Millennial Food + Drink Trends: 25/26
Millennials (born between 1981 and 1995) are lucrative food consumers, spending more on groceries than the average shopper in the US (Capital One Shopping, 2025). With their priorities in flux, we detail three current directives for brands: delivering convenience without compromise for increasingly time-poor consumers, producing cleaner-label foods that assuage their sceptical stance and meeting new functional needs.
Convenience Without Compromise
Sceptics Seeking Safer Foods
New Functional Priorities
Convenience is increasingly prioritised as career and family responsibilities multiply, especially as parental overwhelm surges (see Millennials: Divergent Adulthood Dynamics). Retaining their foodie mindsets, however, millennials still want compelling meals – just easier and faster. See also Low Effort, High Reward in The Future Kitchen 25/26: Consumer Cooking Trends and Millennial Food + Drink Trends: 24/25.
Convenience is increasingly prioritised as career and family responsibilities multiply, especially as parental overwhelm surges (see Millennials: Divergent Adulthood Dynamics). Retaining their foodie mindsets, however, millennials still want compelling meals – just easier and faster. See also Low Effort, High Reward in The Future Kitchen 25/26: Consumer Cooking Trends and Millennial Food + Drink Trends: 24/25.
Summary
Convenience Without Compromise | Convenience is increasingly prioritised as career and family responsibilities multiply, especially as parental overwhelm surges (see Millennials: Divergent Adulthood Dynamics). Retaining their foodie mindsets, however, millennials still want compelling meals – just easier and faster. See also Low Effort, High Reward in The Future Kitchen 25/26: Consumer Cooking Trends and Millennial Food + Drink Trends: 24/25. |
Sceptics Seeking Safer Foods | Millennials’ wariness of Big Food dates back at least a decade and is now driving concerns about ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and ingredients seen as artificial and/or toxic. The rise of early-onset cancers among millennials will likely spur this attitude (the modern western diet is a possible culprit) alongside their worries as parents. |
New Functional Priorities | Millennials are key protein consumers: alongside Gen Zers, they’re the generation ranking protein as the most important ingredient (Innova, 2024). This manifests in a growing affinity for high-protein snacks and shakes, and rising meat purchases. Another functional food opportunity on the rise: products tailored for menopause, as older millennial women start experiencing symptoms. |
Millennial Food + Drink Trends: 25/26
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Offering access to over 350 consumer and cross-industry reports annually, Stylus Membership is your window to tomorrow’s most exciting opportunities.
We already arm more than 500 of the world’s most forward-thinking brands and agencies with the creative insights they need to make transformative business decisions.
We’d love to do the same for you.
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