The food and beverage trends to watch in 2024, according to Nestlé USA

According to Mike Van Houten, he has “maybe the coolest job” at Nestlé USA. No, he doesn’t taste-test chocolate chips, but as VP and head of consumer and marketplace insights, he gets to “look after the consumer” during an era in the food and beverage industry that is equally exciting and volatile.

Van Houten told Retail Brew the CPG giant has consumer teams that “live and breathe” specific food, beverage, and frozen food category consumer insights, and others that have a wider purview looking at how societal behavior changes—like demographic fragmentation as the US becomes more diverse—impacts the food and beverage industry. They also, of course, speak face to face with consumers and connect with them on social media to determine long- and short-term trends.

As we jump into the new year, consumer trends within food and beverage are in a flux: Some of those that emerged prior to the pandemic have been accelerated, and some have remained steady, and some have faded away. Van Houten shared a few notable trends Nestlé USA is keeping an eye on this year.

Start of something new: During the pandemic, the CPG industry pumped the brakes on developing new products as companies focused more on the availability of their core products on shelves. Now, with supply-chain issues largely in the rearview mirror, “innovation is back,” Van Houten said, noting Nestlé’s innovation projects have recently jumped 50%. That’s not just new products and flavors, but also products at different price points to cater to more cash-strapped consumers—like Nestle’s Carnation coffee creamer line introduced last fall, offered at a lower price point than its Coffee Mate creamer line.

And speaking of coffee…Van Houten said that consumer coffee behavior adopted during the pandemic—like buying themselves fancy appliances such as an espresso machine or French press and experimenting with making different coffees at home—have continued. Nestlé USA has found that more consumers are making coffee at home now than in 2019, so innovation around customization (particularly for cold coffee) that enables consumers to create at-home concoctions will be big this year, he shared.

Heating up: Another pandemic era holdover set to be big in 2024 is spicy flavors. Spicy food has hit a sweet spot over the past few years with the trend sweeping QSRs and snacks at the grocery store. The momentum will continue even beyond the expected products (like everyone’s favorite Flamin’ Hot Cheetos) as younger, more diverse generations champion spicy foods and spread the word on platforms like TikTok, Van Houten predicted.

“This is a great example of a trend that has incredible macro tailwinds, meaning we think this spicy phenomenon is here to stay because palates are changing in the US,” he said. “We think that this is really just the beginning.”

Stranger than friction: Beyond the products and flavors consumers will be reaching for this year, Van Houten noted that how consumers are shopping for their products will shift, too, as they increasingly seek out “what they want, when they want it, wherever they are,” he said.

“We are spending a lot of time making sure that we are understanding all of those intersections like, ‘Where do people want certain products? What are the barriers and frictions [as to] why maybe they can’t get it today?’” he said. “And we in the whole industry are going to spend a lot of time getting that right.”

That means not only a seamlessness between the in-store and online grocery-buying experience, but also experimentation around meeting customers in some, uh, untraditional spots, like Nestlé’s DiGiorno pizza kiosks it introduced last August. This idea came out of determining those trade-offs consumers have to make when buying groceries and having an “innovative mindset” to find a creative solution.

“We’re just at the beginning of this move to eliminate friction and help consumers buy wherever they want to buy,” Van Houten said.