Every fall, I look forward to the release of Innova’s Top 10 Trends for the coming year. The Innova Market Insights team of analysts, trends experts, and others work together to identify the influences, innovations, and ingredients that best capture food, beverage, and supplement trends that will shape the marketplace.
As part of our trends forecasting, Innova conducts ongoing consumer research in 11 countries, including the US and Canada. Our surveys focus on various aspects of consumer interaction with the food and beverage environment, including lifestyles and attitudes, health and nutrition, snacking, flavors, foodservice, and others. We’ve learned from consumers that quality in ingredients and products strongly influences their purchasing decisions. They also consider value, health, convenience, sustainability, enjoyment, and a number of other factors. We create our annual trends forecast by integrating these consumer insights into our intelligence on new product launches, which we monitor in real time.
The Innova Market Insights Top 10 Trends 2025 presents both new trends and trends that have evolved over several years, for example, plant-based, into a new set of exciting trends that will be highly relevant to CPG manufacturers in the months to come.
Ingredients and Beyond–Elevating Standards: Ingredients were in the spotlight in 2024 and are expected to remain in focus in 2025. The new trend highlights ingredient quality. Our consumer research shows that consumers want products with quality ingredients that also deliver extra benefits, be they health, nutrition, naturalness, freshness, or shelf life. In fact, consumers participating in our trends surveys say that quality in ingredients and products is the most important consideration in food and beverage purchases. In a retail world filled with an abundance of product options, quality offers a shortcut for decision making.
We see the use and promotion of higher quality ingredients as a valuable tool for manufacturers. Consider that protein content claims are widespread. To differentiate themselves, companies are starting to emphasize protein quality features based on amino acid mix, digestibility, bioavailability, and absorption.
One challenge for manufacturers will be to balance quality with value. The post-pandemic years have been marked by inflation at the retail food level. In the US as well as globally, consumers are demanding lower food and beverage prices. This has provided an opportunity for private label manufacturers to enhance product quality while offering value to consumers. We have been monitoring a rise in the quality of private label ingredients, as well as increased private label offerings of high-quality indulgences such as chocolate at an attractive price.
Health–Precision Wellness: Personalization is a growing trend in food and especially beverages. Customers seek ways to make their coffee drinks, boba teas, and other beverages uniquely their own. The appeal of precision wellness to manage health issues is that it marries personalization, balanced nutrition, and convenience, three features that resonate with consumers. Manufacturers can personalize products and deliver precision wellness differentiated by generation, lifestyle, physical and mental health needs, gender, activity level, and other consumer characteristics.
We see strong growth in women’s health—a relatively new trend—along with mood support, performance, and the enduring consumer drive toward weight management. The introduction and growing use of GLP-1 drugs will further impact product innovation and marketing in the weight management space.
Flavors–Wildly Inventive: For several years, Innova has tracked consumer desire for the “wow” factor in food and beverage. Our surveys show ongoing interest in fun and excitement, characterized by unexpected flavors, flavor combinations, bright colors, fusions of two or more cultural cuisines, cobranded products by heritage brands, unusual product formats, mash-ups of more than one type of product, and limited editions.
In 2025, we expect heightened consumer interest in exciting flavor combinations, many of which are popularized by social media influencers. Companies can jump on the opportunity to ramp up the fun factor with innovative flavor combinations, especially in desserts, beverages, and snacks. Flavor combinations also can be delivered in the form of products that represent two food and beverage categories, for example, a snack combined with a main dish or a sweet-plus-savory product.
Gut Health–Flourish from Within: The pandemic years ushered in product innovation for immune health. Innova now sees the pendulum swinging back to gut health. When we asked consumers to name the top driver of their functional health food and beverage purchases, they named digestive and gut health most often. Consumers also are increasingly aware of the details of gut health. The combination of gut health and our trend regarding precision nutrition manifests in consumer interest in specific gut health ingredients, namely, fiber and especially prebiotic fibers, and enzymes. We predict that the 2025 consumer will incorporate gut health into their strategies toward holistic wellness.
In monitoring product launches, we see that manufacturers are fine-tuning product ingredients to support the gut microbiome. Gut support is spreading into more product categories, for example, snacks. Also, digestibility of protein is gaining visibility in ingredients and claims.
Plant-based-Rethinking Plants: Plant-based has been an enduring trend during the past several years since emerging less than a decade ago. Innova has tracked the evolution of plant-based through changes in global forces, lifestyle trends, industry innovation, and consumer sentiments and behaviors.
Consumers are driving this year’s trend to rethink plants and plant-based products. Consumers are not happy with many of the plant-based offerings in the marketplace. They consider plant-based products to be ultra-processed and are looking for more than just dairy and meat imitators. Consumer surveys tell us that consumers want plant-based products that are more natural and less processed, have better sensory features, provide benefits for health, and are environmentally sensitive.
We see manufacturers are going back to the drawing board to re-innovate their plant-based offerings into products that have simpler ingredient lists and cleaner labels at a competitive price. This includes more plant-based products with real and recognizable whole plant ingredients and more global launches with a natural claim. (In the US, “natural” is not an approved claim and companies using the term in labeling may be vulnerable to lawsuits.)
Sustainability–Adapting to Change: Sustainability continues to feature in Innova’s trends forecasts. What’s different for 2025 is consumer recognition of the relationship between climate change and sustainability efforts. The consumers we surveyed say they are open to efforts undertaken by manufacturers toward sustainable farming practices, climate resilient crops, new crop cultivation technologies, and protection of nature.
Climate-related supply chain pressures will force manufacturers to innovate toward alternatives. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, soil depletion, heat waves, and climate-related diseases impact cocoa, coffee, olives, and other climate-sensitive crops. We see companies seeking ways to maintain sensory appeal when cutting back on chocolate, creating coffee-free beverages, and utilizing different oils. Premium pricing could help manage limited ingredients, but consumers may be unwilling to pay more for certain products.
Beauty Food–Taste the Glow: Despite long-standing associations of skin health with aging, anti-aging products may be most suitable for younger consumers. Young consumers, led by Gen X and Millennials, care about their physical appearance and beauty. They are highly aware of skin health, both facial and on the body, healthy hair, and physical appearance.
Our trends research sees consumers expanding their quest for beauty into food and beverage products. We’ve been tracking growth in launches with a skin health claim and increased use of collagen and various vitamins that are associated with better skin.
Food Culture–Tradition Reinvented: Food culture is in transition. Consumers honor the authenticity of their family and cultural traditions while also seeking dishes with a foundation in other cultures. They want products with authentic ingredients. At the same time, they seek excitement through cultural fusions. This provides manufacturers with the opportunity to incorporate and differentiate products based on country, region, or micro-region.
Companies also can create mash-ups from different regions, countries, and food traditions. Because many of today’s consumers are culinary explorers when shopping, ordering in, dining out, and traveling, they expect culinary excitement in combination with tradition and authenticity in the foods they purchase.
Mood Food–Mindful Choices: We live in highly stressful times. It’s no surprise that consumers participating in our surveys – especially younger consumers – report growing concern about their mental and emotional wellbeing. Also, stress and anxiety impact the types of products consumers purchase.
A growing number of manufacturers are introducing products that provide mental health benefits. However, product innovation and launches in the US are underdeveloped. Mental health ingredients include certain vitamins, minerals, functional and nutraceutical ingredients, mushrooms, and others. Of note, however, mental health benefits are not among the approved package claims in the US.
AI – Bytes to Bites: The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in food and beverage innovation is expanding rapidly. Companies are incorporating AI tools into their identification of ingredients, product formulations, flavor development and combinations, production, and food safety procedures. Expect to see AI disruptions in the coming year, as well as brand communications and claims about the benefits of AI for their products.
