I think there’s one that comes through my neighborhood. I’ve never actually seen it, just heard it, and it never seems to… actually stop. When I was a kid, the ice cream trucks would stop and play their music for a while so people had time to grab their money and run outside. This one just seems to play a few bars of a song as it drives through, makes me wonder if it’s actually an ice cream truck at all.
I think butter would be a very interesting one! Especially for the spreadable kind.
The only other item I’ve done this with was beer. We had about 10 of our college friends all bring one or two kinds of beer each in a paper bag, smuggling in to the designated “staging” room. I wasn’t super into beer so I just did the facilitating on this one - I randomized the order and handed out samples of the beer in small cups to everyone, and everyone gave a ranking and some thoughts, as well as trying to guess what the beer was. At the end, I entered everything into excel and had a little presentation of the results. It was a fun night.
The most memorable part was when our friend who LOVES this one particular (somewhat pricey) craft beer gave it like a 3/10. He spent the entire night ranking everything quite low and waiting for his fav to come up, expecting to immediately recognize it and give it an 11 - to the point where he accused me of missing his contribution completely - just to discover it was beer #4 and he had already made disparaging comments about it.
My husband and I got curious about the variance in canned tomatoes one day, so we got one can from every brand we could find. We had a blind tasting session where we tried each one without knowing what brand it was (palate cleansers in between) and ranked them all out of 10 with some comments. We didn’t share our rankings or thoughts with each other until the Big Reveal at the end when we found out which tomatoes were which.
Turned out we actually preferred some of the cheaper brands, and the most expensive ones got worse ratings. There wasn’t a direct relationship between price and preference, but it was interesting.
It was a fun day. We also did the same thing with soda water.
Background in animation and design sounds perfect for creating assets for streamers/vtubers. There always seems to be some demand for logos, “stingers” (animations that play between changing scenes), looping videos for idle screens (when the streamer isn’t on camera, such a “taking a break” scenes), and emotes. Take a look around vgen.co and see if those types of things might be up your alley.