Why millennials matter so much to the natural products industry [NEXT Forecast 2017]
On top of an adventurous culinary streak and an appetite for authenticity, millennials place more trust in the natural channel and nutrition as a first-choice health strategy.
January 9, 2017
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The following is an excerpt from the NEXT Forecast, an insider’s guide to where the natural products market is now—and where it’s headed. Drawing from proprietary data sets, expert interviews, in-market case studies and the Natural Products Expos, the NEXT Forecast is the industry’s leading source of forward-looking insights. Learn about this and many other in-market trends laddering up to dominant macro forces in this report.
There’s no doubt about it: millennials are a different generation than their baby boomer parents. Their need for trust and transparency is readily apparent in many ways, including with their food. Chalk it up to skinny jeans, suspicion of "industrial food" or ongoing political debate about health insurance, millennials are taking more control than previous generations in the most visceral of experiences: nutrition.
An urgency to trust the choices they make in that experience has millennials lining up in the checkout aisle in the natural channel and willing to focus on quality over price—and this is impacting their perceptions of trust.
In a New Hope Network consumer survey focusing on supplement use conducted in early 2016, millennials were remarkably more likely than baby boomers to trust supplements (56 percent to 29 percent). They were also less trusting of conventional health care, with 39 percent declaring such trust, compared to the 62 percent of baby boomers.
NEXT Forecast 2017 opportunity
With authenticity a key appeal and traceability an expectation, tech-immersed millennials not only reflexively reach for their smartphones to research an ingredient right in the aisle, they also hear about it when their friends, virtual or otherwise, find something new or share some misstep on the part of a food or supplement company. But that mix of accessibility and curiosity could easily step into a spectrum of products well beyond nutrition into personal care and other categories.
Get the full NEXT Forecast to see how 14 macro forces will shape the future of the natural products industry.
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