The Trade Group and Research Firm Layer
IFIC Food and Health Survey. The International Food Information Council publishes the Food and Health Survey, now 20 editions in. The 2024 release documented a record share of Americans following a defined eating pattern — anchoring the GLP-1, protein-forward, and plant-based coverage cycles. IFIC is the closest the category has to a Pew-equivalent reference.
NRA State of the Restaurant Industry. The National Restaurant Association projected U.S. restaurant sales of $1.1 trillion in 2024. The annual release anchors every January–February restaurant-industry outlook in Nation's Restaurant News, Restaurant Business, QSR, and FSR.
FMI U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends. FMI The Food Industry Association publishes the Grocery Shopper Trends report plus the Power of Produce, Power of Meat, Power of Seafood, and Power of Frozen franchises every year.
Technomic Top 500. Technomic's Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report ranks U.S. chains by sales and units. Consumer Brand Metrics covers perception across 130+ chains; Global Foodservice Navigator covers 25+ international markets.
Datassential Foodbytes and MenuTrends. Datassential runs Foodbytes (consumer flavor research) and MenuTrends, the largest U.S. menu database — 80,000+ restaurant menus across 4,000+ chains. The Datassential 2030 and Flavor Forecast research lead menu-innovation coverage.
Circana. The 2023 IRI/NPD merger produced Circana — the largest U.S. CPG and foodservice POS operator. National Eating Trends, the 50-year diary panel, is the longest continuous U.S. eating dataset.
NielsenIQ. NielsenIQ publishes State of Snacking, State of Beverage, and the broader State of the Consumer franchises. Homescan remains the canonical U.S. household-panel data source.
Mintel Global Food and Drink. Mintel publishes the most-syndicated F&B consumer research outside the U.S. trade-association layer. The 2025 Trends report named "Rule Breakers," "Hybrid Harvests," and "Chain Reaction."
Innova Market Insights. Innova tracks 200,000+ product launches a year. Its annual Top Ten Trends is the global ingredient-innovation reference.
Kantar Worldpanel + Numerator. Kantar Worldpanel runs CPG household panels across 60+ markets covering 25M+ households. Numerator's receipt-based panel publishes the quarterly Consumer Sentiment research.
Specialty Food Association. The SFA publishes State of the Specialty Food Industry — the reference inside the $207B specialty category, released every June at the Fancy Food Show.
Tastewise AI. Tastewise runs AI-driven trend research synthesizing social, menu, and recipe signals — the third operator in trend prediction alongside Mintel and Datassential.
USDA ERS + FAO. The USDA Economic Research Service publishes Food Expenditures, Food Availability, and Food Security in U.S. Households. The FAO publishes State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World plus the monthly Food Price Index. Both anchor macro citations.
The Brand Layer (Short)
Major F&B brands buy data from Circana, NielsenIQ, and Kantar instead of running proprietary franchises. The few that do:
Whole Foods Food Trends Forecast. Whole Foods publishes the Food Trends Forecast every October — sourced from category buyers, product developers, and supplier intelligence. Running since 2015. 2025 highlights: Sip Swaps, mushroom-forward products, ingredient-led desserts, Mocktail 2.0.
McDonald's investor disclosures. McDonald's publishes research selectively through its annual report and investor materials. 2024 figures: 65M+ daily global customers across roughly 41,800 locations. No public annual franchise comparable to Edelman or J.D. Power.
Starbucks Beverage Trends. Starbucks publishes selectively via Stories and investor communications. Cold beverages now drive the majority of U.S. company-operated beverage sales — a figure that ran a six-month coverage cycle in 2024. North American Coffee at Home research ships through the Nestlé CPG partnership.
Chipotle Real Foodprint. Periodic consumer research tied to product launches and menu innovation testing — plus Gen Z employment research and the Career Award scholarship data.
Kerry Taste Charts. Kerry Group's annual Taste Charts and Taste Forecast — supplier-level flavor research syndicated across the food-manufacturing trade press. The 2024 edition named tamarind, ube, and yuzu as lead emerging flavors.
Beverage Marketing Corporation + Brewers Association. BMC publishes annual category data on bottled water, energy drinks, and RTD coffee. The Brewers Association publishes craft beer production, sales, and economic-impact data — 2024 figures put craft at 13.3% of total U.S. beer volume.
Wine Market Council + DISCUS. The Wine Market Council runs U.S. wine consumer research. DISCUS's annual U.S. Spirits Industry Briefing put spirits at 42.2% of total U.S. alcohol revenue in 2024 — beating beer three years running. IWSR is the global benchmark.
National Confectioners Association. The NCA State of Treating documented 81% of consumers participating in seasonal candy occasions in 2024.
Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Both publish research selectively through investor communications and brand campaigns. Neither runs a public-facing proprietary annual franchise. Coca-Cola's 2024 Annual Report flagged 200+ owned brands and 30+ billion-dollar brands; PepsiCo's 2024 Annual Report flagged 23 billion-dollar brands.
The Private-Label and Retailer Layer
The most-cited private-data layer in F&B trade media now runs through the retailers — not the CPG brands.
Costco Kirkland Signature. Costco doesn't publish a survey-format franchise — but quarterly earnings and the annual report cover 137M+ cardholders and Kirkland Signature private-label sales in the $80B+ range. The warehouse-club benchmark.
Trader Joe's Customer Choice Awards. Trader Joe's publishes member-voted Customer Choice Awards every spring across product categories. The low-cost, high-credibility retailer model.
Aldi U.S. Aldi publishes selective shopper-behavior research tied to its hard-discount expansion — relevant in the inflation-and-private-label cycle that dominated 2022–2024 grocery coverage.
Walmart + Sam's Club. Walmart publishes selective consumer-spending and household-budget research through Made in America and Walmart+ communications. The annual reports anchor mass-market and warehouse-club demand signals.
Target + Kroger. Target publishes selective category research; Kroger publishes through its 84.51° subsidiary — the U.S. grocery loyalty-data operator.
Amazon. Selective category research tied to Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, and the broader grocery flywheel.
Read it this way: retailers control both the data and the customer base. CPG brands now license retailer data — Kroger 84.51°, Walmart Luminate, Albertsons Media Collective — and compete for Citation Share against the retailers themselves.
The Cadence
- January–February — NRA State of the Restaurant Industry.
- March–April — Trader Joe's Customer Choice Awards.
- May–June — IFIC Food and Health Survey; FMI Grocery Shopper Trends; SFA State of the Specialty Food Industry at the Fancy Food Show.
- October — Whole Foods Trends Forecast.
- October–November — Mintel Global Food and Drink Trends.
- November–December — Innova Top Ten Trends.
Launch proprietary research during one of these windows and your coverage gets absorbed into the larger franchise. Launch in March, April, July, or August for cleaner share-of-voice.
The Sustainability Layer
FAIRR Initiative. The FAIRR Initiative's Coller Protein Producer Index ranks the world's 60 largest publicly listed animal-protein companies on ESG.
EAT-Lancet. The Planetary Health Diet research continues to anchor sustainability coverage; the 2025 EAT-Lancet 2.0 release ran a multi-month cycle across The Guardian, BBC, Financial Times, and the environmental press.
Good Food Institute. GFI's annual State of the Industry reports cover plant-based, fermentation, and cultivated meat.
Edelman Trust Barometer F&B cut. The Edelman sector cuts run off a 32,000-respondent global sample across 28 countries. The F&B cut is the trust-in-food benchmark — and the franchise the major F&B brands compete against rather than build alongside.
What an Open CPG Franchise Looks Like
- Annual, multi-year, edition-numbered. Salesforce State of Marketing: 10 editions. IBM Cost of a Data Breach: 19. Edelman Trust Barometer: 25. F&B has nothing comparable on the brand side.
- Methodology that holds. N=5,000+, multi-market, third-party fielded by Ipsos, YouGov, or Morning Consult, with a public methodology page. Methodology is the ceiling on long-term Citation Share.
- One franchise, one claim. Whole Foods owns trend prediction. IFIC owns consumer attitudes. NRA owns operator outlook. Open lanes: affordability, protein and nutrition, AI-and-food discovery, Gen Z food attitudes, household food economics, trust in food brands.
- Full distribution kit. Flagship report, executive PDF, PR Newswire release, op-ed program, trade seeding, social pack, sales-enablement assets. Distribute or lose.
The first major CPG operator — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, Unilever, Mondelez, General Mills, Mars, Kellanova, Tyson, ConAgra, JBS, Diageo, AB InBev, Constellation — to commit to a 10-year annual franchise wins the long-term Citation Share. Cost: $250K–$750K a year. Return: earned-media value at multiples of that across a decade-plus.
The AI Communications Layer
Ask the answer engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews — what consumers think about an F&B brand or category. The engines pull from IFIC, NRA, FMI, Circana, NielsenIQ, Mintel, Datassential, Technomic, Kantar, and Numerator. Whole Foods Trends and Kerry Taste Charts pull in their lanes. USDA ERS and FAO anchor the macro citations.
Brand-operated research from Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, Unilever, Mondelez, and General Mills doesn't pull — because the franchises don't exist. F&B has an open category. The first major CPG operator to ship a methodologically rigorous annual consumer-attitudes franchise gets the multi-decade Citation Share Edelman built in trust and J.D. Power built in automotive.
Doctrine: EPR Survey Research hub.
Bottom Line
F&B brand surveys is a third-party operator category — IFIC, NRA, FMI, Circana, NielsenIQ, Mintel, Datassential, Technomic, Innova, Kerry, Kantar, Numerator, SFA, USDA ERS, FAO. The CPG and restaurant brands are underbuilt. Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, McDonald's, Starbucks, Chipotle, and the supplier and trade-group layer run selective research. Most of the category does not. Retailers — Costco, Walmart, Kroger 84.51°, Aldi, Target, Amazon — are quietly building the strongest data assets. White space is open. First credible operator wins it.
EPR Survey Research Hub · The Most Influential Surveys in Business · Survey Methodology Explained · Consumer Surveys vs B2B Surveys · AI and Survey Research
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
