TrendSource Trending Blog

...And we're back for part 2! Same rules as before--we're going to checkin on our market research blog, this time from a retail and CPG perspective, and see if our picks panned out or should just be panned.

Do you know how many plastic bags  you use every year? Well, for the average American family it’s about 1,500—in California, where voters just upheld a ban on single-use plastic bags, that amounted to about 15 billion plastic bags each year. Supporters of the ban charged that plastic bags were wasteful and polluted cities, waterways, and oceans. Now, with election season over, grocery stores have already started to implement the law, refusing to provide customers with plastic bags and charging them for reusable alternatives. Grocers, manufacturers, and consumers are all adjusting to the change and also looking outside the state to see if this is merely a rare coastal exception or the beginning of a broader trend.

The average person should, we are told, drink roughly 64 ounces of water each day, and many of those daily ounces come from plastic bottles. Yet despite bottled water’s prominence if not dominance in the United States, sustainability-minded consumers are increasingly rejecting the fiscally and environmentally wasteful product, turning instead to reusable glass bottles made by brands like LifeFactory and Zula. LifeFactory alone has sold over $20 million of reusable bottles.

The health conscious consumer is stretching far beyond concerns of saturated fats and calorie counting. Several considerations have entered the minds of consumers that play a significant role in buying decisions:  

Every day, it seems consumers are less interested in frozen foods and canned vegetables and more interested in organic and free-range products. Companies going green is nothing new, but the changing needs of the consumer have led to the introduction of sustainability in the consumer packaged goods market.