US nutrition and energy bar retail sales

It is not, on its own, surprising that the American cultural diet has shifted toward both Drake and Clif Bars; what is surprising is how closely they've shifted together (r = 0.960). Between 2005 and 2022 the share of US music listening that was hip-hop and R&B climbed steadily, and the shelf-space allocation for chewy oats rose with it, and we are left holding a graph that says the country has been humming a beat while chewing a bar for nearly two decades.

Both curves are symptoms of the same slow reweighting of American taste. Hip-hop overtook rock as the dominant US genre around 2017, helped enormously by streaming, which counts a 30-second play as a sale and therefore rewards the genres most optimized for radio-replacement playlists; nutrition bars, meanwhile, grew from about $2 billion to nearly $9 billion as Americans substituted snacking for meals, particularly during gym trips and commutes. The same demographic — urban, under 40, smartphone-native — drove both: the commuter reaching for a Kind bar at 8am is the same commuter cuing up a Kendrick album for the drive.

We chew our oats; we stream our bars. Both are portable consolations for the car.