Mintel’s global food and drink experts explored the key paradoxes influencing consumer behaviours, values, and attitudes toward food and drink.
The research identified four central themes that they predict will be influential in 2025 and beyond. These include a modified approach to ‘food as medicine’, an enduring interest in the feel-good factor of breaking food rules, the challenge to maintain consistent food supplies in an increasingly volatile world, and the potential advantages of blending traditional agriculture with cutting-edge technologies.
The 2025 Global Food and Drink Trends highlighted two significant dualities: how consumers navigate health and indulgence and how the global and local food supply chain must adapt to disruptions from extreme weather, geopolitical events, and technological innovations.
Fundamentally Nutritious: The emergence of weight-loss medications like Ozempic will redefine consumer perceptions of ‘food as medicine’ from added functional ingredients to meeting daily essential nutrient needs.
The emergence of GLP-1 weight-loss medications will inspire consumers to reevaluate the relationship between food and medicine. Starting in 2025, brands must streamline their health claims to the critical nutrients they contain.
Simplified claims highlighting protein, fibre, vitamins, and mineral content will appeal to people using weight-loss drugs and the majority of consumers who define their diets based on their individual needs and how food makes them feel. Expect an increase in nutrient-dense product innovations to improve short—and long-term health.
Increased adoption of personal data collection will happen simultaneously as consumers pay more attention to two metrics that are key to how GLP-1 weight-loss drugs work in the body: blood sugar and hormone health. Rising interest in blood sugar could increase the demand for low-glycemic formulas and blood sugar monitoring beyond just diabetics.
For hormone health, brands can support men and women as they navigate hormonal changes brought on by ageing.
Rule Rebellion: Embrace consumers as ‘perfectly imperfect’ beings hungry for brands that help them ‘break the rules’ in food and drink.
As society increasingly accepts imperfections, food and drink brands can target these ‘perfectly imperfect’ consumers with innovation that breaks the invisible rules around food and drink consumption. Brands can lean into how consumers want to, or actually, consume food and drink rather than how they feel they ‘should’. By supporting these rebellious tendencies, brands can help consumers feel more represented by the outside-the-norm food and drink choices.
In the near future, brands will seek to break down continued social stigmas surrounding lesser-talked-about health issues. For example, currently, less-seen on-pack and marketing messaging that directly mentions the role of food and drink in mental health management will become more commonplace.
Meanwhile, there is further potential for ‘rule-breaking’ innovation from food and drink brands that feel the pressure to be sustainable despite knowing consumers won't necessarily pay more for eco-credentials. Innovative brands can create new norms by developing products with unfamiliar sustainable ingredients that can be marketed on their unique taste.”
Chain Reaction: As disruptions to the food supply become more frequent, the industry will need to encourage consumers to welcome and trust the new origins, ingredients and flavours that will emerge locally and globally.
More frequent climate-related production challenges and geopolitical events increase consumers’ food bills and awareness of how distant world events can affect their meal plans. In an increasingly volatile world, food and drink brands must communicate how local to global sourcing adjustments were made to benefit consumers.
Cross-industry, multinational collaboration and scalable tech solutions will be required, but they are not without complications. More importantly, consumers will feel the consequences of these challenges personally, and brands must be ready with solutions.
Looking ahead, more ingredients will be sourced from alternative and potentially more reliable growing regions, such as olive oil from Algeria or Peru. Brands can highlight the benefits of diversified sourcing, such as nuanced flavour variations. Social media, immigration and travel, will transform many consumers’ local-centric identities.
Hybrid Harvests: Food and drink companies must illustrate how technology and agriculture benefit consumers, farmers, and the environment.
Greater use of technology in food and drink production is inevitable to meet current food supply challenges, yet many consumers are not ready to embrace it. Despite this resistance, brands can tap into consumers' openness to technological advances that, for example, enhance convenience. They will need to tell consumers how nature and technology complement—or better yet, enhance—each other.
Over the next few years, food and drink brands must prioritise how these technological advancements benefit consumers through better taste, more excellent nutrition, consistent supply, and the environment. It will be imperative that new technology, particularly AI, is humanised.
For example, German juice brand Eckes-Granini’s marketing video announcing its partnership with Microsoft draws attention to how this technology makes a positive difference in their producers’ lives, not just making production more efficient.”
As with our previous Global Food and Drink Trends, the 2025 predictions were based on Mintel’s seven trend drivers: well-being, experiences, surroundings, rights, technology, identity, and value.
Mintel’s extensive libraries of global consumer data, new product innovations, and inspiring marketing campaigns have further supported the trend predictions.
They have also been developed around buzzworthy topics that have the potential to upset the status quo in the food and drink industry in 2025 and beyond, such as GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and artificial intelligence (AI).
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