On a Thursday in late August, Andrea Hernández was contemplating a small bottle of cold-pressed organic watermelon juice. “It’s really delicious,” she said, sipping. “But is it $6 delicious?”
She considered this while sitting at Happier Grocery in Manhattan, a luxury emporium of status food: beef tallow cubes displayed like chocolates, protein soft serve (a collaboration with the tradwife mogul Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm), grain-free naan pretzels, a museum’s worth of imported bottled waters.
“How are you?” she said, standing to hug the founder of an up-and-coming nondairy milk brand. He told her that she’d been a “wealth of knowledge and resources,” and that the milk was now available in 25 cafes. “I promise you, this is not planned!” Ms. Hernández said. The scene repeated 20 minutes later, with a mushroom guru.
As the creator of Snaxshot, a Substack newsletter and Instagram account devoted to packaged goods, Ms. Hernández, 35, is perpetually joking, and also deadly serious about the subject: “We’re literally talking about snacks and beverages and food,” she said. And in the same breath, “We’re talking about something that’s like, a core of the human experience.”
In the snack aisle, she believes, conceptions of ideal bodies and lives are reflected in real time: the national infatuation with strength training and protein, the rise of GLP-1s, the MAHA-endorsed rebellion against seed oils, the conservative longing for a more pastoral world in the form of fancy beef jerky.
“If you were paying attention to food and beverage,” Ms. Hernández said last year on the “This Is TASTE” podcast, “it should not have come as a surprise to you that Trump won.”
Snaxshot offers observations, analysis and industry scoops, presented breathlessly, often without punctuation. A new nicotine energy drink is evidence that we have “entered the era of ‘cocaine-induced opulence,’ a sharp pendulum swing from the past decade of adaptogenic and mushroom coffees.” J. Crew (retail) releasing limited-edition cascatelli (pasta) is just the latest example of the youthful appetite for “affordable affluence.” And Man Cereal, packed with 2.5 grams of creatine per serving — well, that remains to be fully deciphered, but “if you think that’s the craziest thing I’ve seen containing creatine, you’d be wrong.”
Ms. Hernández has emerged as a singular voice in the world of consumer packaged goods, largely covered up to this point by press releases and niche industry publications. “There aren’t many copycats,” said Scott Norton, a consumer product investor and a co-founder of Sir Kensington’s Condiments.
Ms. Hernández grew up in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with three siblings and an affinity for imported American snacks: Sour Skittles, Gushers, Funfetti Dunkaroos. After graduating from Northeastern University in Boston, where she studied marketing and communications, she returned to Honduras and began working as a brand strategist, but the pandemic left her without a job or plan — and unlimited free time. “Substacks were like sourdough starter,” Ms. Hernández recalled. “Everybody was doing it.”
And she had a topic in mind. The year before, on a trip to New York City, she’d encountered pastel cans of Recess, a CBD-infused, adaptogen-spiked sparkling water marketed as a panacea for millennial anxiety. She was skeptical, and, at the same time, knew it was exactly the kind of thing that she, a marketer, might come up with. “That was the essential question: Are we being duped by marketing?”
With Snaxshot, Ms. Hernández is doing “the antithesis of what I grew up doing,” positioning herself less as myth buster than as cultural anthropologist: Whether prebiotic sodas are effective is less interesting to her than why everybody suddenly seems to be obsessed with them.
In the five years since, Ms. Hernández has become, at least in certain circles, a kind of snacking Nostradamus. “When Andrea covers a product or a shift, it tends to ripple within the industry,” said Melanie Masarin, the founder of the nonalcoholic aperitif brand Ghia, in an email, noting that Ms. Hernández’s observations have a way of showing up in group chats, brand conversations and beyond.
Part expert and part everyman, her voice is threaded through the discourse: If someone writes a story about snacks, they inevitably quote her. “Her following, even though maybe it’s not the biggest yet, is very sticky with people very influential in food,” said Nicolas Jammet, the co-founder of Sweetgreen and a paid subscriber to the newsletter. (A few months after starting the newsletter, Ms. Hernández received a fan mail from a Starbucks executive.)
At the same time, she still operates with a modicum of anonymity. A whole swath of her followers, among them the actor and comedian BJ Novak, and Eli Sussman, the chef behind thesussmans Instagram account, know her only through Snaxshot’s Instagram, where she posts a steady stream of brutally precise memes.
“It’s a little bit for everyone,” said Ms. Hernández, gleefully. “You take whatever you want from it.”
Snaxshot is currently 17th on Substack’s list of Food and Drink best sellers, between the food writer Emily Nunn and the chef and humanitarian José Andrés. And while Ms. Hernández declined to share subscription numbers, she said her readership was in the “tens of thousands.” Under 100,000, but “it’s close,” she said, close enough that she makes six figures a year from paid subscriptions in addition to what she earns consulting for major brands. (She does not accept payment for her coverage.) On LinkedIn, Ms. Hernández lists her official job title as “cult leader,” until the end of 2023 when she promoted herself to “supreme being.”
She is kidding, of course, but this title does reflect the snack market’s size and scale. According to data from the consumer research firm NIQ, the market was worth $213 billion in the latest 52-week period. “It used to be like, I would go to the grocery store, I could choose between Kraft or Annie’s or homemade macaroni and cheese,” said Oren John, a branding and marketing creator based in Orange County, Calif., and one of Snaxshot’s early fans. “Now I have 45 macaroni and cheese options.”
After years of near-constant travel, Ms. Hernández moved back to the United States last spring to live among the snacks, choosing Austin, Texas, for its position at the intersection of “L.A. wellness girlie smoothie culture” and “New York biohacker wellness bro culture.” She spends at least part of each day out in the field: Target, H-E-B, Whole Foods, Sprouts and, the local independent grocer, observing snack behavior in the wild.
“I try to live above the algorithm,” Ms. Hernández said, although she keeps abreast of trends on social media and is, in fact, stressed out that she is not on her phone right now.
Snaxshot, she hopes, is only the beginning. “I’d love to do something like what Anthony Bourdain did, but for snacks,” she said, mapping out potential segments for a TV show. She also dreams of writing a book (working title: “Generation Snack”) while keeping the newsletter and memes going — ideally, with some assistance.
“I’m not sure I’m ever gonna get a James Beard Award,” she said. “But I do feel stuff that I’ve written has been able to sway conversations.”
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