Food and Beverage Top Stories

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Prepared Foods has selected six new food and beverage products introduced in December 2024. Vote to let us know which new product is your favorite!

The report highlights five transformative trends driving the future of the frozen food department, along with additional information reflecting how and what frozen foods are being consumed.

Five main approaches to decrease or remove sugar from dairy foods include direct reduction; substitution with a lower-calorie sweetener; substitution with a non-nutritive, high-intensity sweetener; utilization of processing technologies; and leveraging food science and sensory principles to enhance sweetness without sugar.

Circana research takes a comprehensive look at consumer snacking habits and patterns, in both retail and foodservice. Here, I want to focus on the three biggest takeaways we found on the retail side of snacking.

These challenges already have caused lower cocoa yield and supply instability, leading in turn to quality and safety concerns, with heavy metal and pesticide contamination from archaic farming and handling practices. Meanwhile social and environmental issues including child labor, economic inequity, and high-carbon-emission transportation methods tied to unsustainable farming practices are compounding these interconnected issues. 

2025 will signal a marked acceleration of AI in marketing as companies move past pilot purgatory and can scale models that create highly personalized consumer interactions, automate processes, and provide predictive data and analytics strategies.

Following Circana’s forecast for 2024 from a year ago and the recent midyear update, the market has mainly trended as predicted. Overall, dollar sales have grown by 2.6%, price/mix by 1.6% and volume sales by 1.1% in 2024.

Nearly two thirds of respondents (64%) said they believed that food and beverage products made with the help of AI technology should not be described as ‘natural’ – with 12% disagreeing with this. There was also strong support for regulation, with 78% of respondents agreeing that the Government should introduce laws controlling the ways food and drink companies can use AI technology to design and manufacture their products. Just 6% disagreed with this.

US consumers certainly lead the world in snacking! A solid majority of consumers we surveyed in the US say that they snack at least once a day and frequent snackers in the US far exceed the global average. 

In any industry, you rely on data to help you make the next bold business move. 
Whether you are a retail store, manufacturer, ingredient supplier, or a foodservice operator looking to capitalize on the next food or beverage trend, having relevant data allows you to make better decisions that affect your bottom line. 
So you gather all the data.