UNSTUCK 036: A Bigger Appetite For Change

We started UNSTUCK two years ago to solve a specific problem: sustainable food brands weren't breaking into the mainstream because they approached consumers through a technology and activist lens instead of a consumer lens. They had product innovation without a consumer strategy, which too often meant not enough consumers to build a business. We thought this was their problem.

We were wrong. It's everyone's problem.

Many major food manufacturers have stopped growing too. Household names like Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Campbell’s and PepsiCo are all reporting volume declines with revenues either flat or down as well. An industry built on volume, efficiency, and relentless optimization is shrinking.

And watching it up close for two years has revealed something critical: whether you're selling plant-based protein or potato chips, the winners are building desire based on the timeless tenets of good marketing and consumer-centricity, applied with the courage to challenge outdated category conventions.

Why Change is No Longer Optional

Three powerful forces are colliding in ways that make the need for transformation in food no longer disputable or ignorable:

The Health Crisis: In the US, nearly 75% of adults are overweight or obese, with all 50 states reporting obesity rates of at least 25%. In the UK, 64% of adults are overweight or obese, carrying an annual health bill of £6.5 billion.

UK Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty recently presented data at the IGD (Institute of Grocery Distribution) conference showing huge improvements across almost every public health metric over recent decades from smoking, air quality and teen pregnancy to road safety and cot death. But not obesity.

"Which is great news . . . but not for you," he told a room of food businesses.

The public health crisis is becoming a commercial crisis for an industry built on products that evidence increasingly suggests are fuelling the problem.

The GLP-1 Disruption: 2025 was the year appetite-suppressing drugs went mainstream. 23% of US households now have at least one GLP-1 user, and Circana predicts 35% of all food and beverage units in 2030 will be purchased by GLP-1 users. That's a third of all units sold going to people seeking greater nutritional density in smaller portions. They'll buy less, but won't spend less — they may even spend more. A long overdue market correction for quality over quantity.

The Trust Collapse: Trust in big food is waning while consumers invest their trust in influencers and creators. The Yuka app, which scans barcodes and recommends healthier swaps, is used by 55 million people across 12 countries. Scientists and doctors are fronting prime time television programmes highlighting huge categories and brands as ultra-processed, showing consumers how they are harming their health. 44% of Gen Z and Millennials say knowing about GLP-1s makes them feel more pressure to make better food choices. When food is the most influenced category on social media (bigger than beauty), trust is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Sustainability hasn’t gone away. But these shifts present the need and opportunity to re-think the industry through a much bigger lens. Retail buyers are asking what their categories should look like in the next 3-5 years. Marketers inside big organizations are frustrated they can't influence greater change. Ingredients businesses are bringing innovative solutions and looking for customers who are bold enough to adopt at scale. But the industry at large remains stuck in a playbook that no longer works.

The confluence of these forces means the cost of staying stuck is existential, not just a temporary blip. It’s no longer just technology that’s moving on. It’s consumers. Which means that companies and brands have no choice but to sit up, pay attention, and get unstuck. Those that do, will thrive. Those that don’t, risk becoming obsolete.

What Consumers Actually Want

Consumers are tired of living at extremes. What may seem like an impossible task for the food industry — creating food that is delicious, good for you, easy to prepare, affordable and sustainable — is what consumers actually want.

They don't want to keep blindly eating processed food for the sake of convenience, knowing it's making them overweight or sick. They don't want superficial collabs posing as innovation (we're looking at you, Coca-Cola Oreo). They don’t want a side of climate sermon with their oat flat white. They want genuine innovation in experiences, flavours, rituals, and benefits.

To thrive, brands need to embrace three fundamental shifts. A playbook that successful challengers are already showing works.  

Shift One: From What’s Efficient to What Consumers Value

Big food is suffering from a similar blindness that has plagued sustainable food: prioritising operational excellence over championing the consumer.

The efficiency mindset — high volume, low margin, optimize what you have — has squeezed innovation out of the system. Product decisions are filtered through a cost lens, ahead of "will consumers actually want this?" The result is supermarket shelves filled with products engineered for efficiency and shelf space, not consumers. Across categories, those products are slowly, slowly seeing market share being taken by start-up competitors with lower distribution and higher costs, but who are built around the needs of today’s consumer.  

As more people decide to eat better rather than more, food brands that purely focus on efficiency are optimizing themselves into eventual irrelevance.

It took Kodak around 10 years to ultimately go bankrupt, having failed to adapt to changing consumer needs and preferences as challengers raised the bar. We won't see the major faces of food change as quickly as they did in technology, but change is afoot. In multiple categories it was smaller challengers celebrating growth at the end of last year, and when performance bonuses aren’t landing in big companies people have to start thinking differently.  

Cost of living challenges have supported the argument that affordability is king and this has helped scale brands to maintain mass volumes by winning on price. The growing awareness of the link between food and health, the wider impact of appetite-suppressing drugs (beyond those actually taking them), and the change in who we trust when it comes to food may disrupt this logic. As more people decide to eat better rather than more, food brands that purely focus on efficiency are optimizing themselves into eventual irrelevance.

Shift Two: From Maintaining Status Quo to Demanding Better

The classic innovator's dilemma: big industries have no motivation to innovate until they're disrupted. And by then, it's often too late. We're willing to bet most 2026 planning in Big Food was incremental — hit 1-2% growth, optimize the portfolio, squeeze another point of margin. But the market is demanding transformation, not iteration.

Sustainable food went wrong by chasing parity. The ceiling became "just as good as the original." Big food is making the same mistake with incremental thinking. Slightly healthier, slightly better ingredients, slightly more sustainable. Neither approach demands a breakthrough because neither is truly consumer-led.

The brands winning right now aren't asking "how do we make current products slightly better or cheaper?" They're asking "what do consumers actually need that nobody is giving them?"

The brands winning right now aren't asking "how do we make current products slightly better or cheaper?" They're asking "what do consumers actually need that nobody is giving them?" They're reimagining what the category can be by starting with unmet consumer needs instead of defending what already exists.

This shift requires accepting that some sacred cows need to be slaughtered. The product portfolio that delivered the last 20 years of growth, probably won’t deliver the next 20 years. The production facility built for scale might be holding back the innovation consumers want. The regulatory environment that’s been fiercely lobbied against, might be pointing toward what consumers are starting to care about.

Shift Three: From Fighting the Tide to Riding The Wave

Regulatory pressure is mounting on both sides of the Atlantic. Last week the US's Make America Healthy Again movement literally flipped the food pyramid on its head and put the kibosh on highly processed foods (the video is worth a watch to understand the strength of the message).

“For decades we've been misled by guidance that prioritized highly processed food.” - RealFood.gov

Unsurprisingly, yet no less disappointingly, sustainability was not high up the agenda. But from a Big Food perspective, vilification from a major government statement will be widely felt.

And it’s not just in the US. With less fanfare across the pond, the UK government was further tightening their restrictions on advertising HFSS (high fat, salt, sugar) foods which can no longer be advertised online.

Most legacy food brands are in reactive mode: fighting regulations, protecting what they have, aligning themselves with a ‘purpose’ to lead brand communications. Challengers are doing the opposite: racing ahead of regulations to build consumer trust through radical transparency, often with mission and purpose authentically built in.

The strategic calculation is simple. Consumers are scrutinizing food more than ever before. Fighting regulations signals you have something to hide. Leading with transparency signals you have nothing to hide. Product changes to meet regulations can be a positive step forward, but may distract resources from the bigger, fundamental steps needed - trying to keep up rather than jumping ahead of the pack. 

The opportunity is massive. With more consumers actively seeking options that provide nutrition and nourishment, be the brand delivering them exceptionally well—not grudgingly, not minimally, but proudly.  From milk to sausages to chocolate - all these products will continue to serve consumer needs but the bar for quality is unquestionably being raised.

What’s next for UNSTUCK

These three shifts — championing what consumers value over efficiency, category reinvention through demanding better over maintaining status quo, and riding the transparency wave over fighting the tide — apply whether you're selling alternative protein or potato chips, across both B2B and B2C.

But the brands that succeed will be those that embrace the consumer opportunities. Sustainable food has been stuck because it brought product solutions but lacked consumer problems to solve. In the last two years we’ve seen those that identified and designed around consumer needs begin to break through. 

It's no longer just the alternatives that need to get unstuck. The entire food industry does.

As it’s become clearer the food industry problem is bigger than sustainability, it has also become clearer at UNSTUCK we need a rallying cry across the industry as a whole. Commentary that will continue to help the sustainable innovators find their consumer value, but will also inspire and educate those working across food - from Big Food to start-up challengers - on how everyone can contribute to getting the industry unstuck. Driving change is hard. We’re here to help make it a bit easier.   

We'll keep dissecting brands, analyzing category disruptions, and showing exactly why some win while others lose. From startups to incumbents, from brands to ingredients, from communications to technologies.

Because it's no longer just the alternatives that need to get unstuck. The entire food industry does.