Artifice falls away, replaced by a tour behind the product creation curtain…

Much of what unfolded in 2023 has laid down a runway for how your strategy should evolve in 2024. Over the last year we’ve seen a distinct rise of consumer uncertainty, a decline in feelings of control and increasing uneasiness over extraordinary climate change impacts, a chaotic political environment, see-saw inflation, raging wars and other forms of personal and societal disruption.

• According to Kantar, 43% of Americans experienced mild to severe anxiety, up from 26% a year earlier, while half of millennials now rank their mental health as part of their well-being they are most concerned about.

It has authored a distinct premium on the desire for authenticity, truth, honesty, values, belief – all of which, incidentally, are desirable human traits. So how should brands respond in an environment where consumers crave honest, respectful relationships between themselves and the brands they care about? By adopting more human-like qualities and behaviors.

• In a recent story on viral engagement at Fast Company, Clinique Global VP of consumer engagement Lucy Burns said, “Gen Z can smell ads a mile away. They are the first generation that really wants brands and creators to authentically speak to them. And what does that mean? You don’t create an ad. You create content that they would want to engage with.”

This will be the year of yearning for discernment of the real and true while working to avoid the artificial and questionable. As reported earlier this year in the Emerging Trends Report, consumers have turned inward to themselves for guidance. Why? People have become increasingly skeptical and wary of less credible independent sources and therefore what they perceive to be unreliable and not-so faithful recommendations about products and services.

• Key insight: Further probing on this condition, we find consumers moving to seek a deeper level of discovery and understanding about the products they care about.

Know more, want more granular info

Emergent has been crunching the consumer insight research reports and studies, as we lean into our predictions for where CPG food, beverage and retail marketing is headed in 2024. The overriding theme and guidance for the coming year is an advancing consumer interest in securing more details about how products are created, manufactured and what’s inside them.

• In short both retail and CPG marketers will have a lot of explaining to do as consumers demand truth and transparency from the brands that matter to them.

What this means: consumers want to understand what the food and beverages they ingest consist of. They want their expectations to be fulfilled and this requires brands to take consumers behind the curtain and reveal more substantive details about formulation, ingredient sourcing and production methods.

Truth: consider the credibility of the content source and how the story is packaged

Transparency: take them behind the scenes to see how you do what you do

Here are six specific food/bev industry trends that remain common across generational audience segments:

1. Less Processed

Consumers do not believe that ultra-processed is a positive attribute. Brands with ultra-processed products should consider investing R&D energy to create less processed versions of products, with simpler labels and emphasis on the nutritional density of ingredients used. Plant-based brands should bear in mind this applies to how products are created and presented. Plant-based used to automatically convey an item is better for you. Not so much now. Some plant-based categories are seen as overly processed. Consumers know more, so Show Me is the operative behavior in brand communications.

2. Upcycled

We’re seeing a growing interest in upcycled ingredients used in product creation. Consumers perceive this as less wasteful and more sustainable. Plus, it’s a great story to tell in product creation narratives.

3. Sustainable

Consumer attitudes on sustainability has shifted due to greater knowledge and understanding of the environmental impact of our food system. It is no longer just the use of recyclable packaging, efficient energy sources and water management. Consumers have connected the dots between supply chain and emissions performance. They want to know what brands and retailers are doing to advance policies and standards related to regenerative agriculture and use of less carbon-intensive ingredients.

4. Nutritional Density

Consumers believe there is a connection between what they eat and their overall quality of life and health. Alongside the redefinition of what aging looks like and how lives can transform over time based on taking better care of yourself, brands can position themselves squarely in the bulls-eye of lifestyle partnership. This is accomplished by delivering products that provide functional ingredients designed to enhance delivery of vitamins, minerals, proteins without added sugars, the wrong kinds of fats and high sodium content.

5. Energy Reduction Plays

Previously, refrigeration translated to fresher, higher quality. That said, consumers increasingly see these as a hidden cost tradeoff to the planet on energy use. Development of more shelf stable versions of products will enable brands to talk about ways they are helping reduce energy signatures in how their products are distributed and merchandized in-store.

6. Disguising Fruit and Veg

Lingering in the back of consumers’ minds is a fundamental consideration that more fruit and veg in the diet is a good thing. How those better-for-you servings are acquired and consumed presents an opportunity for brands. How can you bring the nutritional benefits of these ingredients in a form consumers will find simple, easy and delicious to consume? Some smoothie beverage brands are great at this.

2024’s megatrend – healthy living, aging and self-care

People believe that what they consume has a direct relationship to the quality of their lives. This impacts health, wellness and helps answer their desire to slow down or even reverse the effects of aging. How can you partner with consumers on their healthy living journey? How can your brand proceed as guide and coach on helping them realize their goals and ambitions? Think of your brand as a true, reliable friend. What would a real friend do to help?

Tactics: what’s behind the thirst for information?

Consumers want to know more about how you create your products and what’s inside them because it helps re-establish their sense of control and ability to create customized solutions for themselves. With so much environmental noise causing people to believe they are losing control, giving it back to them is vital in your relationship. More information puts them in the driver’s seat while you supply the grist for their own lifestyle consideration. This should be reflected in your content creation plans.

Primacy of emotion, best served

As we’ve said before, decisions and actions originate in the limbic area of the brain, and our subconscious (dictates actions we take) is heavily influenced through emotion. This is best seen by emphasizing the joy of cooking alongside the joy of eating and drinking – no matter the category, this rule remains true: celebrate the experiences of cooking, consuming and their related social interaction benefits.

Emergent’s role refined for 2024

We believe that strong brands win so we’re obligated to help strengthen client brands by driving towards greater uniqueness and differentiation. Well-positioned brands say and do things differently than others in their category. They bring a different tone, see the future differently and have a clear point of view.

Our role: to help clients refine and package how they show up in the world. To that end, we work to build brand reputations, credibility, belief and transcendence. We believe the foundation for this work lies in refinement of brand purpose, deeper meaning and values. We know that conveying your brand’s “why” – its true purpose – is a more effective tool to win hearts and minds than the typical feature/benefit story. People are irresistibly drawn to brands that share a vision and reason for being they believe in. We connect this story to the brand users through stories – content and earned media.

Final guidance for 2024

Brand optimism. Through all of the doomer conditions people are confronted with on a daily basis, smart brands can be a safe harbor for an optimistic outlook based on progress and personal fulfillment. Your brand’s role as coach, guide and enabler can help people envision a better, brighter and more meaningful future.

If these observations and possibilities strike a chord for honing your 2024 plans, use this link to start an informal conversation about your questions and concerns.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

The healthier, more efficient way to make meat

We at Emergent believe that pushing your product concept and brand positioning sufficiently to the right or left of center is desirable to author a new category, one that your brand can own and thus define as state of the art. This action delivers a unique opportunity to be No. 1 in a new business segment controlled by the brand. With a bold move like this, an emerging challenger can radically differentiate itself in an otherwise murky “sea of sameness” – in this case, among all-too-similar novel protein brands. 

Of course, category creation comes with unique challenges related to pioneering a new idea in the face of consumer behavior that is systemically wired to avoid any perceived risk. Overcoming this consumer-perceived risk isn’t as easy as you might think, and that task stands as the primary barrier to mainstream market adoption of anything new and different.

Today we’re taking a closer look at an emerging success story in alternative proteins, a Boulder, CO-based animal-free meat maker that has managed to integrate nutrition density with an amazing animal meat taste but without having to resort to “highly processed” formulation wizardry to get there.

Meati is the brainchild of Tyler Huggins and his team of MushroomRoot™ experts who are on an expansion drive at food retail to bring their muscle meat chicken and beef products to everyone with a taste bud. They’re offering a compromise-free meat solution that replicates the animal version, only at a fraction of the environmental and resource consumption impacts of livestock agriculture.

Here is our deep dive interview with Meati founder and CEO, Tyler Huggins. Emergent’s brand building guidance follows the Q&A, so stay with us.

How is our legacy food system currently contributing to global warming and what changes must occur to stay within the Paris Climate Agreement ceiling of 1.5˚ Celsius?

Huggins: Stepping back and recognizing the overarching principle that demands greater attention from all of us is crucial. In essence, efficiency is the key to success. We need to strike a better balance between the resources invested in food production and the outcomes of that process.

This principle strongly influenced our business, known as Meati Foods, but legally registered as Emergy – a term denoting the total energy expended in creating something. Our mission is to create significantly more delectable and nutritious food while minimizing resource usage. This approach leads to less strain on our ecosystems and reduces the factors destabilizing them.

How important is sustainability readiness (responsibility) performance to your brand narrative and to consumer preference for Meati?

Huggins: Sustainability is becoming or has already become a normalized expectation for consumers — it is no longer a distinguishing feature or distinct selling point. Still, it is absolutely essential. There are different degrees of sustainability, but the main takeaway is that what we produce and consume to run our societies must use far fewer resources, pollute far less, and regenerate and protect nature’s riches. It’s the efficiency issue described above. If you cannot demonstrate sustainability, it will be noticed, and you won’t be considered if there is another good-enough option that does. Sustainability is table stakes, just as taste, texture, and nutrition are in the food business. We took years to find a type of MushroomRoot™ with natural characteristics that allow a vastly more sustainable way to produce a scalable, delicious, and high-quality source of nutrition that is affordable and easy to work into familiar cooking routines.

Sustainability has transitioned from a unique selling point to a standard expectation among consumers. Nevertheless, it remains absolutely vital. While sustainability can manifest in various degrees, the primary message is that our societal production and consumption must significantly reduce resource usage, pollution, and actively regenerate and safeguard nature’s resources. This aligns with the efficiency concept mentioned earlier. Failing to demonstrate sustainability will not go unnoticed, and if there is another viable option that meets the required standards, it will likely be chosen over non-sustainable alternatives. Sustainability has become a fundamental requirement, just like taste, texture, and nutrition are essential in the food industry.

The retrenching of Impossible and Beyond has poured cool water on the ‘plant-based meat for meat lovers’ hype machine while serving a reality check on brand strengths and weaknesses in alt. proteins. What is Meati doing to secure sustained business traction with consumers that will help avoid these hiccups and convince retailers your new category isn’t a one hit wonder?

Huggins: It’s important to acknowledge that there was a considerable amount of excitement surrounding Impossible and Beyond, and rightfully so. They were pioneers, turning futuristic visions into a reality in the present. They deserved all the attention they received for leading the conversation about the food system and the environment. Over time, the world has become more accepting of alternative proteins, and the stock value and demand are now stabilizing at more realistic and sustainable levels.

However, the fundamental desires of people have not changed. The current food system exacts a heavy toll on the environment without adequately meeting people’s needs, especially with a growing global population. As income levels rise, more individuals crave a meat experience. To become a staple in people’s regular diets, our approach has been to fulfill every essential criterion for a successful protein today: deliciousness, check; irresistible texture, check; nutritional value, check; use of simple and natural ingredients, check; significantly more efficient and sustainable, check; convenience and easy integration into familiar cooking techniques, check; and scalability to ensure affordability and accessibility, check.

The time has come for “and/and” products that offer it all, without compromising on any aspect. Our company is built on this philosophy, and we have carefully chosen our star ingredient to achieve precisely that.

For decades people have been taught that meat from animals is always the best source of great tasting protein. Old habits die hard. How are you currently working to convince serial risk-avoiding consumers to switch to Meati?

Huggins: A funny recurring story related to this is that we’ve heard from our restaurant partners that people who order our cutlets sometimes come back declaring the restaurant made a big error and served them chicken. The point there is that we think the product speaks for itself. Still, you’ve got to get people in the door and taking that first bite, right? To achieve that, it’s a mixture of approaches to reach people at different stages of comfort or interest in animal-free meat made from MushroomRoot. A big part of that mix is enlisting folks whose opinions about food are respected, sought out, and trusted. That can mean we work with famed chefs like Dave Chang reaching millions of people in a video of him cooking with a Classic Cutlet. We may work with lesser-known influencers who have smaller but passionate audiences excited to explore with them. We’re also being mindful of collaborating with people and brands that are all about practical, varied, and realistic solutions to eating well for health and the planet.

Flexitarians fit into this category, and they’re often great at connecting the animal-based food universe with other types of food. Rachael Ray is a great example. Derek Jeter is another one — here is a star athlete, someone who clearly understands nutrition and performance, who was happy to announce he is investing in Meati.

Consumers now care more about your brand’s “why” than either how or what you do. What is Meati’s higher purpose, mission and beliefs that transcend the usual mix of balance sheet considerations such as increasing investor returns?

Huggins: As a registered public benefits corporation, Meati has ingrained its commitment to more than just the bottom line into all aspects of our operations. Our mission statement encapsulates our core purpose: To elevate humanity’s collective health and longevity through the limitless power of MushroomRoot.

We firmly believe that the world requires innovative and superior solutions that allow us to care for the planet while still indulging in the pleasures of good food and the communal experience it brings. We understand that people genuinely care about the environment, but they often need support from companies like Meati to provide them with accessible tools for making a positive impact in their daily lives. Our aim is to assist individuals in making a difference without entirely upending their meal planning, sourcing, preparation, cooking, and eating habits. We strive to offer convenient and practical options that empower people to contribute to a better future for the planet.

Meati is made from a unique ingredient – MushroomRoot. Please explain your technology and process to deliver an authentic analog eating/taste experience to animal-based beef and chicken products?

Huggins: The beauty of our process lies in its simplicity, which is immensely appealing to consumers who are tired of lengthy ingredient lists and heavily processed foods. It shares similarities with the art of brewing beer or crafting cheese. We start by placing spores of our MushroomRoot (also known as N. crassa mycelium) into a tank along with sugar, water, and nutrients, and then it grows rapidly. Once harvested, we combine it with other wholesome ingredients and gently shape it into our various cuts.

That’s about it — all the texture that people love in animal-based options is naturally present in our animal-free MushroomRoot. This is a major reason why we explored various types of mycelium before discovering this incredible one. Its inherent texture sets it apart and ensures an enjoyable culinary experience for our customers.

Is MushroomRoot a farmed ingredient? How do you source this ingredient and how will your supply chain offer an improvement over existing vulnerabilities in supply?

Huggins: Depends on what you mean by farmed! But, yes, we would say it is farmed. All you need are the spores of our type of MushroomRoot, and you can go from there. Once we have the spores, we simply keep regrowing them from a batch of MushroomRoot and reusing them. Picking them up is as simple as finding a provider of all types of spores or tracking it down in the wild, but we’re well past needing to do that. We grow and prepare it completely in-house, which does indeed make our supply chain less complex — we need only our MushroomRoot spores, sugar, water, nutrients, energy, a modest amount of other ingredients like natural flavors, a tiny slice of land to house everything, and the equipment similar to what you might see in a beer brewing facility. We don’t need to rely on external partners halfway around the globe to prep critical components of our products.

To boot, we can do all this indoors — we’re not beholden to radical weather shifts impacting our growing cycles. If we’re facing any issues in the supply chain, they’re low in quantity and of a generic quality — they are issues common to all types of companies operating in a post-COVID world. When it comes to the supply chain issues that may affect the few ingredients, we do use outside our own MushroomRoot, we also have a lot of confidence in getting a hold of them, because we’ve aimed to work with experienced suppliers in extremely developed industries who are as near to us as possible. We always knew achieving supply chain simplicity would be essential in a more chaotic world, and the simplicity of our MushroomRoot also helps us realize this goal.

No offense intended towards farmers, but we proudly identify ourselves as ranchers. Our process starts with a mere spoonful of spores, and from there, we nurture and cultivate our MushroomRoot, creating the perfect conditions for it to flourish and yield a variety of nutrients, including protein. All of this takes place within our specially designed “Mega Ranch,” a name befitting one of North America’s largest end-to-end meat production facilities.

One of the remarkable aspects of our approach is that we don’t need to rely on distant external partners for crucial components of our products. Everything happens under one roof. This indoor setup provides us with stability, unaffected by radical weather shifts that could otherwise disrupt growing cycles.

By streamlining our supply chain and partnering with a select few experienced suppliers from well-established industries, located as close to us as possible, we have achieved significant simplicity. We have always recognized the importance of simplifying our supply chain, especially in an increasingly chaotic world. Our MushroomRoot’s inherent simplicity plays a vital role in realizing this essential goal.

Meati is in-market and rapidly expanding. What key learnings can other alt. protein brands take away from Meati to accelerate the commercialization of their businesses?

Huggins: To succeed, you must showcase sustainability and a genuine dedication to safeguarding the environment. However, it’s equally vital to satisfy consumers’ valid expectations concerning taste, texture, nutrition, price, availability, convenience, and culinary versatility. Food holds a deeply personal place in everyone’s daily life—it’s both ordinary and sacred. When we select and savor our meals, it’s only natural to momentarily set aside broader concerns and concentrate on the individual sensory pleasures and experiences that elicit the heartfelt declaration, “I love this food.”

Our primary goal is for everyone to express this sentiment when they try our food. We aim to provide an unforgettable culinary experience that captures people’s hearts and taste buds while reassuring them that they are contributing positively to the planet in the process. Balancing these aspects is what drives our mission—to create food that brings joy to people’s lives while also caring for our precious environment.

One of the biggest challenges alt. protein companies have on the path to market is scaling their production. What advice would you offer to others coming up as the best and most efficient path to manufacturing at sufficient scale to supply demand? At what level of production do you reach price parity with the products Meati replaces?

Huggins: First, our goal is not so much to 100% replace this or that product, but to offer another option that people can work into their diets that makes it easy to adjust mealtimes to be better for the planet without sacrificing joy. People love animal-based meat and will continue to do so, but it does come with immense costs that we may start seeing very clearly present in its price, so it’s important to have another option to scratch that “meat experience” itch that does not feel like a compromise. Other than that, my general advice would be: Pick your ingredients carefully! We spent years researching different types of mycelium looking for one that naturally possessed all the characteristics of a great and sustainable food and scalable food.

We are already reaching price parity with certain cuts of organic and super high-quality animal-based meat. We’re confident that as we ramp up to millions of pounds of Meati, we’ll start to see exciting shifts in the price. At the same time, again, it is very likely the price of animal-based meat will start to rise in the face of supply chain chaos, health emergencies, weather patterns, and reduced externalization of environmental costs.

What three things should consumers know about Meati that will influence them to give it a try?

Huggins: Delicious with the just-right texture, easy to cook with, and nutrition like you wouldn’t believe.

The next chapter in food has arrived

Meati is an iconic example of the future of food – new processes that help us reimagine where food comes from and how it is produced. The changes we’re witnessing are the most pervasive and fundamental to how we feed ourselves, since the domestication of plants and animals 10,000 years ago.

With the dawn of a new food system and the entrance of a host of new brands creating various forms of protein using fermentation techniques, cultured solutions and evolutionary improvements to plant-based version, come unique challenges to securing marketplace traction.

• Even today, in the ramp up phase for many new brands, the storytelling, value propositions and brand imagery are remarkably similar business to business. Sameness is a calcifying phenomenon that works hard to commodify brands. Distinctiveness is necessary and harder to achieve because it requires an intentional push towards radical differentiation.

The great lesson embodied in Tyler Huggins’ organization is the effort to establish a new category that is unique to the Meati brand. Consumers always think category first and brand second – like Mexican beer and then Corona. Category ownership is a power position and enabler of competitive advantage. Retaining the edge and distinctiveness over time isn’t easy – it requires constant attention and occasional refurbishment to stay ahead of those who will

rush to mimic your success. Being first with the most is an incredible advantage.

The coming revolution of new food brands and categories, all competing for share of mind, stomach, wallet, shelf space and devotion will elevate the premium for sound strategy, well-executed.

Here are some fundamentals to stay ahead of the pack:

Refined higher purpose

You would think that new tech food brands would be the industry darlings of mission and higher purpose thinking, yet all-too-often we find that isn’t the case. A quick pass on a change-the-world origin/founder story may appear to be checking the higher purpose box. However, building a sound mission, values and belief system for a brand requires more work and a defined process to thoroughly vet the details of a relevant and resonant purpose-driven platform. Posers not allowed.

Inspiration and education, not manipulation

The path to engagement between brands and consumers is paved with recognition that consumers (and trade customers for that matter) are human beings and biology is at work in how we make decisions and take action. People are not fact-based, analytical decision-making machines. We are feeling creatures who think and not thinking creatures who feel.

Thus why a brand’s “why” – its purpose and deeper meaning served with a honed beliefs system – is the path to inspirational, emotion-resonant communication. Emotion drives decisions and actions, not feature and benefit selling. This rightfully places insight to behavioral psychology in the center of strategic planning.

Education, coaching, guidance are the tools and role brands play in successful communication – the consumer is always the hero of our storytelling. Inspiration not manipulation is the path to building a community of brand advocates and evangelists. Want to have a deeper relationship with consumers, then imbue your brand with deeper meaning.

Symbols, symbols everywhere

Consumers now look upon the brands that matter to them as flags and symbols of who they are, what they value. Is your brand communication intentionally designed to help them signal to the world around them the meaning you bring and thus amplifying how they see themselves?

Your brand communication and digital channels need to supply the symbolism they want to convey. This is intentional and designed to help them “feel” a certain way when they are in the presence of your brand.

The path ahead

Tyler Huggins and his team are working on the next generation of food products that deliver on taste and nutrition but at a fraction of the environmental and natural resource impact of conventionally made foods. This is how we will affordably feed 10 billion souls by 2050, and without further damaging the planet we call home. The great news: we can accomplish this mission while amplifying and enhancing our love of great taste and elevated eating experiences. If this story raises questions about the right mix of strategic tools to breakout from the sea of brand sameness, use this link to ask questions and start an informal conversation.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Strengthening your cultural connections is vital to sustainable growth

Why does brand relevance matter so greatly to your 2022 business results? Because it is within relevancy’s sphere of influence that consumers discover both their interest in your brand and a reason to buy. You may believe your product stands resolutely on its own merits – formulation and attributes and all. To a degree it certainly does, however your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Powerful external forces are at work driving consumer behaviors and preferences. More than ever, people are influenced by:

• What is popular
• What is socially agree-able
• What is on trend culturally

Where does your brand sit in relationship to popular food culture? Current issues and values pressing on the food industry’s future? Brand relevancy is connected to and associated with current culture cues and the symbolism that surrounds it.

Here is our guide to relevance and connection

Brand relationships continue to look more and more like those of the human variety. You are no longer just selling a product. You are marketing deeper meaning, values and beliefs attached to strong cultural influences. Better connections here help more salient brands rise while others less present in these shifting conditions may experience a corresponding decline in their value proposition.

Is your brand engaging in the world around it?

We are witnessing a profound sea change in the path to purchase as consumers look to brands for trusted sustainability stories and tangible efforts to address heightened awareness of a relationship between food/beverage choices and climate impact. Health, wellness and sustainability are key associations for modern food, beverage and lifestyle culture trends.

Is your brand viewed as a positive influence?

What specific actions, policies, behaviors, standards and commitments is your brand making to be at the forefront of these key issues that now dominate the cultural conversation? Is your brand voice up to date, participating in this discourse with credibility and referencing tangible efforts to meet wellness and sustainability expectations?

Is your brand a contributor to users’ lives?

As stated earlier, brand relationships look a lot these days like interactions we have with the people we care about. Thus, why enlightened marketers understand their future is founded on reciprocity. Brands must make a real effort to help consumers overcome barriers, succeed and grow on their life journeys. How is your brand operating as a coach and guide to help users achieve their passions and desires?

Designing for enhanced relevance

Relevancy is achieved through a creative, appealing mix of attitude, behaviors (actions speak louder than words) and appearance. What’s required here is an innovative reappraisal of your brand identity, visuals, voice, actions and symbolism that should be in sync with the cultural dialogue going on right now.

Your brand is the fabric and tether to deeper meaning that provides consumers with an anchor of belief and emotional resonance. Here’s the mix of ingredients that help you dial in brand relevance.

• How your brand interacts with popular culture – Your strategic game plan

• Articulating what your brand stands for – Your values and beliefs

• Why your brand exists – Defining your brand Higher Purpose

• Engaging where your users spend their time – Your interactions with their micro-communities of influence

Here are three steps you can take right now to bring this thinking to your strategic plans.

1. Consumer lifestyle insight

You’re interacting with humans not data points. What do you understand about their lifestyle aspirations, needs, wants and concerns? If sustainability is a cultural imperative now, do you know what areas of sustainability readiness they care about the most? Without a foundation of insight into their lives, it’s nearly impossible to find alignment and relevance with who they are, what they want and what they believe.

2. The customer experience journey

Based on a more granular understanding of your users’ aspirations, how should your brand promise and value proposition best be packaged and delivered to meet those needs? Are you monitoring social channels to assess how they’re interacting with you and engaging in your community? First party data is the best resource for reliable understanding of their behaviors.

3. Creative thinking around your future

Based on deep insights into your consumer base and their unmet needs, what new categories can your brand credibly operate in to help solve more problems and cultivate a deeper, more valuable relationship? What new touchpoints can you activate to engage consumers on their journey? Finally, what new tools can you deploy to deliver on the promises you’ve made?

• Legacy brands can improve their relevance by refreshing and restaging their brand positioning and building connections to current cultural symbols and aligned business behaviors.

• New and emerging brands can embed this thinking into their go-to-market strategies and the brand narrative they are building.

Once you understand how status and aspiration are defined by your user base, you can go to work finding connections and building trust. Perhaps the most important sea change in our culture is a move towards how consumption decisions impact the world and community around us. It is no longer just what’s good for me, the decision is now also about what’s good for society and for the future world people want to live in.

Emergent is a trend watching, culture defining organization of brand building experts and communications architects. We can help you dial in relevance and gain traction while leveraging the powerful forces of cultural change that influence what people want. The outcome is traction, engagement, relevance, value and business growth.

Use this link to request a complimentary “culture impact assessment” of your category.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

What happens when the consumer moves on and the brand doesn’t.

The pace of change these days is unsettlingly quick. Pandemic-authored forms of disruption have come hard and fast, supplemented by equally measured swings in consumer behavior, priorities and preferences. The world around us is evolving. Needs are changing. Attitudes and interests are getting a makeover. The pace of marketplace shifts is accelerating.

• We’ve entered an entirely new era of marketing challenges where consumers move more quickly than brands. This creates fractures in relevance and perceived value as businesses remain anchored to a legacy business model or said more simply, “how we’ve always done it.’

When the consumer’s wants and needs move to another location on the relevance chess board and the brand doesn’t move with them, what happens when the business suddenly finds itself at odds with its user base?

Changes now upon us –

• Modern food culture has gained new levels of sophistication.
• What food is and where it comes from is headed towards a bioengineered future.
• Health and wellness needs are now dominant preference considerations.
• Sustainability concerns have morphed to focus on climate impacts.
• Shopping patterns and behaviors are now linked to extraordinary experiences.
• Safety and security are simmering underneath a cauldron of uncertainty.
• Brand trust deficits compound while also multiplying perceived risks on the path to purchase.

Challenges that result –

• Your product portfolio hasn’t advanced to match the consumer’s evolving quality definition and expectation.
• You’re not looking hard enough at innovation driven by climate outcomes and requiring advanced bioengineering.
• Your products are not fully in sync with health and wellness lifestyle goals.
• You are still narrowly focused on clean energy as the platform for sustainability solutions.
• There’s nothing remarkable and entertaining about shopping your store.
• You haven’t answered the bellwether safety and security issues swaying your users.
• You haven’t placed trust creation at the core of your strategic marketing plan.

New brands are stepping into the gap

Where there’s a lingering need, others will step in to fulfill it. The world is ripe for entrepreneurs who wish to serve these evolving needs creating a business environment founded on new definitions of what scale is; value propositions that re-write the rule book on average cost of goods; and what people will pay for entirely new and higher standards of quality. Brand narratives are moving to focus on purpose and values while historic brand stories remain tethered to feature/benefit selling.

When people change, if you don’t change with them, you’re in trouble.

This summer I attended a backyard community barbecue where the entire menu was a trip into Korean culinary culture. It was mesmerizingly good, a welcome departure from hot dogs and burgers, and an eyeopener on flavor interplay between sweet (sauce) and sour (kimchi). The novel ingredients were off the charts delicious and created a learning moment.

The lesson: once people have experiences that alter their world order and concept of what’s important, tastes good or matters to their sense of values and beliefs, it’s nearly impossible to go back to the old behavioral patterns.

Food culture refinement is fueling change

You just know expectations on what great food is like are shifting when more sophisticated menus and unique global taste experiences start showing up at the corner neighborhood bar – gastropubs are getting Michelin stars!! We are awash in cooking competitions, chef authored packaged artisanal foods, fancy meal kits, and preoccupation with fresh local food ingredients that require preparation skills.

As people acquire knowledge and experience, perceptions shift. The lowly Brussel sprout, and veggies generally, enjoy a renaissance as cheffy preparations take this mini-cabbage (same species of plant – the brassica oleracea) sulphur bomb to new heights of flavor transformation with cured meat and high temp roasting to caramelize the leafy exterior. Cooking techniques magically alter a one-time musty vegetal eating experience with deeper umami flavors.  

The American palate is maturing alongside growing enthusiasm for more complex and layered food preparations and menus. Are food brands right there with them helping share the future of food, or mired in a legacy infrastructure of ultra-processed preparations that lean too heavily on fat, sugar and sodium to drive their appeal?

While popping open a bag of potato chips is still a common snack time ritual, people making their own chips from scratch isn’t out of the realm of possibility either. Food culture in America is rapidly evolving with raised expectations for tastes, flavor profiles and gustatory adventures.

When food experience is driven by ingredients

The basic legacy concept behind packaged food solutions is convenience, an effort to reduce or remove preparation from the equation. But what happens when millions of consumers get a taste of the very flavor layering techniques that make chefs the culinary superstars that they are? Lockdowns helped push people to their stoves. It’s hard to go back to standard boxed mac and cheese when you’ve enjoyed the outcome of informed cooking mixing a béchamel sauce with aged gouda and lardons to envelop an elbow noodle in indulgent magic.

It’s even harder to dismiss these developments when observing 12-year-old kids on FoodTV’s “Chopped Junior” show whip out a wine reduction sauce for pan roasted halibut in under five minutes? Suddenly an otherwise neutral, bland tasting fish rises to a new position in flavor town at the hands of a tween. Does this not signal a change in how we see food ideas, expectations on preparations, romance around the possibilities of better food experiences?

Ingredients take center stage in menus. Packaged products with reimagined ingredients not slavishly tied to what’s cheapest have this incredible competitive advantage of being able to tell their product creation story proudly. This is happening at a time when that’s exactly the kind of behind-the-curtain tale consumers want to know.

How to disrupt yourself

One sure-fire way to guide innovation, restaging, re-purposing and reimagining what your brand is on earth to accomplish – is putting the consumer at the center of your strategic planning and product development strategies.

• This is harder to do than it sounds because businesses often reflexively sit in service of their legacy brick and mortar infrastructure, supply chain traditions and sensibilities around average retail pricing.

When the consumer is willing to pay more for demonstrable upgrades in quality, where is that coming from? It is the very knowledge they’ve acquired through elevated food experiences where they learn about the relationship between better ingredients and better taste – and often healthier food outcomes to boot. The added spend equals sufficient added value.

Every food and beverage brand should be led by food culture anthropologists, scanning for the sea changes at a time when shifts are occurring more rapidly. We’ve reached a point where the consumer will inevitably move on while the brand plays catch-up or suffers relevance declines.

• When values change and the consumer wants unique, customized higher quality food experiences, you don’t want to find yourself at odds where you end up fighting them to stay put. Sure enough, a new brand will hit the radar to answer their call for quality innovation.

If you want to stay ahead of developing trends, be sure to register here for the Emerging Trends Report. If you’d like to discuss how your brand and business might evolve to stay ahead of food culture changes, use this link to say hello and invite an informal conversation!

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Mainstream consumers aligning for greater good

Sustainability concerns could not be a hotter topic right now. The temperature continues to rise as consumers learn there’s a connection between their purchase decisions and climate impacts. According to Hartman Group Sustainability 2021 trend research report, the issue was already gaining significant momentum prior to the pandemic. It is virtually on fire now as environmental concerns have become attached to purchase motivations for mainstream consumers — a new form of climate-conscious consumption.

• To help you determine where your company is on the sustainability and climate readiness continuum, we’ve created a simple self-assessment tool you can access, offered later in this article.

Hartman characterizes this as a form of ‘secular spirituality’ – a moral system that operates as a guide to decision making now focused on the greater good. Consumer sentiment on environmental and social wellbeing therefore should not be underestimated by brand marketers.

Helping drive this cultural sea change is increased media coverage tracing the impact of food and beverage consumption to the environment, personal health, safety and planetary security. This is occurring in parallel with a potent cocktail of climate anxiety and concerns over a legacy of regressive public environmental policies, that now serves to motivate consumer desire for real change.

We’re witnessing a causal link emerge in consumer sentiments between everyday life (I bought a hamburger) and bigger problems ahead (it took 600 gallons of water, increasingly scarce land resources, toxic methane released into the air, and two years to make that hamburger). The growing imperative is urgent action needed to stem the tide and get ahead of global warming impacts on life before our environment reaches a point of no return.

What’s telling is the move from fringe to the center. At one time so called “green” concerns sat on the periphery – important to a narrow audience of climate advocates. Now, this has migrated into the mainstream, likely because people are increasingly confronted with global warming impacts right in their front yard – Seattle at 116 degrees in June? Absolutely historic.

As evidence of this transition: Hartman found that 51% of consumers say they purchase sustainable products specifically because they are better for the environment – that’s up 17 points from 2017 to 2019.

Progressive brands see this and will get ahead of it

What does sustainability and climate readiness look like? How should brands behave in an environment when consumers want to make pound-for-pound comparisons and seek transparency on just how climate positive a brand is?

Carbon footprint is about to become a defining tool in assessing environmental faithfulness. Yet there is no recognized umbrella benchmark for how this should be measured and calculated. Until industry associations coalesce around a standard set of rules for sustainability science and data, its likely to feel a bit like the wild west, with third-party category expert climate sheriffs holding court.

Emergent isn’t standing on the sidelines. We’ve already weighed in on the climate challenge with our Brand Sustainability Solution program. The first-of-its-kind suite of services integrates scientific carbon footprint assessment with consumer insight research to determine which areas of climate positive behavior are most important to a brand’s user base; and marries the outcomes with a suite of marketing communications tools intended to help a company convey its sustainability story and climate policy bona fides.

Our consumer insight research partner, Brand Experience Group, has already completed a study that makes a clear case for the business benefits of strengthening sustainability commitments – and found evidence that failure to do so will create a long-term drag on brand growth and profits.

Shift in responsibility for sustainability action to companies

For years the consensus among consumers was environmental solutions were an individual choice and responsibility. Now that perception has moved and people largely see companies as responsible for creating measurable change, mainly because they are viewed as key actors in the sustainability problem.

Hartman’s research charted the shift on who bears responsibility for sustainability and climate mitigation policies to large corporations. They are on top at 86% followed by government at 71% and individuals now at 58% – down from 73% a few years ago.

This is a moment in time when companies have an opportunity to take a leadership position on a rapidly developing cultural change that will impact their brand value proposition. Five key directional questions to consider:

1. Have you conducted an independent, third-party Carbon Footprint to better understand climate impacts and to inform mitigation efforts?

2. Have you conducted consumer insight research to better understand how climate and sustainability concerns impact your core users’ behaviors and product choices?

3. Do you have a clear understanding of which sustainability issues (e.g. climate change, pollution of the oceans, animal welfare) are most motivating for your users?

4. Do you have a clear understanding of where your Sustainability efforts rank among competitors in your relevant categories (ahead of or lagging behind)?

5. Are you confident your brands’ sustainability narratives enhance consumer preference and choice?

These and other questions form the guideposts of sustainability and climate readiness. If you’re wondering how your company stacks up on progressive sustainability programs and policies, you can take our simple online assessment questionnaire. In just five minutes we can help you secure a snapshot of where your organization sits today on climate readiness.

Use this link to take the confidential online sustainability readiness questionnaire. Once submitted we will come back to you with a customized outcome report, complete with readiness scoring. Both the questionnaire and follow-up results report are complimentary.

It’s better to know where you are now and be proactive rather than wait for the sustainability boom to drop and find yourself in the unenviable place of reacting and playing catch-up.

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Culture change impacts food and beverage brand relevance

There’s a new sheriff in food and beverage town now. A consumer on the hunt for climate- friendly choices. They have a hankering to use the checkout counter as a ballot box to vote their beliefs. Are you prepared for them? Just who is this new cohort rapidly gaining momentum?  As an audience of influencers and advocates how significant will their impact be on the future fortunes of food businesses and retailers in 2021?

Read on.

Five years ago, a great dot-connecting moment transpired when consumers determined that the quality of what they eat has a direct and tangible impact on the quality of their lives. Food retail saw a marked shift in shopping patterns to the perimeter fresh departments as preference for fresh, real food overtook the decades-long infatuation with convenient, inexpensive, highly processed packaged foods and snacks. The aftermath of this transformed ‘what does healthier mean’ calculus and fed the innovation skate ramp of new, entrepreneur created food products flooding the store. These super premium brands-with-deeper-meaning and made from higher quality, ethically sourced real food ingredients have captivated consumer attention and retail shelf space. How many brands of artisanal beef jerky are there now competing for a slice of the snack dollar?

We reminisce on this point just to remind us all that change comes quickly. Our collective goal as marketers is to stay ahead of these transformative shifts. Thus able to help define the state of the art for your brands, rather than scrambling to re-acquire relevance after observing share erosion in the quarterly results report.

Rise of the Climatarian

Another dot-connecting transition is underway. A growing number of bellwether consumers are grasping the connection between the food production system and its out-sized impact on greenhouse gas production plus the climate change threats that accompany it. According to our insight research partner Brand Experience Group, their ground-breaking study on sustainability, estimates the current number of consumers who are passionate about or committed to the importance of “sustainable consumption” at 34% and rising.

The role of meat production and industrial agriculture processes contributing to the planet’s warming is changing the food choice value proposition to invoke a claim that defines carbon footprint. While the word sustainable has gained traction in recent years as a formal player in marketing lexicon, it is acquiring a more specific meaning. Sustainability and climate change are getting married and we’re all invited to the reception.

What’s driving this? In his stellar New Yorker magazine feature “After Alarmism: The War on Climate Denial Has Been Won,” climate advocate David Wallace-Wells paints the picture.

“In California in 2020, twice as much land burned as had ever burned before in any year in the modern history of the state — five of the six biggest fires ever recorded. In Siberia, “zombie fires” smoldered anomalously all through the Arctic winter; in Brazil, a quarter of the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, was incinerated; in Australia, flames took the lives of 3 billion animals. All year, a planet transformed by the burning of carbon discharged what would have once been called portents of apocalypse.”

Increased media attention on the issue has circulated data revealing the significant top box role beef and lamb production have in methane creation. Global agriculture practices and meat collectively contribute more to climate threat than all fossil fuel transportation combined. The impact of climate on people and society is being played out in prime time through recurring news coverage of raging wildfires, droughts, super storms, increasing Hurricane impacts, melting glaciers, rising water levels and flooding worldwide.

We’re about to see a shift towards carbon footprint as a definer of sustainability. Those with an attractive, relevant brand story to tell are manifesting this attribute in product label scoring while legacy food and beverage companies swarm to announce “Net Zero” emission commitments. Meanwhile there will be growing scrutiny of supply chains to root out sources of greenhouse gas. The decarbonization of our food system is getting underway. Consumers will demand it. It will be juiced by new food technologies and a cohort of emerging brands that pioneer ways to create food without built-in climate deficits.

Digital innovation will be eclipsed by bio-degradable everything

Alongside global warming is a related developing trend – an innovation heat map swing from digital technology to significant advancements in bioengineering and biofabrication.  A complementary view of sustainability looks hard at the role of plastics and other trash dump materials in so many facets of our lives with a convincing argument that recycling isn’t the best answer. Creating products, packaging, even clothing, from materials that simply disappear harmlessly is exponentially better for the planet.

In 2019, nearly 500 million plastic toothbrushes were sold with the majority of them ending up in landfills and the ocean. They cannot be recycled. Since plastic was first mass-produced in the 1950’s, 9.1 billion tons of it has been created and landfilled – an astonishing 91% of this massive plastic tsunami isn’t recyclable, according to Fast Company magazine. On the toothbrush front, Colgate owns 30% of the entire category and in an effort to end the proliferation of plastic they are introducing “Keep” – the first planet-friendly brush that employs a reusable aluminum handle. The replaceable brush head is still plastic but the design represents an 80% reduction in plastic material use.

Steve and Nick Tidball’s Vollebak, a futuristic brand of men’s fashion, is re-writing the rules and process for clothing creation. Their plant and algae t-shirt is made from plant-based linen and wood pulp fibers decorated with ink from algae. The shirt can completely decompose in 12 weeks when tossed into the compost pile. A shirt that literally disappears. “Sustainability is easier to understand when it involves feeding your clothes to worms,” said founder Steve Tidball in an overview article on their technology showcased in The Future Normal newsletter.

Key to this coming movement of planet friendlier foods, products, processes and ingredients is a revealing focus on the impact of lifestyle and consumption habits on our planet’s health. The realization that what we buy is a reflection of our values rises as a functional and viable path to signal those preferences and beliefs. Consumers’ wallets are used to vote their preferences. This new path to purchase will require brands to look deeply across the organization to determine where improvements and changes can be made to align with this sea change.

Undoubtedly yet another generation of new brands will emerge with carbon footprint claims and planet-friendly packaging as the lead in their brand voice. More innovation is coming. There are, however, business challenges ahead for these upstarts.

• What is the secret to scale-able and sustainable growth, the path to sales homeruns not base hits? We reveal it here.

80% of CPG start-ups will never get past $1 million in sales

Some new emerging brands have well-connected founders and are able to attract investment that creates resource advantages. “Money can buy distribution. It can buy advertising. It can buy huge field marketing events. But it can’t by consumer enthusiasm. It can’t buy cultural relevance for the brand’s attribute-outcome symbolism,” exhorts Dr. James Richardson, of Premium Growth Solutions.

After an initial, well-funded launch with a strong velocity report card, things start to stall or plateau. What’s wrong is often embedded in the product itself. It just isn’t that remarkable. Or, importantly a narrow, niched positioning causes the brand to stall. It simply runs past its ability to attract an audience sufficiently large enough to keep the velocities on a northward trajectory. Enthusiastic users, perhaps, but a narrow, smaller fan base nonetheless.

Scaling beyond the mid-range isn’t an outcome of more funding or the awareness that can buy. It is delivered by steering the brand towards the right and largest addressable market. Beyond Meat famously did not create a better vegan burger for vegans. They opened the aperture wide by casting themselves as a meat made from plants for meat lovers. They threw down the gauntlet of crave-able taste experience and asserted they were as good as a beef burger. Bold to be sure. The product delivered on its promise under that scrutiny.

The genius was casting a wide net to meat lovers and in doing so working to build relevance and resonance with a very big audience of meat department beef shoppers. It wasn’t because there was this giant standing pool of people representing themselves as “flexitarian.” No, instead they invoked meat lover and by that they meant anyone and everyone who loves hamburgers, the most popular sandwich on earth. The outcome was a rapid rise to hundreds of millions in sales.

Largest. Addressable. Market.

Don’t make vegan cheese for vegans. Instead craft extraordinary, delicious plant-based cheese for cheese lovers. A high taste bar to be sure, but then that’s what separates the extraordinary product innovation from the merely average.

Climate change and bioengineering will reshape the food, beverage and lifestyle brands business more quickly than anyone imagines. Venture capital and innovation will quickly chase these dreams. More higher-purpose brands will be invented. Some will be out-sized winners while some will remain small or fail altogether. The difference maker won’t be the size of the budget and the awareness that can acquire. Sound strategy will play a decisive role in the fortunes (or lack thereof) of these businesses based on the quality of the innovation itself, the size of its potential market and the alchemy of how and where its relevance is expressed.

If this thinking strikes a chord and you would like to brainstorm further the implications for your business, use this link to start an informal, no-charge conversation.

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