Outlook 2025: Consumer Trends

Food Technology survey respondents singled out plant-based as the trend most likely to lose ground with consumers in 2025.

Asked an open-ended question about what they expected to diminish in importance to consumers in the year ahead, 14% of respondents wrote in plant-based—more than any other answer. In addition, others said they expected meat alternatives or vegan products to be most likely to fade away.

Trends forecaster Suzy Badaracco, president of Culinary Tides, expects sales of plant-based meat alternatives to continue to trend downward. “There are no drivers for consumers to come back to meat-based analogues,” she maintains. “Their issues continue to be the same; consumers don’t like the taste, price, [or the] ingredient deck.”

Arlin Wasserman, founder and managing director of consultancy Changing Tastes, says plant-based products are “already over in the minds of consumers” and notes that sales “never amounted to much before starting to decline.”

Not everyone shares that view. Nearly 7% of survey respondents identified plant-based as a trend they expect to see grow in 2025.

The middle ground on plant-based may well be what Badaracco describes as “plant-forward lifestyles.” A plant-forward diet isn’t vegetarian or vegan but rather includes meat along with whole or minimally processed fruits and vegetables, she says.

What else will lose its luster in consumers’ eyes in 2025? Several survey respondents said they believe the focus on food and beverage nostalgia is over, and Mike Kostyo, vice president at Menu Matters, couldn’t agree more. He hopes to see “less of a relentless focus on nostalgia in 2025.”

He reflects that “it’s been an easy well to keep going back to, but it doesn’t showcase true innovation, and it’s starting to get old all over again. At a certain point, we have to develop new ideas so current generations have something to be nostalgic for in the future.”