Jason Martinez Moreno, co-founder of Tommy Popcorn, explains why launching a business in the US has involved far more than learning a new set of rules.
I recently wrote a 10-page research document about popcorn flavours.
That probably isn’t what most people imagine when they think about the job of a founder. But we’re looking at new flavours for Tommy Popcorn in early 2027, and before we decide what to launch, I want to know everything around what American shoppers are actually looking for.
That means digging through search data. Which flavours are people searching for? When does interest start to rise? Are there seasonal patterns? What words are shoppers using? And, maybe most importantly, is there demand that existing brands aren’t meeting?
Taking a business from the UK to the US has taught me that expansion isn’t just about getting your product into another country, you have to learn how that country shops.
The paperwork is only one part of it
There is, of course, a long list of things to learn when you open a business in America.
The laws are different, the accounting is different, food labelling and compliance are different. Even things that seem relatively simple can send you down a rabbit hole because the way you’ve always done them in the UK doesn’t necessarily apply.
As a founder, you can’t completely remove yourself from any of that. You have to understand enough to know what questions to ask and when you need specialist advice.
But there is another part of entering a new market that is much harder to outsource: learning the customer.
I have spent years building up an instinct for British consumers, moving into America meant accepting that some of those instincts were no longer especially useful.
You can’t just export your British customer
The temptation when expanding overseas is to think you’ve already done the hard bit. You’ve built a product people buy, you’ve worked out your price point and you’ve learnt how to market it. Now you just need to repeat the formula somewhere bigger.
It doesn’t really work like that.
The US isn’t just a bigger version of the UK market. Consumer tastes are different, shopping habits are different and the sheer size of the country means behaviour can vary massively depending on where people live.
Even the way a product needs to grab someone’s attention can feel different. American consumers are used to a huge amount of choice, particularly in snacks. You’re competing with products that are bold in their flavours, packaging and positioning. So, rather than assuming we knew what would work, I started going back to the data.
What Amazon searches can tell you
One of the places I spend a lot of time is Amazon search data. It gives you something that’s difficult to get from normal market research: a picture of what people are actively trying to find.
Someone answering a survey might tell you that a certain flavour sounds appealing. Someone typing it into Amazon is actively looking for it.
I look at the terms people use, the volume of searches and how demand changes over time. If interest in a particular type of snack starts climbing at the same point every year, that’s useful. If thousands of people are searching for something but the available products don’t quite match what they’re asking for, that’s interesting too.
None of those numbers makes the decision for you, but together they can tell you much more about the market you’re entering.
A popcorn launch can start months before anyone tastes it
We’re currently looking at flavours we could launch in the first quarter of 2027.
Long before any new product reaches a customer, I’m looking through the data to work out what might happen next.
When did searches for similar flavours rise last year? What happened the year before? How crowded is that part of the market? What are customers saying in reviews of competing products? Is demand building or are we looking at something that had a brief spike six months ago?
For this particular project, that work turned into a 10-page research document looking at the potential release flavour and timing. It might sound excessive for popcorn, but getting a launch wrong is even more expensive.
Founders end up doing some strange jobs
This is also the side of running a business that people don’t always see.
“Founder” sounds like one job. In practice, especially while you’re building in a new country, it can mean doing six different jobs before lunchtime.
One hour I’m thinking about accounts or compliance, the next I’m dealing with suppliers. Then I’m looking at marketing, product development or digging through consumer search data.
We use lawyers and accountants, of course, but that doesn’t mean I can hand something over and forget about it. Especially in the early days, I’ve had a hand in shaping a lot of the company’s legal and compliance paperwork myself.
I’ve had to understand the rules well enough to brief specialists properly, ask the right questions and, just as importantly, recognise when something that comes back isn’t quite right. You don’t need to become a lawyer or an accountant, but as a founder you do need to know enough to challenge the people who are.
It’s the audience research, though, that I’ve kept particularly close to. If someone sends you five bullet points saying what the data shows, you get the conclusion. When you’ve spent hours going through it yourself, you start seeing the small things behind that conclusion.
A strange search term appears again and again, customers keep making the same complaint in reviews, a flavour you hadn’t considered starts gaining searches at a particular time of year. Those details can change what you do next.
Expansion is really an exercise in unlearning
If I were giving advice to another British founder looking at America, it wouldn’t be to ignore the legal or operational side. You obviously need to get those things right.
It would be not to let them take up so much of your attention that you forget the bigger question: do you actually understand the people you’re about to sell to?
Entering a new market involves a surprising amount of unlearning. You have to be willing to question things that felt obvious at home, from the products people want to the words they use to find them.
Data isn’t a replacement for instinct. If anything, I’ve found it helps you build a new instinct.
And when you’re trying to understand millions of potential customers in a country you’ve only recently started selling in, that’s far more useful than assuming Americans will buy something because British shoppers did.
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