Consumer-centric food and beverage innovation
We live in the digital age where information is available instantly and everyone from Gen-Zers to Baby Boomers are on social media. Trends and fads spread quickly as consumers self-educate, join communities and openly share what makes them tick. Now more than ever, the connected, always-on consumer is both demanding and driving innovation within the food and beverage industry.
For food and beverage manufacturers and operators, the rapid pace of changing consumer preferences and social and cultural shifts can be challenging to make sense of and determine what product development opportunities to follow. At Kerry, through our proprietary KerryCompass insight tool, we navigate this complex landscape to help our customers make meaningful innovation decisions and create products that nourish and delight consumers.
How KerryCompass can help you harness consumer insights
KerryCompass is our unique standardized framework that covers consumer food and beverage trends from sustainability, nutrition, taste, retail and many more. To build our toolkit, we reviewed 510 data dimensions across 227 sources, tasted 424 products, interpreted 236 industry reports and interviewed industry experts.
Through this research, we identified 18 micro-trends split amongst 4 distinct macro-trends. Each of these can be flexed to reflect local category, channel and consumer dynamics. Here is a snapshot of the identified macro-trends:
Mind and body:
People are seeking a more integrated, tailored approach to wellbeing that optimizes their physical and mental powers, enabling a high quality of life.
Command and Control:
People can connect to products, services and experiences faster than ever, but the proliferation of data and the pressure to ‘keep up’ with peers are driving them to seek better ways of sharing, managing and controlling their data and lives
People and planet:
People are shifting towards a more mindful approach to the environment, caring about the people around them and where their food comes from.
Rules and roles:
More people are rejecting traditional expectations, finding new ways to empower themselves through activism and seeking more flexibility in achieving a work-life balance.