Hello Curious People,
Here are this week’s headlines:
Charting the path of protein from macro to pleasure moment; the journey from chalky shake to something way more delicious.
When machines start driving kids, teaching humans, and diagnosing from the bathroom, you know intelligence has gone full lifestyle. The next generation of tech is social, self-aware, and surprisingly good company.
Prepare yourself for food that isn’t food, records that stare back, and a gallery that lets you take a nap.
A great selection this week of ads & activations that just made us feel good! #sorrynotsorry
When everyone else is playing dress-up, Heidi Klum is playing God. And that's the point.
Enjoy the read.
Angelique
The Protein Renaissance: Wellness That Tastes Like Victory
This morning, I bought a coffee that tasted like victory. Not because it hit 25 grams of protein. But because it felt good.
Silky, foamy, quietly smug.
That quiet smugness? The sweet taste of revolution.
Somewhere between the chalky shakes of the early 2000s and today’s protein-infused everything, something wonderful happened: We stopped treating nourishment like homework.
From Discipline to Desire
For years, protein was a proxy for control. Picture the early 2000s gym bro: blender bottle in one hand, grimace in the other. Chugging down grainy sludge like it was a rite of passage. More penance than pleasure.
Then life got noisy. Schedules blurred. Wellness fatigue set in (with 70% of us now prioritising protein daily).
And even the iron temple started asking: “Why can’t gains taste good?”
That’s when people began craving something simpler: the kind of ease that feels like exhaling.
Make it easy.
Make it fun.
Make it delicious.
Make it fit into my life without making my life smaller.
That’s what people want now: Pleasure. Not Perfection.
The Rise of Everyday Indulgence
The new wave of protein doesn’t demand devotion; it slides into our rituals and makes them richer. A scoop in our morning cereal. A swirl in our latte. A dusting over popcorn that turns movie night into an act of self-care.
☕❤️👊 Starbucks did it with their protein cold foam: comfort disguised as coffee (15g boost per grande).
🍿❤️💪 The Kardashians did it with Khloud popcorn: indulgence wrapped in efficiency (7g per serving).
🍝❤️🏋️ Even pasta’s getting in on it with Macho’s marinara. Because, why shouldn’t red sauce count as recovery? (100g protein per jar.)
We’ve quietly rewritten the rules of nourishment.
It’s no longer about control. It’s about completion.
The small, sensory satisfaction that says: “I’m doing enough”.
Pleasure as Performance
The truth is, function never wins without feeling something too. We don’t crave nutrition labels. We crave experiences that make us feel capable, calm, alive.
In a culture obsessed with optimisation, pleasure is becoming the ultimate performance enhancer.
And that’s the opportunity.
Powering Up Coffee
Starbucks’ protein-infused cold foam blends nutrition with coffee rituals (up to 36g per drink).
Sauce-Powered Protein
Macho turns classic marinara into a 100g protein powerhouse that brings performance to the pasta bowl.
Morning Boost
FUEL10K’s protein-boosted granola turns breakfast into a delicious performance fuel moment (7.9g per serving).
Sprinkled Snacks
Khloé Kardashian’s Khloud turns popcorn into a 7g protein flex. Clean, crunchy, and zero guilt. Because who said gains can’t taste like butter?
Noodle Upgrade
Huel’s high-protein noodle pot turns instant meals into nutrient-rich, no-fuss indulgence.
Grab-and-go Gains
MyProtein’s Clear Vegan Protein Water makes daily nutrition effortless with sip-ready plant-based protein.
Hitting our protein targets? Now just a side effect of joy.
The next era of wellness won’t punish desire. It will reward it with flavour, texture, ease, emotion. All of it.
I’m excited by a future of where we’re not counting more macros, but making more moments really count.
Brands (and people) designing for that?
They’ll be the ones tasting victory every day.
The signals you’re seeing?
They come straight from Future Possible®, the world's only trend platform that uses pleasure as its compass to decode what humans really crave.
Join 8,500+ innovators who get insiders’ intelligence on the $13.7 trillion pleasure economy and the opportunities your competitors don't want you to see for only £95/year.
Wait, What?!: Sci-fi Tech Hitting the Real World
Toyota has unveiled the Kids Mobi, a bubble-shaped electric pod that drives children to school, no adult needed. The fully autonomous vehicle features LED “eyes” and an AI companion called UX Friend that chats and plays with kids during the ride. It’s designed to give children “freedom of mobility,” making school drop-offs safer, simpler, and surprisingly adorable. Turns out, the next big rite of passage isn’t prom, it’s parallel parking in preschool.
Meet Bumi, the small but mighty humanoid robot by Noetix Robotics. Standing just under a metre tall, it walks, talks, recognises faces, dances, and even teaches coding, all for around $1,400. Designed to educate, entertain, and make robotics more human, it’s a friendly blend of curiosity and code. Just when you think robots are here to replace us, they show up to teach, and this one costs less than your phone.
In Beijing and Shanghai, smart urinals are turning toilet breaks into health checks. For just a couple of dollars, they analyse your urine for glucose, proteins, calcium, and early signs of disease, sending results straight to your phone in seconds. It’s fast, cheap, and quietly transforming public health from the ground up. When the smartest doctor in the room is a urinal, the future’s officially taking the piss.
The Cata-Lyst:
3 Mind-Expanding Finds We’re Tuning Into
This trio pushes the edges of taste, sight, sound, and making yourself at home.
The Hungries
Feeding the Future
From non-cocoa chocolate made with food waste to umami-rich proteins that aren’t meat, chef Rasmus Munk, of The Alchemist restaurant fame, is serving up endless innovation in his food lab, Spore. Here, he reimagines both food and the future of the planet.
Hypnosis on Wax
Artist Le Maille uses zoetropes printed on vinyl to turn records into moving art. As the music spins, so do his hand-drawn animations, looping, pulsing, and morphing in perfect sync with the sound. It’s a hypnotic blend of visual rhythm and sonic texture, creating a totally immersive experience you can’t stop watching (or listening to).
Peter Doig
The House of Music
Peter Doig returns to London with House of Music, a quietly mesmerising show at the Serpentine that feels more like a living room than a gallery. That’s because Doig’s dreamlike brushwork is being hung in an environment that features furniture, curtains, even a vintage sound system, and if visitors want to take a nap, he says that’s fine too.
4 Great Marketing Moves
World Menu Heist
McDonald’s turned fan envy into action with “World Menu Heist,” smuggling eight global favourites into UK menus via a cinematic campaign that infiltrated OOH, social and in-store channels. Framed like Ocean’s Eleven, the stunt channels consumer cravings into a participatory story that makes the limited-time launch feel like an event.
Heavy Hitters
Gymnation in Dubai built what it claims is the world’s heaviest permanent billboard, a one-tonne installation crafted from forty interlocked weight plates, promoting its new Strongman class. The stunt literally lifts the idea of “bodybuilding” into outdoor spectacle, turning advertising into actual physical force.
After-Work Ritual
Heineken renamed over 1,000 UK pubs “The Office,” offering free pints after 4:59pm to hybrid workers who admit they’re missing those casual catch-ups with colleagues. By turning the return-to-desk debate into an invitation to reconnect, the brand reminds us that some of the best ideas happen not in meetings, but over a pint.
Comfort Immersion
Heinz turned its Cream of Tomato into a full-on sensory event with “Bathe in Comfort,” an OOH and digital campaign visualising a warm bath of nostalgia, taste and emotional indulgence. It’s built from the insight that Brits love the soup so much they’d bathe in it, turning a simple tin into a rich, immersive moment.
The Art of Going Full Monster
This Halloween, Heidi Klum didn't just dress as Medusa. She became her.
Think: shimmering green scales, animatronic snakes slithering from her head, reptilian contacts, and a split tongue attached with a suction cup (yes, it made dinner tricky).
Her husband came as the Greek soldier she'd just turned to stone.
Fifteen artists. Months of prep. One battery-powered tail.
The self-declared Queen of Halloween proved what every brand leader should know: in a world of AI everything, commitment to a big idea and ungodly craft is the ultimate flex.
While everyone else was buying off the rack, Klum spent months building hers from scratch.
The lesson? When everyone's playing the same game, the only way to win is to stop playing.
So I say, it’s time to go full monster or go home.
Because in an era where authenticity is currency and attention is gold, the brands (and people) willing to truly commit to the uncomfortably different…
…they're the ones who turn heads...
And occasionally, turn they’re competition stone.
See you next week 🔮 👽 🎩 🪄