Let me describe your last trip to the supermarket.
You walked in with a vague intention. You moved through the aisles. You picked things up. You put things in the basket. You paid. You left.
At no point did you feel like something was wrong.
That is the most interesting part.
The architecture of false choice
Open any economics textbook and you will find a consumer. Rational, informed, sovereign. He surveys the available options, processes the information, and selects the product that best satisfies his preferences. The market responds. Better products win. Worse products disappear. Everyone benefits.
Now find me that consumer in a Tunisian supermarket.
What you will find instead is a person standing in front of a shelf that appears to offer choice, multiple brands, multiple formats, multiple price points, and actually offers something closer to a managed illusion. Because in most categories, the real decision was made long before that person walked in. It was made in a wholesaler's office. In a distribution contract. In a shelf positioning negotiation that happened months ago between parties who never once thought about the consumer's preference.
This is the oligopoly problem. And we do not talk about it honestly.
Every major CPG category in Tunisia has its oligopoly. Two or three players who together control the market. But the more interesting structure is one level down, at the subcategory. There, what looks like competition is frequently a single product with no meaningful alternative. You think you are choosing between brands. You are actually choosing between the product and the absence of the product.
That is not a market. That is a corridor with a checkout at the end.
When choice disappears, so does the reason to innovate
This matters enormously for innovation and we almost never connect the two.
Innovation, real innovation, the kind that improves daily life, requires competitive pressure. A brand improves its product because a better product takes its customers. Remove the competitive pressure, and you remove the incentive. What remains is the incentive to cut costs, because cost cutting improves margins without requiring the brand to earn anything from the consumer.
So the tomato paste gets more aqueous. The biscuit gets thinner. The chocolate develops a texture that is difficult to describe but easy to recognize, the texture of something that used to be made with more care and less calculation. The plastic bottle, which used to hold its shape in your hand, now crumples at the first application of grip because someone reduced the polymer density by a fraction of a percent and recovered the difference across millions of units.
Each of these is a small decision. Together they constitute a strategy. The strategy is: the consumer has no real alternative, so we will extract value from the product until we find the point at which the consumer notices and revolts.
We have not yet found that point. The consumer keeps buying. The strategy keeps working.
Nobody planned this. That is the terrifying part.
There is no meeting where Tunisian brand managers gathered and decided to make everything worse.
What happened is more mundane and more systemic. A market structure emerged, through regulation, through early mover distribution advantages, through the particular economics of import controls and wholesale networks, that made competing on product quality a losing strategy. The brands that locked distribution won. The brands that tried to compete on product lost, or survived in niches, or were absorbed.
Over time the survivors learned the lesson. Not consciously. Just through the ordinary process of doing what works and stopping what doesn't.
The result is a market in homeostasis. Nobody is innovating because nobody needs to. Nobody needs to because nobody else is. The equilibrium holds. The biscuits get thinner in perfect synchrony across every brand in the category, because they are all responding to the same structural logic.
This is what economists call a stable equilibrium. What it feels like from the inside is a country where things quietly get worse and nobody is responsible.
The classroom that got it right.
I am currently attending an innovation course at IHEC. The frameworks are solid, the thinking is honest, and most importantly, the course is built on the right premise: that innovation belongs to everyone, not just corporations or startups. Any person willing to think seriously and act deliberately can innovate. That is the only premise worth teaching from.
But every day I leave the classroom and walk back into the actual Tunisian market. And what I find there is not a failure of education. The knowledge exists. It is being taught well. The failure is in the conditions that would allow that knowledge to be practiced. A market where distribution beats product every time does not reward what the classroom teaches, however well the classroom teaches it.
The classroom is right. The market simply hasn't read the syllabus.
We also stole the word and gave it to the wrong people
Somewhere along the way, innovation became a costume.
It acquired a specific aesthetic: the startup, the pitch deck, the conference, the young founder, the disruption narrative, the evening news segment with the boy who built something from salvaged parts and a solar panel while a governor looked on approvingly.
Everyone outside this aesthetic, which is almost everyone, received the implicit message that innovation was not their domain. The restaurant owner with an idea for a new sandwich formula. The coffee roaster experimenting with a new blend. The small manufacturer considering whether to hold quality or join the race to the bottom. None of them would reach for the word innovation to describe what they are doing.
But what they are doing is precisely innovation. And their innovations, if they happened, if they were supported, if they were culturally named and valued, would touch more lives every single day than the entire Tunisian startup ecosystem combined.
A better chocolate bar is not a small thing. It is a thing that happens to millions of people, every day, for years. The cumulative experience of a product that delivers genuine pleasure rather than managed disappointment is not trivial. It is the texture of a life lived slightly better than it would otherwise have been.
We have built an entire vocabulary of innovation and impact that is blind to this. That treats the sensory, the immediate, the daily as beneath serious consideration. That reserves its attention for the civilizational and the scalable while the biscuit quietly gets thinner.
The fix is not what you think
More funding will not fix this. More startup competitions will not fix this. Another innovation prize, another conference, another segment on the evening news will not fix this.
What needs to change is the market structure that makes competing on quality irrational. And what needs to change alongside it is the cultural belief about who innovation belongs to.
These are not quick fixes. Market structures change slowly, through regulation and new entrants and the occasional catastrophic failure of an incumbent that got too comfortable. Cultural beliefs change even more slowly, through accumulated examples and new language and the gradual replacement of one implicit assumption with another.
But they do change. And they change faster when someone names what is actually happening.
What is actually happening is this: Tunisia has a consumer market where the incentive to improve product has been almost entirely replaced by the incentive to control distribution. Where quality is declining systematically and rationally. Where the word innovation has been captured by a small tribe and made inaccessible to the people who could use it most.
And where the consumer stands in the supermarket aisle, basket in hand, believing he is choosing.
He is not choosing.
He is accepting.
There is a difference. We should probably start talking about it.
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