Name: Appetite for Growth 2026: Winning with Purpose
Uploaded: 2026-11-05T10:34:24.868Z
Duration: 45 min 4 s
Description: Appetite for Growth 2026: Winning with Purpose

Transcript for "Appetite for Growth 2026: Winning with Purpose": Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Avidade for Growth 2026. I'm Javier Sanchez, global business development director at WorkPanel by Numerator. It's a pleasure to have you with us. This is the fourth consecutive year we've published, this report, and that continuity matters. It allows us to not just capture what people or consumers are doing now, but to understand which changes are temporary and which are becoming embedded in our everyday reality. This year's edition is called winning with purpose, and our central argument is simple. Growth isn't only about what people eat and drink. It's also about what they choose to consume and the job they want their food and drink to perform for them. Over the next half an hour, I'll take you through these three connected shifts, how purpose is changing, how food choices are moving, and how pleasure itself is being redefined. I'll finish with what these shifts mean for brands looking for their next source of growth. First, a quick word on how we look at consumption. Our demand movement framework brings together the who, when, what, where, and why of eating and drinking into one single behavioral view. It is grounded in millions of reported occasions across our usage panels. For today's analysis, we will focus on six Western European markets, which are The UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Italy, and we will compare the twelve months up to June 2026 with previous years. The scope is food and drink consumed at home or prepared at home and carried out. This is important. We are measuring actual occasions and not simply attitudes or stated aspirations. The starting point is that every occasion has a job to do. Sometimes, we are feeding ourselves. Sometimes, we are treating ourselves. Sometimes, we want to invest time and attention. Other times, simplicity is the priority. Emotional and practical considerations coexist, and they change throughout the day and across life situations. So two people exactly eating the same dish may be addressing completely different occasions, different needs. That is why a purpose led lens can uncover competitors and opportunities that a traditional category view would miss. When we map those needs, four broad territories emerge. Daily nourishment account for around thirty six percent of occasions. Taking time together will represent 26%. Restore and replenish, which is more functional and convenient role, represents 23%, and unwind and relax account for the remaining 15. Think of this not as fixed consumer types, but as different jobs that the same person may be moving between. For brands, this gives us a common language to understand where we currently play and where we could credibly grow. We can now go one level deeper, breaking these four macro needs into 14 distinct demand moments. For example, within daily nourishment, we can distinguish between kick start, complete and balanced, and filling meals. All these are about nourishment, but they serve different purposes and come with different consumer expectations. Similarly, restore and replenish includes moments such as as simple and healthy, routine and recharge, and lighter meals, while unwind and realize captures more spontaneous or pleasure driven occasions, like stop and go, soften and chill, or weekend reward. And this is where the framework becomes particularly valuable for brands. Rather than looking at consumption simply through the traditional lens of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we can understand what consumers are actually trying to achieve in each demand. This gives us a much more precise view of where brands are relevant today, where where consumers' needs are evolving, and ultimately where new opportunities for growth may emerge. One important point is that one global framework does not mean six identical markets. The profiles here vary meaningfully across Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, The UK, and Germany. Some markets lean more strongly into particular meal routines, other into convenience or treating. The opportunity for a multinational brand is to use a consistent definition of demand while respecting the local realities and the local differences in how those needs are expressed in each country. So throughout the presentation, I will distinguish what looks structural across Europe from what requires a market specific response. With that foundation in place, let's turn to our first big shift. Purpose is changing, but where exactly is demand moving? Across the six markets in Europe, in home occasions are down 0.7%, and out of home trips are down 1.2 in two years. This isn't simply consumers transferring their eating from home to restaurants or cafes. Both channels are under pressure. And together, that represents around two and a half billion fewer eating and drinking occasions over two years. Now look at the mix on the right. Main meals now represent 47% of occasions, up half a point, and breakfast, up to almost 30%. Snacks, by contrast, have lost almost one point as well as carried out. This suggests that consumers are protecting the eating occasions they consider essential while being more selective about discretionary ones. There are several possible influences here, such as sustained pressure on household budgets, a greater focus on health, and changing lifestyles. We should also keep an eye on GLP one medicines, which can reduce appetite and could reinforce the shift towards fewer, more deliberate occasions. The implication for brands is clear, though. Each occasion has to earn its place. And coming back to the plotting of our, you know, framework here is why conventional meal labels can be misleading. A breakfast is not always about exactly the same need, and a snack is not necessarily a treat. The same meal type can serve nourishment and restoration and social connection or relaxation. When we reorganize occasions by purpose, we can see what consumers are actually trying to solve. This matters commercially. If we only track the meal or product category, we risk missing the demand shifts happening inside it. And seen from a distance, that loss of 2,500,000,000 occasions that we were discussing before looks like a relatively small decline. But follow the steps in the waterfall, and a very different story will emerge. Within daily nourishment, kick start and complete and balanced growth seem to compensate the decline of filling meals. Then in restore and replenish, simple and healthy alone adds 2,000,000,000 occasions, which is the single biggest gain on this chart. And that's an extraordinary amount of growth for one very specific consumer demand. On the right side, the losses become more visible. We have Sofa and Till, Lazy Start, and Family Favorites losing roughly 1,000,000,000 each. In other words, the market isn't standing still. It is redistributing billions of occasions from one purpose to another even though the overall total barely moves. Some demand movements are winning, others are losing, and brands can outperform their categories if they follow that movement. The question is not only whether consumers are eating more or less, it's what they're trying to achieve in each eating and drinking occasion. Now let's test whether these changes are isolated or consistent across markets. Two declines stand out. Family favorite falls across all six countries and filling meals in five out of six. On the other side, simple and healthy grows in every market. Several other moments show a mixed picture, which is useful reminder not to overgeneralize. For me, the important distinction is between a structural signal we can act on across Europe and a local signal that calls for a more tailored strategy. Simple and healthy is the clearest structural growth story. It is growing across all six countries from 5% in Germany to 16% in The UK over two years. And the occasion themselves are very recognizable. We're talking about quick, balanced, predominantly adult meals often involving one main dish and limited preparation. We are not necessarily talking about elaborate wellness routine. We are talking about making every day eating feel manageable and good for us. Vegetables and legumes, soups and salads have a stronger presence in this space, and for brands, the opportunity is to remove friction while delivering a credible sense of balance and well-being. Separating longer term direction from a more recent momentum is key when deciding where to invest. Brands need to understand which demand moment are structurally attractive and which ones are accelerating or decelerating right now. That distinction will help them decide whether to defend an established position, capture an emerging need, or rethink a proposition. Starting the top right, structural growth. Simple and healthy, we already discussed this. It has gained occasions over the two year period, and it's still showing positive momentum. Complete and balance is also positioned on the positive side. These are not simply temporary spikes. They look like durable changes in how people want to eat. At the top left, we have emerging recovery, which is interesting. Lighter meals is a useful example of why momentum matters. It may not have the same established growth story as simple and healthy, but its recent trajectory is improving. And then at the bottom left are moments facing both longer term decline and weak momentum, including family favorites and filling meals. These are the spaces where relying on the old location architecture becomes especially risky. What do these growing purposes have in common? A move towards less elaborate, more manageable eating. The cooking complexity lens helps us understand that simplicity is not just about preparation time. It is also about the number of steps, ingredients, and decisions involved in every occasion. Consumers still want meals to deliver, but often with less effort. The opportunity is to make the desired outcome easier to achieve rather than assuming people will invest more time to get it. The air fryer's cooking appliance is a tangible example of this shift. It appears in around 4% of home cooked preparations, so the headroom of growth is still massive, and it's over indexing in restore and replenish. That tells us something about the job consumers are hiring need to do, convenient, lighter, manageable cooking that can also feel balanced and healthier. The broader lesson is not that every brand needs an air fryer product. It is that formats, instructions, and product design should fit the way consumers increasingly want to prepare their food. We have just seen that main meals are holding up better than other eating occasions, but that doesn't mean people are going back to the traditional elaborate lunch and dinner occasion. Look at these figures. Lunch and dinner are slightly up, but the number of dishes served within those meals have declined. Starters are down 2% and desserts are down 4%, which makes the menu composition being more simple. At the same time, preparation time has fallen to around twenty minutes and ready made dishes are being used 5% more often. Most meals are still prepared at home, but the structure of that meal is becoming lighter and simpler. And in the context of a meal simplification, the key question should be, what deserves space on my plate? That's why the conjunction of convenience, nutritional density, and satisfaction increasingly need to work together. And it leads us naturally to the next chapter. If the purpose of the meal is changing, are the foods people choosing changing too? Our second shift is about choices on the move. If consumers are changing the jobs they need food to do, which dishes are winning and why? The composition of the plate is changing. In our European view, meat dishes are losing share, while vegetables, eggs, and pizza are among the beneficiaries. But I would not interpret this as a simple switch from one ingredient to another. Different dishes are succeeding because they fit different emerging needs, balance, practicality, affordability, familiarity, or enjoyment. We need to understand not only which foods are growing, but the specific purpose behind that growth. Before looking at the individual dishes, we need to introduce a distinction that is very important for growth strategy, core demand versus expansion. Every dish has a set of moments where it is particularly established. These are the occasions people most naturally associate dish with, its core. Across the categories we studied, around seven in 10 dish occasions come from the three biggest moments, while the remaining three in 10 come from elsewhere. But that balance differs considerably by dish. Some foods are strongly concentrated in their established territory. Potato dishes, for example, get about 85% of their occasions from the core. Others are much more versatile. Pasta gets around 39% of occasions beyond its top three moments, pizza around 44%, or ethnic dishes around 45%. Why is this important? Because a brand can grow in at least two ways. It can win more often within the job it already serves, or it can become relevant in new jobs, perhaps through a different format, a different preparation method, different reason to choose different consumers. So those are not inter exchangeable strategies. They can coexist. If your core moment is growing, you may be able to ride that demand. But if your core is declining, growth may depend on the stretching capacity where consumers do not think of you today, but maybe they can think of you in the future. So keep this distinction in mind because vegetables and pizza will illustrate two very different paths to grow. Across dishes, growth is far from uniform. Some familiar foods are benefiting from changing needs, while others are struggling to keep pace. Rather than treating these differences as a popularity contest, we can use demand moments to explain what is behind them. Is a dish growing because its core occasion is expanding or because it is becoming relevant in more parts of the day or within more purposes. Those are two different growth mechanisms with very different implications for brands. The variation across dishes is exactly why we need to look beneath aggregate meal trends. Even within a single meal type, different foods are gaining or losing relevance. The next two slides help explain why. Growth can be driven by strengthening a dish or bowl or by stretching into new purposes. Vegetables illustrate the core led growth. Three core demand moments represent 57% of the vegetable occasions, but generate almost 70% of the growth. So the existing heartland is not only large, it is becoming more dynamic. Simple and healthy is particularly important, and lighter meals is also contributing disproportionately to the growth. The side also points to flavor and pleasure as drivers within these occasions. That is a useful reminder that even in a healthy oriented space, consumers do not want to compromise on taste. For vegetable led offers, winning means making the call proposition easier, more appealing, and more enjoyable. Pizza shows the other side of fluidity. Its five core demand moments account for 56% of the occasions, but only 30% of the growth. In other words, the 44% of pizza occasions outside the core are delivering 70% of this dish growth. This is a powerful example of demand expansion. A familiar dish is finding relevance in additional contexts and needs. You can see the growth in share of stomach across all demand moments, particularly important in lazy start and, kick start. So this break fast, start of the day for pizza that is really helping the category. For brands, the implication is to look beyond the classic consumption stereotype and ask where product portion format or messaging could unlock another job for the same food. So having looked at pet stores and pizza, let's see how these patterns apply across other dish categories. On the vertical axis, we have the evolution of each dish over the last two years. The horizontal axis show how much of that growth or decline comes from the three core demand moments. The farther left, the greater the contribution from occasions beyond traditional core. And through this lens, this reveals some interesting patterns. On the top left, we find pizza, plant based alternatives, pasta, rice dishes. These are growing primarily by expanding into new demand spaces. In fact, from all growing dish families, 60% of them are growing thanks to expanding into new demands, meaning most of their growth comes from outside their established core moments. Now look at subs and steels in the bottom left. This is an interesting opposite example. Their core moments are declining, and although they're finding opportunities beyond those moments and expanding, that expansion isn't enough to compensate for the losses. So the takeaway is different. Categories require different growth strategies. That's for sure. Some need to strengthen their core. Others need to be fluid enough to find a new space, a new, occasion, a new demand, and others will need to do both. And that's precisely the value of understanding demand moments behind category performance. And to bring this idea of versatility to life, here are a few examples of how familiar foods are taking on new roles. Versatility can happen through four months as we see with cottage cheese or overnight oats where different preparations open up, new consumption opportunities. It can happen through occasion with foods like pizza or tortilla chips moving beyond their traditional eating moments, And it can also happen through knit with products like chocolate coated frozen fruit or Greek yogurt bringing together health, functionality, and indulgence. But what's particularly interesting is that these three dimensions are not mutually exclusive. Format, occasion, and need are interconnected and inter exchangeable. A new format can unlock a new occasion, which in turn can allow a product to satisfy a completely different consumer need. And this is where the real opportunity for innovation lies is understanding how brands can combine three... These three dimensions to expand their relevance and become part of more demand moments in consumers' lives. Our third and final shift is about pleasure. If consumers are increasingly looking for health and balance and functionality, what happens to intelligence? Is pleasure disappearing or simply changing its meaning? As we move into pleasure, the first thing to recognize is that some of the traditional slots for indulgence are shrinking. Dessert of main meals is down 4%. Afternoon treating and after dinner treating are also under pressure. At the same time, we see strength in earlier, more functional eating occasions. It would be tempting to interpret this as consumers no longer wanting treats, but the reality is that people are becoming more selective about when indulgence is worth it. A consumer may decide to skip the dessert at the end of a meal, but still want a really good chocolate or a small premium ice cream or a satisfying yogurt on another moment. That distinction, fewer automatic treats but not necessarily less desire for pleasure, is gonna be central to what comes next. Filtering our demand movement framework by snacking occasions, this snacking universe illustrate this shift especially clearly. Rather than being defined primarily by tripping, some snack occasions are becoming more functional, a way to recharge, bridge a gap, or meet a specific need. This doesn't mean every snack must become a healthy product. It means the balance between enjoyment and utility is changing, and brands need to be clear about the job they are solving. A product designed for a quick functional pause may need a different proposition from one design for a deliberate intelligent escape. And, yeah, health as a usage driver is also gaining relevance across the broader demand moment landscape, including those spaces we might normally consider indulgent. And this is an important nuance. Consumers do not necessarily make a binary choice between something healthy and something enjoyable. They may expect a treat to fit better with the wider goal or a functional product to taste genuinely good. For innovation, the challenge is to bring those expectations together without diluting the emotional reward of consumption. Now I think this is a particularly interesting example of how the boundaries between health, functionality, and pleasure are becoming less clear. Here we're looking at high protein consumers in Italy, and the figures are indices against the average consumer where 100 is the benchmark. Some of the results are exactly what we would expect. These consumers are two and a half times more likely to practice or three times a week or more, and they're strongly associated with young men fifteen to forty nine. We also see a strong association with balanced diet and with eating during or after or around sport practice. So clearly, performance and nutrition are very important drivers. But look at sofa and chill indexing at 159 or treat and reward occasions at 137. These are moments we would traditionally associate with, relaxation, enjoyment, or indulgence rather than nutritional performance, and yet high protein consumers are also significantly overrepresented there. Protein is no longer confined to sports nutrition or post workout recovery. It's increasingly becoming part of everyday eating, including moments where consumers simply want to relax or treat themselves. Performance and pleasure are no longer competing needs in this case. For some consumers, they're becoming part of the same expectation. And that's what we... Why we say pleasure isn't disappearing. It's reshaped by different consumer expectations. I think the five quotes on this slide hint about, the direction it's taking. The first one is performance. The drink does something for you, perhaps delivering protein or another recognizable benefit. Second is permission. Consumers keep the ritual but remove a perceived compromise. Think of no alcoholic drinks that still feel like a proper appetitive. Third, hybridization. Products borrow from different categories combining the familiarity of one with the benefits or experience of the other. Fourth is the bite size. This is particularly relevant when people want to moderate quantity without abandoning indulgence or a smaller unit that can give consumers more control over how much they're eating. And then we have intensity, stronger flavors, crunch, texture, or other sensory cue that make a modest portion feel genuinely rewarding. For innovation teams, the question becomes, which of these codes can our brand creatively own, and how do we deliver it without losing what people loved about the product in the first place? Let me connect the three shifts we have explored. First, purpose is changing. The total number of meeting occasions may look fairly stable in the top line, but underneath, billions of occasions are moving between different demands. Simple and healthy is growing consistently, while several more traditional or discretionary moments are losing ground. The second choices are on the move. The foods that grow aren't necessarily the ones tied to the fastest growing traditional meal. Slots, often, they are the ones that can serve more than one job. Beds, the most, and pizza illustrate two very different ways of winning, but the broader analysis shows just how important expansion beyond the core has become. And the third point, pleasure is being redefined. Consumers still want enjoyment, but increasingly alongside health and function and convenience and moderation. Taken together, these changes suggest a simple principle. Growth will come less from asking consumers to eat more and more from understanding what makes an occasion worth having. That's the idea behind winning with purpose. What should a brand do with this framework? I will start with these five questions. Which demand moment do we win today? Which of those are growing or declining? Where are consumer needs changing fastest? Can we strengthen our role in our core occasions or creatively stretch into adjacent ones? And finally, what needs to change in our product format communication or activation to win on those occasions? The value of this framework is that it turns broad consumer trends into a focused set of commercial decisions. This is also how we can turn the analysis into a category growth program. We can map the category demand landscape, identify the moments driving or eroding growth, assess the role of brands and competition, and translate those insights into portfolio innovation and activation priorities. The goal is not another segmentation that sits on a shelf. It is an ongoing, a live measurement of occasions that connects consumer behaviors with choices that the business can make. And importantly, it can be applied consistently across markets while keeping the local detail that matters. Thank you very much for joining us. I hope today's findings have given you a fresh perspective of where growth is coming from and how to capture it. We would be delighted to explore what winning with purpose could mean for your own category and brands. Thank you again. I look forward to your questions, and see you soon.