Food Forecast: Trends, Tensions and Macro Forces (1 of 3)

Consumers are struggling to navigate an uncertain world, thanks to an ongoing pandemic, increasing prices, climate crises and geopolitical conflicts. Food and beverage brands are facing those same challenges and more, including unprecedented retention issues and ongoing supply chain disruptions.

Yet there is a way to turn all that uncertainty into real opportunities for growth:?Trends and foresight help us understand and anticipate change so that brands can meet consumers’ emerging needs and desires. In fact, our?Ipsos Strategy3?team has developed the Theory of Change to understand how and why change happens. We use it to define trends by analyzing change at multiple levels: macro forces which act across the world; shifts in society, markets and people; and signals of change that we can observe.

In our newly published?Food Forecast POV, we’re highlighting a few trends we’ve developed to help our food and beverage clients stay ahead of the curve over the next 1–3 years and beyond.?In this post, we'll look at the first of three key Trend Tensions impacting food...

Trend Tension #1: Healthy Convenience

After two years of stress and sedentary lifestyles, people are focusing on ways to improve their health and well-being—which means they’re looking for healthier options and ingredients and are more conscious about what they consume and where it comes from. In fact, most consumers are so focused on healthy products they say they’re willing to sacrifice convenience to get them.

Yet at the same time we also know that consumers are returning to routines that require more convenient options, which creates a tension with food and beverage specifically: the convenient choice versus the healthy choice. Whether this plays out in grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations or coffee shops, it’s a tension that’s likely to continue given that only 32% of U.S. consumers think their access to healthy food will get much better in the future [Ipsos What the Future Study, fielded April 19–20, 2022].

So while globally we hear from most consumers that they’re willing to forgo convenience in the pursuit of health, we know that it really depends on the moment, their mood, the situation and who they’re with—and this is a balance that we expect to continue to play out in the next few years.

Think about...

How can your brand capitalize on opportunities along this spectrum, to meet consumers where they are in any given moment along that health-convenience continuum? How can you combine the best of both worlds?

Share your thoughts in the comments, and stay tuned for our next post in this series!