The 2027 Food and Beverage Forecast: 10 trends that will reshape what America eats

So as I said before, we're going to take a quick moment and look at where we are situated right now.

I said a second ago, we're looking backwards, but we're actually still in this, right? We're still in 2026.

There's still a whole quarter ahead of us to capture.

So I want to kind of level set for us about what we are seeing play in the market now.

For those of you who read our 2026 forecast last year, these trends will look familiar to you.

You will have seen things like the anti-fake steaks, quiet luxury, all of these kind of cute terminology that we like to use.

But really at the grounding of it, I'll explain what we've seen in the market.

We know that there has been a huge consumer swing towards authenticity, right? And we predicted our forecast last year that consumers would be moving away from processed plant-based versions or approximations of meat and wanting things to either be fully comfortable in their plant-based nature, not trying to approximate anything, just being plant-based or fully animal-based, right? We know that plant-based is in decline.

That's not new information, but excuse me, we forecasted where we think consumer demand will be heading within that context.

So we saw a lot of movement in that category.

We know that Beyond Meat moved away from being Beyond Meat and just to Beyond and actually entered into the protein beverages game.

Michael, I know that you were at Impossible for a bit too.

So this probably is something interesting to see in the category.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think so much is just changing so fast.

And I think for me, we'll see the next evolution.

But I think from portion play to the quiet luxury, things are coming into market.

I think coming into market much faster and we'll get to it with the technology side of brands be able to discover operators, be able to deliver on it.

It's fun.

I'm personally a fan of this sort of snackified seafood.

That's a very fun brand that's going to come in with kind of a heritage story in Europe, but actually kind of putting it in a much more palatable and approachable way here for an emerging customer base in the U.S.

So really interesting to see these things come to life.

Yeah, you'll note even just visually the amount of color that we're seeing.

This is a subtle or not so subtle nod to the role of Gen Z having in a lot of what we're doing here.

You'll note that GLP-1 is actually, of course, a huge factor, and we're going to be talking about that in depth today.