Understanding 2021 CPG Trends: Positioning Your Natural and Organic Brand For Success with Wise Athena and SPINS
Where do we go from here?
It’s the question all successful CPG brands ask themselves, and the road ahead can be murky for emerging niche product categories like natural and organic. Throw in a global pandemic, historic weather events and even more detours emerge.
Thankfully, the right data can provide a roadmap that helps put complex variables into perspective. Yes, even those complex variables.
Working with our strategic partner and consumer insight specialist SPINS, we know that natural and organic products have a special place within 2021 consumer trends.
As the leading provider of retail consumer insights, analytics and consulting for the Natural, Organic and Specialty Products Industry, SPINS transforms raw data into actionable business solutions, helping brands communicate their growth to retailers to scale their distribution and helping retailers understand and maintain their points of difference.
This partnership helps us better understand
what’s happening in the “natural and organic”
market, and with SPINS’ deep reservoir of data
and our high definition elasticity, we can flex
our data harmonization muscles to make the
right promotional suggestions to CPG
companies. We achieve this by analyzing
SPINS’ data with CPG Sell-In Data and POS
Retail data to achieve a higher level of
accuracy in our projections, with prediction
certainty between 85-95%.
Here’s a brief summary of what you can expect in
these categories for 2021, according to SPINS:
Homemade Health Without the Work
After a year of making a majority of meals at
home, the way that consumers think about
feeding their families has shifted. Many are too
exhausted to make complex meals with
multiple steps and ingredients, but that doesn’t
mean they’re willing to sacrifice quality and
health. Instead, they’re looking for faster, easier
ways to achieve healthy, homemade meals
that don’t require a lot of preparation time. As
SPINS notes, “Refrigerated entrees are up 56%
while refrigerated burritos and tamales are up
24%; shelf-stable entrees and mixes have
grown 31% and frozen entrees have risen 17%.”
Snacks Take on a New Look
Working from home, combined with less
frequent grocery trips didn’t just change
mealtimes. It also changed the way people eat
in between meals. Where snacks may have
been collectively shared within office spaces in
prior years, months of independent eating have
created a new category SPINS calls “functional
snacking.” Functional snackers aren’t just
looking for a quick bite—they’re looking for
functional ingredients like “vitamins, high
protein, and probiotics” in the foods they
already love.
“We know that
natural and organic
products have a
special place within
2021 consumer
trends.”
Connections Between the World and the Way We Eat
There’s nothing like a global pandemic to make people reconsider their priorities and daily habits. In the past year, with a lot of time to consider the state of the world, people are rethinking what their individual actions could mean for the greater world, and the food they eat is no exception. This kind of thinking doesn’t necessarily mean that people are giving themselves familiar labels like “vegan” or “vegetarian.” Instead, as SPINS says, shoppers are simply looking for ways “to reduce their meat consumption seeing as the production of meat products has a large effect on climate.”
Everyone’s (Still) Looking For a Little Comfort
When consumers want to avoid processed foods, that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t looking for ways to enjoy childhood favorites and the meals that bring them comfort. If shoppers can find healthier alternative versions of their favorite macaroni and cheese product, or if they know they’re buying a version of food made with environmental considerations, it could be the difference between choosing one brand over another.
Wise Athena helps CPG companies optimize Pricing & Trade Promotions strategies with A.I., giving clients insight into seasonal trends, fluctuating product demands, and daily changes resulting from market discrepancies. We’ve proven that we can increase sales and margins in less time, and with less effort, with data harmonization capabilities, high definition elasticity, and prediction certainty between 85-95%.
