At a time when a virus is wiping out entire industries and economies, not every day do you hear that the same virus is fueling a $235B opportunity.
Functional foods are modified foods that claim to improve health or well-being by providing benefit beyond that of the traditional nutrients that contain it.
So what? While a few years ago, the concept of functional foods was limited to snack bars that you might encounter at the gym, the industry has grown wider to include baked goods and pretty much the entire category of probiotics. NWO.AI surfaced a 71% growth over the past year in its Impact Score. The Impact Score combines chatter in online discussions, search, and TV mentions into one unified score that represents the mindshare occupied by a topic in culture on any given day.
Digging deeper: The pandemic is undoubtedly getting people concerned about their health and wellness. The stay-at-home orders and the decline in outdoor activity have made many of us conscious of our waistlines and skin health. Consumers are looking to bolster and protect their immunity while also consuming foods that add to gut, skin and cognitive health. A side by side comparison of the 3 microtrends driving functional foods are shown below:
Some brands are already positioning their offerings to include functional food ingredients in order to increase appeal and leverage the exponential growth of this microtrend. Health benefits, in particular are being advertised to drive demand.
However, within specific categories of functional foods, cultural shifts require brands to focus on advertising benefits that are becoming more ingrained in culture rather than allocating marketing budget on ones that are receding. For instance, within the probiotics market, we've seen its association with gut health flatlining. On the other hand, the combination of probiotics and skin health, as a signal has grown exponentially over the past 6 months.
Like probiotics and it's associated health benefits, NWO.AI maps, and tracks thousands of associations between trends and their demand drivers through a cutting edge Natural Language Processing algorithm. Are you ready to get ahead of the game and proactively leverage cultural shifts? Reach out for a demo and we can help you better understand your category and ways to approach it.