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Your Top Articles of 2024

Top Food & Beverage Flavors for 2025

Tracking emerging flavors poised to impact menus next year and beyond

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The speed in which emerging flavors, ingredients and cuisines move through the trends cycle today is nothing short of astonishing. The quick pace of flavor discovery is exciting for the consumer, but arguably even more thrilling for the menu developer. The challenge is choosing which trending flavors to focus on in the development process. We’ve pinpointed four flavors for 2025, each representing opportunity for differentiation while aligning with larger, sustaining trends. As we see them take shape on restaurant menus, each also promises opportunity in the retail space, offering a parallel path for consumer exploration and adoption. 

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Powering Beverage Product Formulations with Protein

The functional beverage category—especially protein offerings—is among the fastest-growing in the beverage market

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The rise in protein-infused beverages is driven largely by consumer interest in their perceived benefits for helping to prevent chronic disease. Yet consumers would not have been able to take advantage of these benefits were it not for advances in beverage formulation capabilities.

Specifically, the trend has been markedly facilitated by the progress in creating plant-based protein ingredients that have markedly improved miscibility, mouthfeel, and other organoleptic qualities desirable in a beverage. This is especially the case when it comes to narrowing the taste and texture gap between plant- and dairy-based beverages with enhanced protein.

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2024 Fall Flavors Flourish Beyond Pumpkin Spice

The flavors of fall call consumers to the promise of cozy season with apple, maple, butterscotch and of course, pumpkin spice

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Cool autumn air seems to be delayed this year, but that hasn't prevented a lengthy roster of new and limited-time products to rush onto retail shelves with an expressed intent to mark the seasonal shift in the minds of consumers. The number of seasonal products featuring fall flavors has experienced exponential growth this year across categories. From beverages to candies to breads, it's clear that product developers have found opportunity and momentum in the fall seasonal market with new product line extensions and limited-time offers.

Capturing consumer attention has never been more important, or difficult, but there is something about the allure of pumpkin spice, maple and apple notes that put the buying public in state of cozy consumption. It would be a fool's errand to list all of the products featuring fall flavors in 2024, but below you will find a list of some of the most compelling examples we have found in our research.

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Top Dairy, Dairy Alternative Trends

Growing competition for consumers fuels new product innovation

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The beauty of Innova’s annual Top 10 Trends of the food and beverage industry is that the trends apply across all market categories—including dairy products and dairy alternatives. Dairy and dairy alternatives overlap in many ways, differ in others, and our Top 10 Trends can be interpreted across both.

Let’s set the stage with an overview of consumer patterns. Innova Market Insights’ research shows that more than one in four global consumers drink milk at least once a day while another 45% report having milk one to six times per week. Breakfast is the primary meal occasion for milk and milk is the top morning meal beverages in 35 countries surveyed by Innova. Nearly half of those consumers we surveyed choose dairy milk, compared to about one in 10 consumers using only plant-based alternatives. In recent years, we’ve seen growth in a flexitarian eating patterns, including the more than one-third of consumers surveyed who say that they are flexible in choosing both dairy and non-dairy products.

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How Consumer Behaviors Drive New Snack Innovations

Today’s consumers take action to prevent health concerns and select healthier snacks

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Snack foods, like desserts, are a favorite for consumers and manufacturers alike. They are fun, a quick indulgence, compatible with on-the-go lifestyles, affordable, and tasty.

Snacks also are on-trend. Several of Innova Market Insights Top 10 Trends for 2024 support continued successes in the snack food industry. Our third 2024 trend, “Prioritizing Prevention,” demonstrates how consumers take action to prevent health concerns and select healthier snacks. The related seventh trend, “Indulging in Health,” reflects the mash-up of health and indulgence in categories such as snacks. Our fourth trend, “Plant-based: The Rise of Applied Offerings,” also speaks to the infiltration of plant-based formats into snacks. The trend, “Local Goes Global,” our fifth trend, acknowledges the simultaneous rise of foods such as snacks with ingredients and seasoning from particular regions and food cultures.