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A seasoning vendor in Barbados propped her phone against a jar on her kitchen counter, talked through how she seasons fish, and posted the video. Three days later, it had 400,000 views. No film crew, no agency, no ad spend; organic reach a supermarket chain couldn’t buy with a million-dollar campaign.
That clip captures something playing out across the Caribbean. Market vendors who’ve spent decades selling from town-square stalls are turning to TikTok, and holding their own against multinational grocery chains that have made life harder for small vendors in recent years.
Roy Naipaul, a Guyanese-American PhD candidate, spent months talking with vendors across the region. Working with his mentor, Dr. Abdallah Elias, in Strasbourg, France, he set out to answer a straightforward question: how do small vendors, with no marketing budget and no corporate backing, survive, and even grow, against supermarket giants? What he heard sounded less like marketing strategy and more like
people figuring out, one video at a time, how to be seen.
The mechanics, as vendors describe them, are almost stubbornly simple. It doesn’t seem to matter who has the bigger budget; what matters is whether someone watches the whole video. Several vendors put it the same way: viewers, not money, decide what gets seen. On the ground, that’s meant a vendor with a smartphone can reach as many people as a chain with a marketing department twenty times her size.
Here’s the twist: the winning formula isn’t polish, it’s the lack of it. A doubles vendor in Trinidad found that just talking to the camera the way she’d talk to a friend, while making Indo-Caribbean dishes, pulled in more engagement than any supermarket ad she’d seen. Customers, she said, want real people, not something overly produced. TikTok completely rewrote the marketing playbook by turning everyday users into a brand’s most powerful sales force. Grassroot is authentic that spreads by word-of-mouth, views and clicks.
Vendors have leaned into things once seen as drawbacks: thick accents, home kitchens, family recipes, regional dialects. A vendor in St. Lucia speaks Kwéyòl on purpose, because it tells viewers instantly she’s one of them. A vendor in Jamaica calls out loyal customers by name mid-video, telling one she’s set aside her favorite mangoes, and watches customers share the clip with everyone they know.
The reach has gone further than anyone expected. Caribbean communities abroad, in New York, Toronto, London, started finding the videos, commenting about missing home cooking, and asking vendors to ship seasonings overseas. Markets that once served a few square miles suddenly [have] a global audience.
None of this came with a manual. Vendors learned by posting several versions of the same video, watching which one took off, and doing more of what worked.
What stood out to Naipaul wasn’t one clever trick, but a pattern that kept turning up. A vendor’s authenticity draws people in. People drawn in watch longer. Videos watched longer seem to get shown to more people, and more people means more new customers who stick around for the next video, and the next.
Vendors described it as something that builds on itself: the more a vendor leans into what makes her genuinely herself, the more that visibility grows, and the more it reinforces the very relationships that made the content work in the first place.
To scale those views, vendors need a strategy that hooks viewers fast, drives rewatches, and plays into the attention economy. There’s a harder truth underneath that momentum, though. Every one of these vendors has built a livelihood on top of a system they don’t own and can’t see inside of. The platform rewards engagement over ad spend, which is exactly why a vendor with no budget can compete with a national chain. But that arrangement isn’t a guarantee. The same views and clicks that made the vendor popular, the lack of views can be their downfall – competition is fierce.
Several vendors said plainly that one change to how TikTok algorithm weighs engagement, made for reasons that have nothing to do with them, could quietly bury their videos under the very corporate content they’ve been outpacing, with no warning and no appeal. The same openness that let them in could just as easily shut the door, with no say for them either way.
What these conversations point to, in the end, is a different kind of support than vendors are usually offered. They didn’t need lessons in social media; they taught themselves, fast and for free, by watching what worked for each other. Pushing vendors to run things more like big retailers could backfire, since it risks losing the very thing that makes their videos work: the fact that they don’t feel corporate at all.
For now, the story coming out of Caribbean markets is an unlikely one. The little guy isn’t just surviving the supermarket era. In some corners of the internet, he’s thriving in it, one phone propped against a jar of seasoning at a time. Whether that lasts is a different question, and it’s one these vendors can’t answer alone.
Roy Naipaul is a Guyanese-American social worker currently pursuing his PhD at the International Executive School in Strasbourg, France. His doctoral research is supervised by Dr. Abdallah Elias and Dr. Zina Kyriakou.
