Report Store

Future of Snacking 2024: Balancing Intent with Indulgence

“Future of Snacking 2024: Balancing Intent with Indulgence” examines the ever-shapeshifting snacking occasion. Built around our proprietary Modern Snacking Framework, this report helps marketers understand both the needs and benefits consumers seek when snacking.

You’ll gain a deeper understanding of where and why consumers make tradeoffs in their snack choices, which considerations are most important, and how sourcing and discovery have evolved. Ultimately, this report lays the foundation for identifying opportunities in product development and positioning that will spur growth.

Beyond Organic 2024

Despite being the most widely known and trusted certification, consumer expectations are reaching beyond the bounds of USDA organic. The modern consumer is looking for more stringent guarantees of environmental standards, animal welfare and more. So where does organic still add meaningful value? Which production methods align with consumer expectations? And how do those expectations vary across categories? 

Beyond Organic 2024 will build on Hartman Group’s longstanding body of research, providing actionable guidance for businesses seeking to optimize farm- and production-level attributes at the category level. Join us as we explore the forefront of contemporary food quality. 

Eating & Drinking Occasions Landscape 2023: Settling Into a New Era

American eating patterns have stabilized in many ways from their complete upheaval surrounding the pandemic, and we’re officially living in the “new normal.”

This report looks back at the past five years to identify key shifts — and subsequent stabilizations — in adult eating and drinking behaviors. By leveraging Hartman Group’s proprietary Compass Eating & Drinking Occasions Database, this report analyzes dayparts, location, sourcing methods, social contexts, need states, and categories consumed to spotlight otherwise hidden patterns and opportunities for food and beverage businesses.

Ideas in Food 2024

What will the future hold? None of us have a crystal ball, but every year marketers and researchers try to answer this question.

Ideas in Food isn’t just another laundry list of trends. Yes, it does detail over a dozen concepts we see developing into trends over the next 3-5 years. But the real value you’ll walk away with is the cultural context and implications behind those concepts. By providing a strategic and future-oriented POV, this report gives you the right insights to confidently understand why you should pay attention to specific trends, which ones may not serve your business, and where you can make the greatest impact.

Taste of Tomorrow: Navigating Food through the Eyes of Gen Z and Alpha

Wondering which eating approaches resonate most with Gen Z? Or how their shopping preferences indicate future purchasing behaviors? What about technology’s role in all of this?

Taste of Tomorrow: Navigating Food Through the Eyes of Gen Z and Gen Alpha 2023 deciphers the influences that mold these consumers’ worldviews and food lives. We provide deep insights and actionable implications into Gen Z with a perspective on Gen Alpha to help companies across the food and beverage landscape cater to their future evolving needs and preferences.

Beverage Category Snapshots

Are you puzzled by shifting trends in your category’s consumption, occasions, and target consumer? Are internal stakeholders driving you crazy with questions about which sweeteners consumers want in your beverages? That confusion stops here.     

Backed by Hartman’s exhaustive research on 2023 beverage culture and data from our proprietary eating/drinking occasions database, a Beverage Category Snapshot report will help you meet the needs of today’s consumer with speed and efficiency. Consider it your toolkit for dialing in the right attributes and occasions within your beverage category.  

Sustainability 2023: Making Things Personal

Is your company concerned with greenwashing accusations? Wondering what will help increase consumer buy-in on your sustainability efforts? Curious how issues like climate change, social justice, worker welfare, packaging, upcycling, and third-party certifications are playing out at shelf?

Sustainability 2023: Making Things Personal builds on The Hartman Group’s decades-long sustainability research efforts to offer food and beverage companies essential insights and recommendations for building a sustainability strategy that’s truly sustainable. The report examines consumers’ sustainability-related priorities today, what issues are emerging, and how to speak to consumers as the definition of sustainability evolves.

Reliance on Restaurants: An American Eating Occasions Perspective

Consumers utilize foodservice for a variety of reasons, ranging from convenience and flavor to socializing and discovering food traditions from around the globe. Today, about one-quarter of all U.S. adult eating occasions involve restaurant-sourced food and beverage.  

Utilizing the Hartman Group’s proprietary Compass Eating Occasions Database, this report takes an in-depth look into restaurant occasions through a need state framework that contextualizes and illuminates how Americans use restaurants to obtain food. The report explores restaurant sourcing differences across demographics, social context and daypart, and also includes a 12-page spotlight on dine-in vs. takeout. 

10 key takeaways will help inform strategy for industry experts, like restaurant operators and suppliers, as well as manufacturers and retailers who compete with the foodservice industry. 

Modern Beverage Culture 2023

The Hartman Group’s Modern Beverage Culture 2023 study explores how consumers engage with today’s rich beverage landscape, including cultural context, attitudes, behaviors and aspirations around beverage consumption. The Modern Beverage Need State model highlights six key need states driving beverage choices, with a focus on how 12 beverage categories perform within these needs. The study provides actionable guidance on how consumers navigate the increasingly complex beverage landscape and how companies can best engage consumers in this fast-innovating space.

Health & Wellness 2023: Pets & Health

A supplement to Health & Wellness 2023: The Great Wellness Reset*, Pets and Health explores both the impact pets have on their owners’ overall health and wellness, as well as owner perspectives on supporting the health and wellness of their pets.

Grounded in primary quantitative and qualitative research, the report offers a comprehensive consumer-centered perspective on health and wellness for pets today.  

Health & Wellness 2023: The Great Wellness Reset

Health and Wellness 2023, The Great Wellness Reset includes the latest findings from The Hartman Group’s long running consumer-centric study of the U.S. wellness marketplace.  The study explores long-term and more immediate trends that are shaping how consumers are approaching and personalizing health and wellness. This Great Wellness Reset highlights areas of opportunity to help consumers along their wellness journey.

Grounded in primary quantitative and qualitative research, the report offers a comprehensive consumer-centered perspective on health and wellness today including consumer priorities and approaches to support their mental, physical and social wellness.

A New Landscape of Eating: 2022 Eating Occasions Report

The landscape of eating has fundamentally changed. And while we cannot predict the future, every indication thus far is that we, as a society, are not returning to how things were before the pandemic.

Leveraging The Hartman Group’s proprietary Eating Occasions Compass Database, this report highlights U.S. adult eating behaviors in 2022, how aspects have shifted from previous years, and how eating occasions differ among generational cohorts and across the day. The report is derived from analysis of Hartman’s Eating Occasions Compass database which analyzes dayparts, location, social composition, need states, food and beverage categories consumed and broadly when and where items were acquired.

In addition to the above referenced data points and insights on eating behavior in 2022, the A New Landscape of Eating: 2022 Eating Occasions Report (available in PowerPoint and PDF formats) includes a spotlight on price sensitive occasions, an overview of the Hartman Eating Occasions Compass Database, and 8 dashboards (3 slides each) for the 8 eating occasions dayparts (Early-Morning Snack, Breakfast, Morning Snack, Lunch, Afternoon Snack, Dinner, After-Dinner Snack, and Late-Night Meal/Snack).

The report concludes with the top 10 takeaways and implications for food and beverage companies, including CPG brands, retailers and food service establishments.

Food & Technology 2023

Food & Technology 2023 explores the consumer perspective on FoodTech — scientific and technological innovation in and around food. The way we "do food" — grow it, manufacture it, plan it, source it, prepare it — has taken giant leaps forward in high-tech directions in recent years, and the pace of FoodTech innovation is only accelerating.

Although technology has a long history in food production, the past few decades have seen an accelerated pace of innovation and the rise of a set of industry verticals that put technology at the center of their propositions. From vertical agriculture, precision fermentation, and cultivated protein to smart kitchen appliances and phone apps, the report examines consumer awareness and acceptance of various FoodTech advancements and the tensions consumers see between nature and science/technology, as well as purity and processing.

Grounded in primary quantitative and qualitative research, Food & Technology 2023 combines both new and trended quantitative research with in-depth ethnographic consumer immersions. The report builds on and updates 2019 Hartman research to explore evolving consumer awareness, attitudes, usage, and drivers around a range of food-tech innovations.

Food Sourcing in America 2022

Food Sourcing in America 2022 explores in-depth how cultural drivers are constantly shifting in modern society, informing and shaping food lives, including how we shop and procure foods and beverage. ​These cultural drivers include: who we are, where we live, what we do, how we connect, what we value.

The Hartman Group’s Food Sourcing in America research series has tracked food shopping (and, more broadly, food sourcing) trends over the past two decades. The last report in the series (completed in 2020) grappled with consumers’ adaptations to the rising COVID-19 pandemic and serves as a snapshot of shopping behavior in Summer 2020.

This newest report examines the pandemic’s residual impact, post-pandemic adjustments, and emerging considerations due to inflation, supply chain disruptions, and global events. As many events impact consumer behavior, shoppers now traverse a hybrid world of in-store and online grocery shopping, seek inspiration from an ever-growing range of sources, consider a plethora of direct-to-consumer and subscription models, and dip in and out of a changing foodservice landscape.

Grounded in primary quantitative and qualitative research, the report offers a comprehensive consumer-centered perspective on key topics, motivations, tensions and drivers associated with food shopping and food procurement, both today and in the future.

Modern Approaches to Eating

Modern Approaches to Eating explores in-depth the spectrum of eating approaches that consumers pursue today, along with the attitudes, needs and goals that motivate them and the considerations and challenges they encounter along the way.

The motivations that drive consumer eating approaches are as varied as the approaches themselves, ranging from desires to manage one’s own body—overall health, weight, specific health conditions or allergies, and physical performance—to external influences— lifestyle, budget, or doing the right thing for the environment, animals and food producers.

Grounded in primary quantitative and qualitative research, the report offers a comprehensive consumer-centered perspective on key topics, motivations, tensions and drivers associated with eating approaches, popular diets, nutrition and weight management, both today and in the future.

Organic 2022 Then, Now, Next

Organic 2022: Then, Now, Next – a continuation of The Hartman Group’s long-running syndicated research on the organic market – explores the transformation of organic from a niche category based on a social movement to a mainstream marker of quality across categories. Through informed commentary on trended data and qualitative consumer perspectives, the report explores how organic has transitioned into the mainstream through USDA organic certification, and the challenges it currently faces, including more forward-leaning approaches to personal, community, and environmental health. What’s next for organic may be two-fold: mainstream consumers crave greater accessibility to organic while leading consumers and producers look to additional certifications and health attributes to extend the original promise of organic beyond current USDA standards.

The report will help you to understand the factors, concerns, and long-term developments that influence consumer attitudes and buying behaviors around organic and natural food and beverage products so you can more effectively engage with your target and meet their expectations.

Eating Occasions Dashboards 2021

Answering the question: How has the pandemic influenced changes in how we eat?

This special report explores the context, needs and behaviors associated with eating and drinking occasions. Utilizing The Hartman Group’s proprietary Eating Occasions Compass database, Eating Occasions Dashboards 2021 report explores American trends in eating and drinking occasions in 2021 compared to data from both 2020 and 2019, and also presents dashboard analysis of 8 eating occasions by daypart. It was researched and prepared by Hartman’s Retainer Services team and provides our analysts’ perspectives to help marketers connect to the cultural changes occurring in the U.S.

The report is derived from analysis of Hartman’s Eating Occasions Compass database which analyzes food and beverage and meal dayparts, location, social composition, and need states, as well as items consumed and broadly when and where items were acquired.

In addition to data points and insights, the Eating Occasions Dashboards 2021 report (available in PowerPoint and PDF formats) includes an overview of the Hartman Eating Occasions Compass and 8 dashboards (3 slides each) for the 8 eating occasions dayparts (Early-Morning Snack, Breakfast, Morning Snack, Lunch, Afternoon Snack, Dinner, After-Dinner Snack, and Late-Night Meal/Snack).

At the Dining Table 2021: American Meals and Cooking

Meals in American households are woven into the cultural fabric of everyday life: They serve as a unifying experience shared by most, if not all, consumers. Societal shifts have resulted in major changes in how Americans prioritize not only their time for meals but also what they value in their food. The continuing COVID-19 pandemic has altered and accelerated these shifts.

At the Dining Table 2021: American Meals and Cooking takes stock of where two years of a national pandemic have left U.S. consumers amidst influences from ongoing changes in demographics, employment situations, food accessibility, and food values all of which have shaped how consumers approach meals and what they seek from mealtimes.

Sustainability 2021: Environment and Society in Focus

Sustainability 2021: Environment and Society in Focus, part of The Hartman Group’s foundational Sustainability syndicated study series, updates long-standing data sets and provides new insights on what sustainability means to consumers today, how they incorporate it into their everyday lives and prioritize it in their purchasing, how they think about specific sustainability topics (e.g., plastics and packaging, agricultural methods or social justice), and who should address these important societal challenges and how to address them. 

Health & Wellness Across the Globe

The Hartman Group is recognized as the authoritative source for understanding the catalysts driving consumer demand fueling the global health & wellness market growth. Our health & wellness syndicated research series is the longest-running consumer-centric study of the U.S. marketplace. With the Health & Wellness Across the Globe report we extend our expertise in this space to provide in-depth analysis and thought-provoking insight backed by a range of data on some of the most important health issues of today for the United States, Brazil, China, Germany, India and Mexico.

Brand Ambition: Food and Beverage Private Brands & Beyond

Brands have always provided a shortcut for consumers to gauge quality, value, and a number of specific product attributes.  In 2010, we reported on the emergence of retailers’ own brands as a quality product that can compete with familiar, national name brand products on an equal basis. The emergence of private brands has changed the dynamics of how consumer products are marketed and sold. Today, the rules and strategies for competition among brands are being rewritten. The Hartman Group’s Brand Ambition: Private Brands and Beyond syndicated study will examine what the role of a brand is in today’s consumer-driven marketplace. The study will address questions such as:

The goal of this study is to provide an accurate portrayal of “brand” and the changing landscape of the private brand market and the associated strategic business implications for both retailers and manufacturers of name brand and private brand products. The report package includes general report (PowerPoint and PDF), including executive summary, in-depth analysis and implications, and demographic data tables (Excel).

Health & Wellness: Reimagining Well-being Amid COVID-19

The Hartman Group has tracked consumer attitudes, behaviors, aspirations, and challenges around health and wellness for over two decades. Health & Wellness 2021: Reimagining Well-being Amid COVID-19 updates Hartman’s perspective on the American health and wellness landscape in the wake of the pandemic and delivers insights into how consumers envision and enact health and wellness in our new normal. The report examines consumers’ current health and wellness goals and priorities, the approaches they use to address them, and the ways they learn about and source health and wellness solutions.  

The Hartman Group’s Health + Wellness series of syndicated studies is the longest-running consumer-centric study of the U.S. wellness marketplace. A key pillar of The Hartman Group’s syndicated study program, it offers our clients a regular insight into this important aspect of American food culture. For decades, the concept of health and wellness has been expanding to incorporate not just physical health but also a holistic well-being of the body and mind as shaped by what we choose to consume as well as the society and environment in which we exist.

Eating Occasions Dashboards 2020

Answering the Question: How Do Americans Eat? 

The Hartman Group’s Eating Occasions Compass tracks the eating and drinking behaviors of thousands of America’s consumers going beyond demographic and standard food diary questions to paint a more complete picture of food and beverage occasions across the entirety of eating. In today's America, the same person eats differently at different times and in varied contexts. People therefore can’t reliably describe in general how often they eat and why. However, they can describe whether, how and why they’ve recently eaten, and with careful prompting they can recall what they have chosen to consume on a given occasion. 

The Hartman Group’s proprietary Eating Occasions Compass is a dynamic database and analytics tool that tracks consumers’ current and shifting eating and drinking behaviors. It provides precise data, information, and penetrating insights as a foundational platform from which you can identify opportunity spaces and fine-tune strategic planning and direction.

In addition to data points and insights, the Eating Occasions Dashboard 2020 report (available in PowerPoint and PDF formats) includes an overview of the Hartman Eating Occasions Compass, the 8 eating occasions by daypart, and three dashboards for each of the 8 eating occasions dayparts (Early-Morning Snack, Breakfast, Morning Snack, Lunch, Afternoon Snack, Dinner, After-Dinner Snack, and Late-Night Meal/Snack).

Snacking 2020: Emerging, Evolving and Disrupted

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly altered the current nature of snacking in America. The pandemic has altered consumers’ schedules, increased their time at home, changed work environments, reduced social interactions, isolated household units, introduced fears around food procurement, and shifted emotional states in the direction of both boredom and heightened anxiety. With these changes, snacking needs and routines have also evolved.  

The Hartman Group’s Snacking 2020: Emerging, Evolving and Disrupted report covers topics such as: 

• Consumer attitudes towards snacking
• Drivers for snacking occasions
• Evolution of snacking habits and frequency
• Planning and sourcing for snacking occasions
• Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on snacking habits and drivers 

Report package includes general report (PowerPoint and PDF), including executive summary, in-depth analysis and implications, and demographic data tables (Excel). 

Food Sourcing in America July/August 2020

From one-stop shopping to multichannel shopping to online markets and click-and-collect, The Hartman Group continues to track consumers’ evolving perceptions, needs, habits, and relationships with food retailers. Now, during this time of crisis and uncertainty, it is even more important to understand new consumer behaviors regarding food sourcing and what they might look like in the future.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced unprecedented disruptions to how consumers procure food, including disturbances to the supply chain, changes to how they plan their shopping trips and physically move through the store, and a meteoric rise of online shopping paired with a sudden interruption to restaurant dining. The Hartman Group’s Food Sourcing in America, July/August 2020 takes an in-depth look at these changes to help food industry professionals understand the current landscape of food procurement and make viable predictions about the future.  

Functional Food & Beverage and Supplements 2020

Understand the health issues and concerns driving consumers' purchase and usage behaviors. Know the implications to more effectively engage with consumers and better navigate a new array of business challenges. Functional Food & Beverage has its roots in both the long-running Hartman Group tracking studies on Health + Wellness (most recent wave published in 2021) and the 2018 seminal Modern Beverage Culture study. This research was conceived to extend understanding of the important elements of the functional solutions space included in prior studies. 

The fielding of this study coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Realizing that the resulting anxiety along with stay-at-home orders would have profound effects on the results, a special chapter was devoted to the disruptive impacts on household routines and the pandemic’s role as a catalyst for engagement with Health + Wellness, most notably in terms of the use of supplements and functional foods/beverages. 

Organic and Beyond 2020

Organic remains one of the most prominent and significant markers of quality in foods and beverages in the U.S. today. In recent years, we have witnessed the advance of organic products into new categories even as organic foods and beverages become more affordable to the mainstream American consumer. 

Organic and Beyond 2020 provides a critical update to The Hartman Group’s long-running syndicated research series on the organic market and natural foods movement, delivering trended data and informed perspectives on consumer attitudes and behaviors surrounding the current organic landscape with an eye to future-oriented developments. 
 

Exploring the Diversity of American Foodways

As the “American consumer” evolves to represent an ever more ethnically diverse and globally connected population, American food culture and trends both reflect and are driven by this diversity.  

As the U.S. grows ever more diverse, it has never been more important to understand how changing demographics affect our food culture and marketplace. Using immigration, racial, and ethnic diversity as a lens to explore how Americans eat today, Exploring the Diversity of American Foodways illuminates what we have in common and what is distinctive in our attitudes and approaches to food, eating, cuisine, health and wellness, sustainability, and food sourcing.  

Sustainability 2019: Beyond Business as Usual

Sustainability 2019: Beyond Business as Usual illuminates how the sustainability mindset and marketplace have changed over the years from the consumer perspective. New consumer energy and movement around the climate, the environment, plastics, and economic issues are helping to re-shape sustainability as a cultural value and purchasing consideration.

In Sustainability 2019, we explore these shifting attitudes and behaviors. We also update long-standing data sets to show change over time, with a deep dive into packaging and a broad overview of sustainability in CPG, restaurants, and food retail, including e-commerce, making Sustainability 2019 essential reading for anyone with a stake in the food and beverage industry.

Cannabis for Health & Wellness — Special Report

Cannabis is poised to be a major disruptive force across a variety of markets, but none more so than food, beverage, and health and wellness. This special report is to help you understand this potential and what it might hold for the future.  

Cannabis for Health + Wellness 2019 looks at the nascent but fast-growing wellness-oriented cannabis landscape. As more states legalize cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes, the demand for CBD and THC products is poised to be a major disruptor in the wellness market.  

Food & Technology 2019: From Plant-Based to Lab-Grown

Food & Technology 2019: From Plant-based to Lab-grown explores the tensions at the cutting edge of food technology from the consumer point of view. As more consumers than ever question the health, ethical, and environmental implications of animal products, innovative plant-based meat, and dairy alternatives are taking the packaged food world by storm. 

Along with up-and-coming technologies like lab-grown meat and cellular dairy, this growing sector is having a moment in the limelight. However, the glare of the spotlight often hides the fact that many of these products and technologies ask consumers to confront a significant cultural tension between their desire to retain some of the experience of eating meat and dairy and their desire to eat foods that are as close to their natural form as possible. 

Health + Wellness 2019

Health + Wellness 2019: From Moderation to Mindfulness 

The Hartman Group’s series of Health + Wellness syndicated studies is the longest-running consumer-centric study of the U.S. wellness marketplace and provides current, in-depth insight into underlying motivations and behaviors for how and why consumers live, shop and use brands, products and services in the health and wellness space.  

Health + Wellness 2019: From Moderation to Mindfulness explores what’s new, what’s mainstream and what’s around the bend in the world of health and wellness. Many measures are trended over time and show significant change over the past 3-5 years, including foods and ingredients consumers are seeking or avoiding, supplement usage, conditions managed, and even what health and wellness itself means.

Modern Beverage Culture 2018

Celebratory, functional, nourishing, quenching. Is there anything more intertwined in America’s contemporary food culture and lifestyles than the role of beverages? Not only do they provide basic sustenance, they serve as an expression of our tastes and values. Beverage-consumption rituals can bring people together or provide solace in quiet, solitary eating occasions. Beverage culture is evolving and dynamic. What does today’s beverage landscape look like? 

Beverages are dramatic disruptors in today’s food and beverage marketplace. New categories, brands, and formats have captured the attention of consumers of all ages and lifestyles and are breathing new life into both retail and food service sectors. Beverages have acquired vast amounts of real estate — on shelves and in key demand spaces — as producers and purveyors expand their offerings to meet consumers’ evolving needs and desires. 

GEN Z 2018: Today’s Teens — Tomorrow’s Adults

Gen Z are diverse, connected, aware, and socially and politically engaged. With its oldest members just entering their 20s, this generation is poised to be a disruptive force culturally and as a market. The Hartman Group’s Gen Z 2018 report explores this generation’s values, attitudes, and approaches when it comes to food and beverages, eating and cooking, health and wellness, sources of information and inspiration, food retail, and restaurants. Gen Z 2018 focuses on Gen Z teens aged 12-20, with relevant comparisons to older generations – Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers.

As always, we use our signature combination of rich qualitative and robust quantitative methodologies to understand these emerging consumers and illuminate the opportunities and challenges they pose to the food and beverage industry.

The Business of Thrift 2018: Understanding Today’s Value-Oriented and Low-Income Consumers

As the U.S. economy continues to shift, understanding and meeting the needs of these various types of value-seeking consumers in the U.S. has never been more critical. How should food and beverage brands position themselves to succeed with these growing segments of the U.S. population? 

The Business of Thrift report provides a look at the socioeconomic forces at play in the U.S. and offers a comprehensive exploration of how value-oriented and lower-income households navigate their food and beverage consumption. 

Organic & Natural 2018

Since 1996, The Hartman Group has documented the evolving organic and natural marketplace through the food culture lens. This report, Organic & Natural 2018, extends previous work on consumer aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors related to organic and natural food and the transformation occurring in today’s marketplace. 

In 2018, we are witnessing an intensification in consumer investment in organic and natural foods, the result of a momentum in both consumer and industry engagement.  

Transformation of the American Meal 2017

Long-term shifts in American culture have reshaped the way we live and eat today. What does this mean for your business?

People are snacking throughout the day, eating alone in greater numbers, and exploring alternatives to food prep by shopping grocerants and ordering meal kits. And that’s just for starters. Shopping for food, dining out, and planning what to eat have all changed dramatically in the past few decades as American food culture has shifted to prioritize, on the one hand, greater customization to personal tastes and needs — especially through healthier, fresher, less processed food — and on the other hand, our continuing and undiminished desire for convenience, variety, and good value.

Sustainability 2017

Sustainability 2017 tracks and investigates how consumers understand, prioritize and connect four zones (personal, social, environmental, and economical), exploring differences between consumer demand for and actual purchasing of sustainable products, and attitudes toward corporate transparency issues. The report updates understandings of their evolving attitudes, behaviors and aspirations regarding sustainability, including category adoption and the ways in which sustainability and transparency concepts manifest in consumer discourse. 

Food Shopping in America 2017

As leaders in the study of American food culture, The Hartman Group has been tracking how Americans shop for food since the 1990s. From one-stop shopping to multichannel shopping to online markets and click-and-collect, we continue to track consumers’ evolving perceptions, needs, habits and relationships with food retailers. 

The Food Shopping in America 2017 report applies The Hartman Group’s innovative approach to answer the question: with more options than ever before, including an expanding array of online food retailers, how do consumers shop for food today? With competition for consumers’ food dollars and eating occasions so fierce, what can food and beverage retailers do to attract and retain shoppers? 

Health + Wellness 2017

The Future of Snacking 2016

Organic & Natural 2016

It is no longer sufficient to assume that analogues of conventional food and beverage packaged products will sell simply because they are organic. The growth of the natural market and increased access to private label organic products have provided alternatives for consumers while posing a challenge for branded organic manufacturers. The advent of these products has the potential to dilute the relevancy and value of organic food and beverages in the minds of consumers.    

Since 1996, The Hartman Group has been at the leading edge of documenting the evolving organic and natural marketplace through the lens of food culture. Organic and Natural 2016 updates the attitudes, behaviors and understanding that motivate (or inhibit) current (and future) consumer interest in and purchase of organic and natural products. 

Dining Out 2016: A Comparative Look at Four Key Restaurant Channels

Foodways of the Younger Generations – Millennials & Gen Z

Culture of Food 2015: New Appetites, New Routines

Weight Management & Healthy Living 2015

Health & Wellness 2015

SUSTAINABILITY 2015: TRANSPARENCY

Diners' Changing Behaviors

Through the Diners Changing Behaviors: Sustainability, Wellness & Where to Eat, The Hartman Group and Changing Tastes provide insights into the intersection of sustainability, health, nutrition and eating-out behaviors and how restaurant and food service operators can capitalize on such trends to maximize and accelerate revenue growth, profitability and customer loyalty. There is a profound transformation taking place in food shopping and shopper behavior. Consumers are faced with more choices than ever before when it comes to buying groceries: foods and beverages can be found virtually everywhere. And, shopping behavior is evolving: Historically, from our research, we know that most shopping decisions are made before consumers step foot inside a store.

There is a profound transformation taking place in food shopping and shopper behavior. Consumers are faced with more choices than ever before when it comes to buying groceries: foods and beverages can be found virtually everywhere. And, shopping behavior is evolving: Historically, from our research, we know that most shopping decisions are made before consumers step foot inside a store.

The report also provides data and insights about format selection, taste and nutrition preferences, and changes in attitudes surrounding celebratory dining versus dining as a part of everyday eating.

Food Shopping in America 2014

Organic & Natural 2014

Digital Food Life 2014

Outlook on the Millennial Consumer 2014

Millennials are leaving indelible footprints on the marketplace. They have been the darlings and devils of marketers. How to influence these masters of customization and self-expression remains a mystery to many. With more Millennials entering the workplace, getting married and becoming parents, how will their evolving interests and cravings impact and reshape your business? What do you need to know to connect with Millennials? 

The Hartman Group's Outlook on the Millennial Consumer 2014 report helps crack the Millennials path-to-purchase code.

Millennials are not the fragile, spoiled and overprotected generation that they have been portrayed to be. These consumers are maturing, and many of their values can be traced to life stage more so than generational differences. Millennials are at a stage in their lives where they are proactively crafting their futures and making distinct choices about how they want to live their lives.

This report will help make sense of their attitudes, habits and choices and provide meaningful ways to effectively connect and communicate with America's next greatest generation of adults.