Making LTOs Permanent: When Fans Influence Brands

Sometimes fans get the best of their preferred brands and flavors by creating demand for a once-unthinkable product or simply demanding the return of favorite LTOs.

Candy & Spice and Everything Nice: Holiday Hits Retail Earlier Than Ever as Spending Shrinks

It’s not just the days that are getting shorter – the amount of time between glimpsing ghouls and buying roof clips for Rudolph is shrinking, too. Home Depot sold out of its first run of …

Candy & Confections Are Killin’ It in 2023

What if candy were associated more with a lifestyle and not with high-sugar, indulgence-driven snacking? That’s how the Swedes do it. In the 1970s, a Swedish dentist created a campaign suggesting children only eat candy …

The Slow, Rewarding, Delicious Business of Branded Apples

The American apple harvest could reach 250 million bushels this year, a 1.5% increase from 2022. Branded apple varieties account for 15% to 20% of apple sales.

COLUMN: What F&B Companies Can Learn from Jimmy Buffett

No matter how you feel about Jimmy Buffett and “Margaritaville,” the man built a billion-dollar empire from a napkin.

Rock the Block(chain): NFTs in Food and Beverage

The heck is an NFT? Their precursors in the ‘90s were called pogs – often cheap and of limited variety for the average consumer, easily tradable and without much long-term staying power. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) …

Hot Honey & The Great Condiment Mashup

Hot honey is back. The question is, did it ever leave? Helping prompt this question is Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut has been making a quiet comeback in the QSR market the last few years; it …

Under the Influence: Protecting Business from Poor Influencers

It’s the influencers’ world and we’re just living in it. Here’s how to avoid the next Fyre Festival with your brand.

Growing Up – CEA & The Future of Indoor Farming

What’s next for the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) space after a spate of bankruptcies and rising inflation?

State of the Industry: Snack & Bakery

The American Bakers Association (ABA) and SNAC International recently hosted a webinar describing the current state of the snack and bakery industry. Presented in partnership with Circana (formerly IRI), the webinar featured a slew of …

Retail Media Networks Are Poised to Explode

Believe the hype – major American retailers and grocers are spending big money on retail media networks (RMNs). Walmart has Walmart Connect. Target reaches consumers using Roundel. Kroger has its Precision Marketing network, Albertsons its …

Will the Government’s New Farm Relief Bill Function?

In the past, the sheer bureaucracy of requesting emergency relief has led to several administrative changes, causing delays, confusion, and more than a little fiscal frustration for those providing many of the common produce staples in grocery and retail.

The Consumer Curiosity Report Reveals Future Food Trends

The Consumer Curiosity Report was the first inaugural report developed by Curious Plot to not only learn how food-forward consumers think and behave, but to help establish, foster, and share new food trends from home to aisle, retail to restaurant.

How to Win Over Evolving Omnichannel Shoppers

Common sense wins the day in most respects, and a little data goes a long way toward verifying collective gut-checks, especially during inflationary years. And though the U.S. has landed a little softer than feared …

The Grimace Effect – How Marketing & Memes Drive Sales

Audacious, sublime, organic – these are the hallmarks of profit for brands wise enough to be confident in their values and lucky enough to thread the needle between quality-controlled seriousness and edge-of-the-internet frivolity.

Emergent Functional Foods Are Flooding the Market

Cereal, by most conventions, is a breakfast food. Yes, cereal can also make a great snack, and has been snackified for decades as a familiar and kids-friendly alternative to vegetables and other foods with more …

The Summer of Butter

Every dairy category has seen positive growth, from milk, natural cheese, and eggs to yogurt, cream cheese, dairy processed cheese, and whipped toppings, all helping power the #SummerOfButter.

Can Buzzfeed’s AI Chefbot Save Your Kitchen?

Tasty enjoys over 1 billion cross-platform views each month and is widely regarded as the most robust and user-generated food community and platform on the internet. That the big cheese of big apps and data is involved with AI recommending food choices and providing budget and grocery tips should not surprise anyone.  

Top Trends at the Summer Fancy Food Show

“Companies must stand out,” said Food Institute CEO Brian Choi. “To win in the marketplace, products have to have a differentiated selling point – just being ‘good’ is not good enough in this environment.”

EVs Can Galvanize Farming and Agriculture

Today’s smart vehicles and robotics can do everything from operate autonomous implements in the field to monitor crucial silo volume and quality data, make precision adjustments to spraying and irrigation, and even assess crop and animal health. And that’s just scratching the surface.

The Better-for-You Blockbuster Snacking Season Has Arrived

As families gear up for movie night across the country and CPG companies figure out how to get their snacks off the shelves and into the hands of consumers before the previews even start, what constitutes a typical movie night snack, for many, is going the way of the dinosaurs.

The Route to Market (& Me) – Amazon Fresh & The Evolving Consumer

“What is the route to market?” Carroll wondered. “That’s what we all used to say – ‘what is the route to market?’ Today, though, it’s the route to me. Give me what I want, when I want it, as conveniently as possible.”

QR Codes: ReliQ or Revolutionary?

How, and why, should some businesses do away with table- or barside QR codes, and what should be expected from both business and consumer? The QR Qonundrum doesn’t have to be an all-in or all-out decision, however – a hybrid approach, using lessons from the business side of the pandemic and the consumer side of hospitality, may be a viable way forward for businesses large and small.

Study: Lab-Grown Meat Potentially Worse for Environment than Retail Beef

If proper technology and facilities can be developed to lessen the current emissions costs of lab-grown products, then yes, the research team found cultured meat to be much more environmentally competitive and with a potential wide range of applications. Today, though, the scientific/environmental/cultural jump “from pharma to food” remains an expensive and taxing endeavor for mother Earth.

Groundbreaking Consumer Insight: The Snack 50 Psychological Ranking

According to Circana Group and reported by The Wall Street Journal, nearly half of American consumers snack three times or more every day, a figure up 8% in the past two years. Last year, U.S. snack sales soared to over $180 billion, up 11% from the previous year.

American Jerk: The Salty, Smoky, Spicy, and Thriving Business of Jerky

There are many notable jerky and meat snack companies out there and most are thriving as the snackification of America continues apace. Jerky in any form has been a staple snack since navigators used sextets to sail the seven seas and discover more jerky, as John Smith is purported to have in the early 1600s when he marked a map of Virginia and wrote, “as drie as their jerkin beefe in the West Indies.”

How to Win in the 2023 Snacking Universe

“Snacking is still a lifestyle in the U.S., fueled by the younger generation,” Wyatt began. “We’re in an unprecedented situation as price hikes in this category are outpacing other food/bev categories.”

The Future of Food Retail

Grocers continue to be challenged by the emergence of competitive C-stores, inflation, and a looming global recession.

The State of Wagyu in America

Wagyu often tops restaurateurs’ dinner menus as the cut de la creme, the luxurious and bougie beef, the apex protein for the apex predator armed with a sharp knife, a crisp vegetable, and an appetite for the sublime.

Mergers, Acquisitions, Startups & Layoffs: What to Expect in 2023 

Inflation is ebbing and the economy is weathering the rate hikes well. Unemployment is at a 50-year low, and recent tech layoffs are minimal compared to the volume of employees hired by those same companies the past several years.

The Teens Have Spoken: Chick-fil-A Remains Favorite Restaurant

Three things remain constant in life: death, taxes, and Chick-fil-A. In Piper-Sandler’s recent survey of teen spending in the U.S., the Georgia-based restaurant chain still struts its stuff above Starbucks and Chipotle and accounts for …

Play Ball! Inflation, Value & SNCKRmetrics at the Ballpark

Sixty to seventy percent of what is sold at the American ball park is standard stadium fare – hot dogs, peanuts, pretzels, and beer. In a year of inflation and supply chain havoc, can fans still afford the bare necessities for a day at the park?

Webinar Shows ‘Healthy’ Top of Mind for Consumers

The Food Institute was recently joined by two registered dieticians to discuss the state of wellness for the Food Industry. Marie Molde (MBA, RD) from Datassential and Barbara Ruhs (MS, RDN, RD) from Avocados from …

The State of the Restaurant Industry

Top restaurant operators share their insights on growth, labor, costs, supply chain, and more.

Failure to Lunch – Can the Food Industry Battle Climate Change?

Reducing meat consumption and improving eating habits on a mass scale to put a dent in greenhouse emissions is going to be tough.

When Karen & Chad Attack: Recovering from Yelp-Bombing and Bad Reviews

Chad and Karen have always been mad as hell. Now they just have more outlets to vent about businesses like restaurants. How you respond simply makes all the difference.