Trends can succeed or fail depending on accurately predicting market conditions. One of my favourite examples of this is the UK bakery chain, Greggs, who cited their vegan sausage roll as a critical contributor to hitting their first billion in sales in 2019. Veganism had been building in importance since 2014 and went from being a niche concept for early adopters to being broadly available on almost every high street in the UK. Had Greggs acted upon this trend back in 2014, their audience would not have been primed to respond.

But in between those years of 2014 – 2019, more and more weak signals emerged and veganism shifted from something that was sampled once a year as part of ‘Veganuary’, and stretched into school canteens for Meat-Free Mondays, and then filtered way beyond food into products like shampoo.