-afternoon, with a meal) through which you can spread your message.
Distribution strategy: In the tech industry, selling through proper channels (enterprise, VARs, partners) is crucial. In F&B, the channels include supermarkets, foodservice, on-premise, direct-to-consumer emphasis, e-commerce, and convenience. Getting the right mix is vital for scaling.
Chasm bridge tactics: Moore emphasises references, word-of-mouth, and pragmatic proof points. In F&B, this means implementing sampling programs, conducting retail trials, securing trusted endorsements, achieving visibility in established outlets, and achieving replicable distribution wins.
Because F&B is more constrained by unit economics, supply chains, shelf life, regulatory factors, logistics, and consumer expectations, crossing the Chasm in food is sometimes more complex than in tech—but the underlying logic remains the same.
Success Story: Functional Sodas
Functional sodas provide a good example of a category that has made meaningful progress across the Chasm. Brands such as Olipop, Poppi, and a few smaller regional challengers began with a wellness-forward angle: delivering gut health or prebiotic fibre benefits in a soda-like format. Initially, these brands gained traction among early adopters, specifically health-conscious urbanites, individuals reducing their sugar intake, and consumers drawn to the novelty of a soda that “does something good.”
But maintaining growth required reframing—moving from a “health drink” niche to a credible alternative for everyday occasions. Several strategic moves illustrate how functional sodas managed that:
Taste improvements & formulation balance: The earliest prototypes often leaned too heavily on fibre, botanicals, or functional ingredients, at the cost of familiar flavour and mouthfeel. Over successive iterations, brands improved the sweetness balance, carbonation, and flavour clarity, bringing them closer to a conventional soda in terms of experience.
Packaging & emphasised: The packaging shifted from apothecary-like or medicinal cues to more vibrant, beverage-forward designs. Messaging emphasised refreshment and enjoyment first, with functional benefit as a secondary claim. This lowered the psychological barrier for more mainstream consumers.
Retail footprint and pricing strategy: Functional soda brands began in DTC and speciality retailers. To scale, they targeted regional and national grocery distribution (e.g. in respected chains). They introduced multipacks, promotional pricing, and slotting deals that reduced the price gap versus conventional sodas. Over time, they found opportunities to enter impulse and grab‑and-go channels.
Sector repositioning: Instead of positioning as “the soda you can have because it’s healthy,” messaging evolved into “soda that works for you”, a more neutral positioning. That shift allowed mainstream buyers to see functional soda as an alternative, not a compromise.
Social proof and credibility: Influencers, health bloggers and niche media fueled early awareness, but the brands needed to move beyond that. Success stories—e.g, securing shelf space in major chains, garnering consumer reviews, and endorsements by trusted voices—became vital. Every new retail account served as a proof point.
As a result, functional sodas now appear not just in wellness sections but co-located with traditional soft drinks in many supermarkets. Their distribution, brand presence, and consumer recognition have reached a more stable and scalable level. The category still has challenges (price sensitivity, category education), but it has plausibly crossed the Chasm into everyday relevance.
Still in the Chasm: NoLo Beverages
No- and low-alcohol beverages, which include a variety of drinks such as non-alcoholic beers, wines, spirits, and botanical “mocktails,” are a category of high interest and success. Although many brands have enthusiastic followings in certain circles, few have truly gained a foothold in the mainstream.
From the early adopter side, NoLo captured interest through narratives focused on health, wellness, mental clarity, and social moderation. The “sober curious” movement, Dry January, and broader wellness trends offered fertile ground. Some consumers were motivated to experiment with mocktails, kombucha-based hard seltzers, or spirit alternatives for better sleep, lower calories or lifestyle moderation.
Yet the leap to mass adoption is constrained by several obstacles:
Sensory expectations
For the mainstream drinker, taste and mouthfeel are non-negotiable. Many NoLo alternatives struggle to replicate the complexity, “bite”, or satisfaction of alcoholic drinks. If a product feels bland, thin or noticeably “not a drink,” it fails the basic test in the early majority’s mind.Pricing and value perception
NoLo drinks often carry a premium price, sometimes even higher than alcoholic equivalents after tax. Many consumers baulk at paying more for something perceived as less satisfying. The premium may be justified for niche buyers, but not for habitual consumption by mainstream drinkers.Availability & visibility
Many NoLo options remain confined to health food stores, speciality retailers, or bars with a focus on wellness. They don’t have the shelf presence or impulse positioning of alcoholic equivalents. Even when NoLo options are stocked, they often appear in separate “non-alcoholic” sections rather than alongside conventional drinks, which reduces visibility and comparison.Messaging orientation
Many NoLo brands emphasise what’s missing (no alcohol, fewer calories) rather than what is present (flavour, experience, occasion). This framing subtly suggests a trade-off, making them seem like substitutes for a limited audience. Mainstream consumers, by contrast, want to see the drink as a legitimate choice in its own right, not as a “lesser” version.Role of established players
Interestingly, some momentum has come from mainstream and premium spirits companies entering the NoLo space. Diageo, Heineken, and others have leveraged trusted brand names to introduce non-alcoholic variants that retain core identity cues. Products like Heineken 0.0 and Tanqueray 0.0 benefit from consumer familiarity, broader distribution, and stronger sensory replication. These efforts help reduce the psychological distance between NoLo and traditional drinking occasions. However, even these players face challenges, particularly in convincing consumers that NoLo is not just for those abstaining but a credible part of everyday social drinking. Their presence gives the category legitimacy but hasn’t yet transformed its usage at scale.
However, niche, boutique NoLo brands—particularly those specialising in botanical spirits or novel mocktails—often struggle to gain traction beyond early adopters. Producers of these NoLo products design formulations that closely match hedonic expectations, cut cost curves, and reframe messaging to emphasise inclusion rather than abstinence; the Chasm will remain a barrier.
Failure to Cross: Plant-Based Meat
Plant-based meat products (e.g. burgers, sausages, ground “meat” alternatives) represent perhaps the highest-profile F&B innovation attempt of the past decade. Attracting hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in investment and global media attention, companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have positioned themselves as transformative alternatives to conventional meat. Their stories illustrate what can go wrong when a company underestimates the depth of the Chasm.
In the early adopter segment, plant-based meat products resonated with consumers motivated by sustainability, climate change, animal welfare, and health concerns. Many of these consumers were willing to try new products, accept minor taste trade-offs, and pay a premium. Early victories in restaurants, premium supermarkets, and foodservice partnerships built credibility.
However, to succeed at scale, the product needed to overcome deeper barriers:
Sensory parity shortfalls
For mainstream meat-eaters, the benchmark is not plant-based meat—it is conventional meat, cooked the way the consumer expects. Many users complained of off‑notes, texture irregularities or aftertastes. These flaws are more tolerable to experimental eaters than to habitual meat consumers. The early majority is far less forgiving of perceived “otherness” in taste profile.Price gap
Despite scale-up efforts, plant-based meat often remained significantly more expensive than ground beef or animal-based alternatives—especially when commodity prices rose or supply chain pressures intervened. Mainstream consumers are reluctant to pay more for something that may not deliver on taste or familiarity.Credibility and messaging conflicts
Plant-based meat’s marketing often leaned into ethical, environmental or “tech-food” narratives—lab-grown, science-backed, disruptive. While compelling to some, these claims sometimes backfired in mainstream settings where simple and reassuring messages are valued. Some consumers viewed the products with suspicion (e.g. “ultra-processed”, “synthetic”). Others found the narrative overwhelming or abstract.Whole product mismatch
The product’s success depended not only on the patty but on its broader ecosystem: recipe adaptation, consumer cooking habits, compatibility with existing products (bread, sauces, cooking methods), supply chains, price promotions and distribution. In many markets, plant-based meat was poorly integrated into conventional retail meat shelves or lacked a consistent supply. Many retailers treated it as a speciality item, reinforcing its niche status.Momentum misalignment
By the time some companies began refocusing on taste, cost reduction and mainstream positioning, they had already exhausted investor patience or media excitement. The early hype drove high expectations and valuations, leaving little room for iteration or honest retrenchment.
Because plant-based meat innovations focused on scale and headline metrics rather than gradually building consumer trust, they encountered the Chasm far before they had established broad appeal. The spectacular growth in pilot markets sometimes masked deep fragility in the structure of adoption.
In short, the plant-based meat story is not a failure of vision, but a cautionary note about underestimating the psychological, sensory, and habitual leaps required from early believers to reach the mainstream.
Why PR and Venture Capital Cannot Bridge the Chasm
A recurring temptation in F&B (as in tech) is to rely on big funding rounds, media hype and bold messaging to leapfrog over the Chasm. But in reality, those tools generate attention but not adoption. The Chasm must be crossed with substance, discipline, and a deep understanding of the consumer. Many venture investors and founders make mistakes in this regard, assuming that the tech playbook suffices for consumer categories. The risk: massive burn without sustainable consumer traction.
To see how this plays out in parallel industries, we can look at failures from consumer electronics and tech that over-relied on hype. Consider:
Juicero: A high‑end juicer that costs hundreds of dollars and requires proprietary juice packs. The public discovered you could squeeze the packs by hand, undermining the value. The product was overengineered, overhyped and misaligned with real user needs.
Google Glass: Announced with bold claims, but users baulked at privacy, social acceptability, limited utility, and price. The hype outpaced the utility, and the device failed to resonate with the mainstream. The category went silent for nearly a decade of re-engineering.
Amazon Fire Phone: Launched with spectacle but lacked a meaningful differentiation in the crowded smartphone market. It failed to deliver enough clear appeal relative to incumbents and was pulled within a year.
These examples illustrate a pattern: companies invest capital and resources in PR to generate early buzz, but this cannot substitute for product-market fit or adoption dynamics. A flashy launch cannot hide a weak consumer value proposition.
In the F&B space, many brands follow the same overconfidence. Venture capitalists celebrate large funding rounds—$10 million, $50 million, $100 million—and the press enjoys the narrative of disruption. However, they overlook the more complex tasks, such as iterating formulations based on taste panels, securing shelf space in mass retail, closing the price gap, building distribution logistics, and managing repeat purchase behaviour.
Some common investor errors:
Mistaking buzz for traction
Media coverage and social media virality can mask weak retention or shallow repeat sales. VCs may misinterpret hype metrics (such as clicks and impressions) as indicators of product-market fit.Overemphasis on growth over proof
Startups may chase expansion or acquisitions before stabilising adoption in core markets. In F&B, that means scaling prematurely into multiple geographies or channels before proving retention locally.Underestimating retail dynamics
Retail slotting, shelf share, promotional discounts, category adjacencies and planograms are complex and expensive. Velocity is king. Many consumer brands underestimate the cost and effort required to enter (and avoid being delisted from) major grocery chains.Applying tech scaling logic to physical goods
Tech startups often scale with marginal costs near zero; consumer goods, on the other hand, must manage raw materials, manufacturing, logistics, and spoilage. The unit economics matter heavily. In F&B, cost structures, margins and supply chain risk are more brittle.Ignoring consumer segmentation dynamics
Many VCs expect that if a brand captures a high-value niche and shows fast growth there, it can “spill over” into mass markets. But that ignores the psychological, sensory, and habitual differences between niche and mainstream.Timing and capital exhaustion misalignment
In tech, investors often provide runway for product pivots or multiple rounds of iteration. In the F&B sector, consumer patience is shorter. A brand that burns cash without achieving meaningful sales may lose shelf access or investor interest before reaching the Chasm.
When companies over-rely on capital and PR, they risk becoming stranded in the valley of hype: visible but unsustainable. To bridge the Chasm, they must invest disproportionately in refining the product, building distribution, lowering price barriers and earning consumer trust. Fix the product, do not over-amplify the novelty.
Conclusion
Crossing the Chasm was conceived for digital technologies, but its logic extends to food and beverages—perhaps more insistently. For F&B, the Chasm is not between features and usability, but between novelty and habitual use, between premium curiosity and everyday consumption.
Functional sodas demonstrate that a brand can translate novelty into mainstream relevance by iterating on taste, packaging, messaging, and distribution. NoLo beverages illustrate how many compelling ideas remain stuck because they focus on what they subtract (alcohol) rather than what they bring (experience). Plant-based meat demonstrates how vast funding and bold narratives cannot overcome sensory, price and adoption barriers without deeply mastering the Chasm.
The biggest fallacy is believing that money and buzz can substitute for the strenuous work of adoption. Many venture capitalists, in F&B as in tech, over-index on headline metrics and underinvest in the laggard‑convincing work of product-market fit, retail integration and consumer behaviour change.
If you are building an innovative F&B brand, the guiding question is:
What must this product do, feel like, cost, and be positioned as for the average consumer to choose it over what they already use?
The answers may require incremental adjustments, patience and humility, but that is how the Chasm is crossed.