Market Sizing & TAM Estimator

Example output

Market sizing — Hazelbourne oat-based coffee creamer, US TAM

Important flag before the numbers: you noted you don't have the exact oat milk category figure. Every number below is either a data point you gave me, a placeholder you must fill with a sourced figure before this goes in front of leadership, or an explicitly labeled assumption. Do not present this deck with placeholder figures still in it; replace every [INSERT FIGURE] before leadership sees it.

Top-down estimate
Start from the coffee creamer category as the relevant frame, since Hazelbourne competes for a creamer occasion, not a drink-oat-milk occasion.
- US coffee creamer category size: [INSERT FIGURE — pull from Circana/Nielsen or a market report].
- Share of that category realistically addressable by a plant-based/oat entrant: estimate a range, e.g. 8-15% based on current plant-based creamer category share where you have it, or flag as [INSERT FIGURE — confirm plant-based creamer's current % of total creamer category].
- Top-down TAM = category size x addressable share. Until the two bracketed figures are filled in, this stays a formula, not a number; do not estimate the category size itself, since that must come from a sourced number.

Bottom-up estimate
Built from your own data points:
- US households: 130 million (your figure).
- Households buying any coffee creamer: 40% of 130M = 52 million households (your figure, multiplied).
- Assumption to validate: what share of creamer-buying households would consider an oat-based option; this is the single most important number in the whole model and you don't have it yet. Propose a testable range: conservative 5%, base case 12%, optimistic 20%, based on typical plant-based adoption rates within an existing category (label this range as a benchmark assumption pending your own concept-test data, not a cited fact).
- Applying the base case: 52M x 12% = 6.24 million households as the addressable bottom-up base.
- Annual spend per adopting household: [INSERT FIGURE — estimate from typical creamer purchase frequency (roughly weekly repurchase is common in the category) x average price per unit; you'll need a price point decision first].
- Bottom-up TAM = 6.24M households x annual spend per household. Cannot finalize without the price and frequency assumptions above.

Reconciliation
Until both bracketed figures are filled, the two methods can't be reconciled numerically; but structurally, expect the bottom-up number to come in lower than top-down, since bottom-up is built from a narrower, more conservative adoption assumption while top-down assumes the full addressable share converts. A wide gap between the two (more than roughly 2-3x) usually means one of the two share assumptions (8-15% top-down, or 5-20% bottom-up) needs tightening with real data before the estimate is presentation-ready.

Sensitivity — the two riskiest assumptions
1. Oat-adoption share of creamer buyers (5/12/20% range): this single variable swings the bottom-up estimate roughly 4x between conservative and optimistic cases; this is the number most worth spending research budget to nail down before the leadership deck, ideally via a real concept or usage-intent survey rather than a benchmark guess.
2. Category size itself (top-down): without a sourced figure, the entire top-down line is unusable as presented; this is a research-budget-zero fix, just pull the number from Circana, Nielsen, or a paid market report.

One-page summary for leadership
Hazelbourne's US TAM sizing uses two methods that should converge once two data gaps are closed: the actual US coffee creamer category size (a quick data pull) and a real adoption-share estimate for oat-based creamer among existing buyers (best obtained via a concept/usage-intent survey, not a benchmark guess). The bottom-up base case, using your household and creamer-buyer figures with a benchmark 12% adoption assumption, suggests roughly 6.2 million addressable households; treat this as directional until the adoption assumption is tested.

Want me to build the sensitivity table across all three adoption scenarios once you have a price point, or draft the specific concept-test question that would pin down the adoption-share number?