With many individuals tightening their wallets as of late, new analysis reveals the flexibility to pay for wholesome, sustainable meals is a much bigger barrier than whether or not shoppers assume it’s value it — a discovering that shifts duty away from shopper attitudes and towards the meals system itself.
Client analysis from Trellis knowledge associate GlobeScan, in partnership with EAT, highlights a transparent hole between aspiration and on a regular basis actuality in terms of meals decisions. Whereas curiosity in more healthy and extra sustainable diets stays excessive globally, affordability emerges as essentially the most generally cited barrier stopping shoppers from buying wholesome and sustainable meals.
Past price, entry and lack of understanding additionally form shopper habits. Many respondents level to the restricted availability of more healthy and extra sustainable choices, together with an absence of familiarity with manufacturers and uncertainty about what qualifies as wholesome and sustainable meals. Collectively, these boundaries recommend that challenges lie primarily within the meals surroundings reasonably than in shopper attitudes.
Solely a really small minority say an absence of perceived worth is a cause for not consuming a extra wholesome and environmentally acutely aware food plan. This reinforces one of many central insights from the analysis: Progress relies upon much less on altering minds and extra on eradicating sensible boundaries that restrict shoppers’ capability to behave on current intentions.
What this implies
The findings level to a shift from persuasion to enablement and to a transparent alternative to unlock market worth whereas supporting higher well being outcomes and extra sustainable meals methods. Shoppers aren’t rejecting more healthy and extra sustainable diets; they’re as a substitute going through sensible constraints that restrict uptake. Bettering affordability, increasing availability and clarifying what qualifies as wholesome and sustainable might help convert current demand into sustained market progress.
Based mostly on a survey of practically 32,000 individuals throughout 33 markets performed July — August 2025.