Market insight: Survival tips

Creed Foodservice has announced its trends for the coming year. The wholesaler’s expert team, led by insights manager Anna Clapson, has streamlined its 2025 predictions around one core macro trend, with six more dovetailing from it. 

The main trend, Adapt to Survive, is reflective of the current climate. Although consumer confidence is increasing and growth within the eating out market is set to accelerate at around 2.4% from 2024 to 2027, uncertainty remains and operators are branching out from their norm and adapting to survive.

The six trends are Consistent Quality: Nearly three quarters (73%) of consumers are quality-led and a further 86% think quality has a price, with consumers being increasingly happy to pay more for higher quality. Although key for all consumers, Creed sees this trend as being a high priority among baby boomers, gen X and millennials in particular.

Personalised Experience: With consumers still watchful of expenditure, when they do eat out, they want to experience dishes that are exactly how they like them. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of consumers are experience-led and this is a high priority for the younger generations, driven largely by them seeking experiences that they see on social media.

Reshaping Value: With the extended period of economic volatility, consumers are looking at things differently and reshaping their own version of ‘value’. While lower ticket items will always appeal, there is also more emphasis being placed on perceived value for money, something that is a priority across all generations.

Future Planet: This is an ongoing trend that is not going away. Some 63% of consumers are very sustainability conscious, and nearly half of grocery and foodservice professionals are prioritising sustainability initiatives in their businesses.

Choose Health: A key consideration for operators will be bringing solutions that deliver not only on taste and value but also nutrition, with 42% of consumers being very health conscious. This is being played out across all sectors and is considered a priority among all generations.

Harnessing Digital: Over a third (37%)of businesses are prioritising digitalisation in the next 12 months. With artificial intelligence systems and robotic equipment on the rise, digital is a key trend next year.

'An interesting period'
Clapson said: “It’s an interesting period, as we’re seeing glimmers of hope as consumer confidence slowly starts to return, but equally operators are still facing economic and operational challenges. That’s why we have anchored around the core macro trend of Adapt to Survive, as everything stems from this.

“We’ve also taken a slightly different approach with linking back to the generations. We’re aware those working within the care sector are catering for a very different audience to those in schools. Equally, pubs and restaurants are also facing their own unique challenges, and so we wanted to help operators understand how important the different trends are to their own consumers.

“We’ve spent weeks researching and working on these trends. Every year, we always challenge ourselves to find ways to make our trends as interesting and useful to operators as possible, as we understand how important it is that these can actually be utilised in their everyday settings and help them to prepare.”

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