Whether consumers are trying to drink less, eat more protein or focus on a more wholefood diet, understanding consumer behaviour is a key component for innovation, NPD, and growth in the food and beverage sector. Kim Berry looks at some of the main motivators in 2025.
Myriad themes have dominated trends in the last couple of years – nutrition, plant-based, and sustainability for example. Some are more persistent than others, but the common thread through them all is that consumers are as complex as they are simple.
For every trend based around wellness and ingredient provenance there’s one wanting lurid colours and edible glitter.
Understanding consumers and their motivations is to find acceptance with the fact their behaviour is reliably contradictory.
Break the rules
Mintel associate director for food and drink, Cormac Henry, told Food & Drink Business the consumer insights business has identified four main trends this year including ‘Fundamentally Nutritious’ and ‘Rule Rebellion’.
“So, when we take the Rule Rebellion trend, it focuses on the fact consumers have a lot of pressures on and around them and have been told how they should live their lives, often in an aspirational way that is quite tough to achieve,” Henry says.
He explains that consumers are prevailing against that in their food and drink choices, consuming what they want and how they want it.
“What underlies this is the paradox of the human condition. It is about recognising consumers want to eat and drink on their own terms, not necessarily how they ‘should’. The opportunities to innovate are around that paradox,” he says.
Henry points out the notion of rebellion extends beyond food choice to when we eat, with convenience still a key attribute consumers are looking for.
“We know about 25 per cent of Australians are snacking rather than having regular meals, and that increases to 30 per cent with Gen Z and Millennials,” he says.
Acquisitions like Mars and Kellanova last year for $56.6 billion and PepsiCo buying better-for-you snacks company, Siete Foods, for $1.9 billion show there is a long play for snack market domination.
And while we are rebelling, there’s an angle to it that Innova Market Insights (IMI) frames as ‘wildly invented’. IMI Global Insights director, Lu Ann Williams, says consumers are still looking for “really different experiences”.
“Social media underlies a lot of these as you can see by the size of the trends and how quickly they blow up. Forty per cent of consumers say they are looking for crazy creations to give them the ultimate indulgent experience,” she says.
Insatiable appetites
Henry says this rule breaking and rebellion extends into normalising conversations – and the role of food and drinks – on previously taboo topics like menopause, more broadly women’s health, and libido.
“The opportunity is there to develop relevant products and openly discuss these issues,” Henry says.
Williams describes a splintering of consumers into “lots of tiny niches”, where everyone has their own trusted sources of information.
“You can see that there’s a lot more emphasis on targeted nutrition approaches – I want to be a balanced nutrition eater, If I'm eating for my age, I should be eating based on my lifestyle, I have a condition that I need to eat for – and consumers are responding to that.
“One example is women’s products. We’ve seen an 18 per cent increase in the past year in food and beverage and supplements that have a woman related claim on it,” Williams says.
Another example of this is weight management. In the last 12 months, IMI found a 10 per cent increase in food and beverage launches that had a weight management claim.
As the take-up of prescription GLP-1 weight loss drugs continues to gain momentum, Williams says even though it is relatively new, “everyday it is in the headlines becomes an opportunity to target some of the precision wellness possibilities that are emerging from it”.
According to the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), the global GLP-1 market is forecast to grow at a 29.6 per cent compound annual growth rate through to 2030. It has been called “the holy grail of satiety”.
“While increased usage of GLP-1 medications will mean decreased overall food consumption, it also opens up opportunities for premiumisation, driving food companies to adapt existing products and create new ones that focus on the protein, gut health, and nutrient needs of the GLP-1 user,” IFT says.
Henry says the discovery that GLP-1 drugs were effective for weight loss as well as diabetes has interesting implications for food and drink because people on them have different appetite requirements. It provides an opportunity to develop food and drinks that help manage appetite without using medication.
“We need to talk about nutrition and satiety, because a lot of those things can be achieved with food and drink. When we look across Australia, over the last few years there has only been around one per cent of per cent of launches that talk about satiety,” he says.
In this “information era”, food and drink companies can provide consumers with information on how certain ingredients and nutrients impact glucose response and feeling full.
Fundamentally nutritious and fresh
Williams says freshness and health benefits are more important to consumers than ever before.
This refreshed focus on better-for-you foods and drinks sees increased scope for products with higher protein, fibre, less sugar, and more convenience.
IFT says, “Consumers are increasingly prioritising the ingredients in their food and are purchasing products with ingredients that are easy to understand.
“The perception of food being healthier if prepared in a consumer’s home kitchen will persist as the focus on ultra-processed foods intensifies.”
Williams says consumers are looking more holistically at factors including naturalness, nutritional content, price, shelf life, and clean label. “It is a balance of all these things.”
Gut health is still dominating the trends landscape, with IMI finding an eight per cent increase in food and beverage products with digestive or gut health claims in the last 12 months.
“We asked consumers what health aspect was driving their purchases of functional food and beverage products, and digestive gut health was number one.
“Fibre is very much in the news because we are not getting enough of it in our diet, and we are seeing it move into a lot of categories in a bigger way,” Williams says.
Probiotics are also emerging in different categories, with 24 per cent growth of snacks with a probiotic inclusion in the last year.
In February, the US prebiotic soft drink brand Olipop was valued at $2.9 billion after raising $78.7 million in its latest funding round.
Beauty from within
Consumers are also extending the health and nutrition trinity of digestive health, immune support, and overall vitality, to include beauty. When asked what part of their physical appearance they wanted to improve in relation to products making beneficial claims, facial skin was number one, followed by hair, and then body skin.
“We have seen an 11 per cent increase in launches in food and beverage and also supplements that have a beauty claim,” Williams says.
“A lot of people used to assume that that anti-aging was for older consumers, but it’s not. A quarter of Gen Z and Millennials say they products, food and beverage products for their skin health.
“We’ve seen a 15 per cent growth in food and beverage and supplement launches that do have a skin plane. Collagen is, of course, one of the big ingredient winners in this space, but again, making very specific claims on the benefits.”
Watching plants grow
When it comes to plant-based, Williams quotes Denis Cherau, MD of Improve, the first open European platform for R&D to show the value of alternative proteins, “Remember, we are at the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of plant based”.
“There is still a huge amount of interest, but everybody is still trying to figure out how it is going to be done. It doesn’t have the same amount of buzz as it did, but people have gone back to the drawing board to figure it out. It is still a market and it will come. The whole plant-based ‘trend’ is here to stay,” Williams says.
Consumers are concerned about the level of processing and artificial ingredients in plant-based products. In 2023, it was the number five barrier for consumers. In 2024, it moved up to number three, with flavour or texture still the top two hurdles to consumer uptake.
Williams says consumers expectation for improved taste, texture, and naturalness, is driving a shift towards making plant-based foods “simpler, cleaner, and more authentic”.
“With a 23 per cent increase in plant-based products featuring a “natural” claim, companies are exploring innovative approaches to deliver on taste and health.
“And there is absolutely a trend to clean up the labels – we have described it as “stripping it back”.
We know companies are looking for cleaner approaches, we’ve seen a 23 per cent increase in either vegan or plant based products that have a natural claim,” she says.
When you consider what each of us contends with each day, it is no wonder we vacillate between trying to get more fibre and eating a nutritious diet to rebelling against what we “should” do with a potato chip that tastes like a lamington, or a soft drink that tastes like a biscuit. Maybe the consumer is the ultimate mash-up.
This article first appeared in the February/March 2025 edition of Food & Drink Business magazine.
