Only 14% of Food Brands Grew Purchase Intent in 2024—and Legacy Players Took Most Gains

Morning Consult's annual brand tracking study found that just 14% of food and beverage brands recorded growth in purchasing intent among U.S. consumers in 2024, according to Yahoo Small Business. The overwhelming majority of those gains went to legacy players—established names with decades of distribution scale and margin room to absorb input cost volatility. For the rest of the category, purchasing intent either stagnated or declined as inflation-weary shoppers pulled back on trial and consolidated spend around familiar names.

The mechanism is straightforward: when household budgets tighten, consumers retreat to brands they trust and products they know deliver predictable value. Legacy brands respond by holding price or running selective promotions that smaller entrants cannot match without torching unit economics. A regional snack brand cannot compete with a national player's 15% temporary price reduction when that national player is spreading the cost across millions of cases and using the volume lift to negotiate better co-op terms with retailers. The emerging brand either holds price and watches velocity collapse, or matches the discount and bleeds cash.

This dynamic explains why so few brands saw intent growth. The winners were not necessarily better products—they were brands with the balance sheet and distribution density to play a volume game during a margin compression cycle. They leaned into price-pack architecture: value sizes, multi-buy offers, and retailer-exclusive formats that occupied more linear feet and created the perception of value without permanent list price cuts. Emerging brands, meanwhile, lacked the SKU count and retailer leverage to execute the same playbook. They stayed premium, lost velocity, and watched intent scores drift downward as consumers simply bought less of them.

The steal for a small physical-product brand is to exit the volume game entirely and reframe the value conversation around cost-per-use or cost-per-outcome rather than cost-per-unit. A coffee brand cannot win a price war with Folgers, but it can win on cost-per-cup if the product is denser, the brew ratio is more efficient, or the flavor is concentrated enough that consumers use less per serve. The play is to shift the buyer's mental math from shelf price to effective price—and to make that shift explicit in packaging, in copy, and at point of sale.

Concretely: reformulate or repackage to deliver more servings per container, then call it out on the front label. "48 cups per bag" beats "12 oz" when the competitor's 12 oz delivers 36 cups. Update the product detail page, the sell sheet, and the retail merchandising to show cost-per-use math in plain numbers. If you are a $18 item competing with a $12 legacy product, and your per-use cost is lower, put a comparison table in the listing images and on a shelf talker. Do not assume the buyer will do the math—do it for them. This costs nothing but design time and a single production change. The payoff is that you stop competing on sticker price and start competing on value yield, which is a fight you can win without a balance sheet.

The broader pattern is that contraction cycles punish brands that play the incumbents' game. When intent is scarce and 86% of brands are flat or falling, the path forward is not to discount harder—it is to change the dimension on which the buyer evaluates cost.