Few industries give you feedback as fast as food and beverage. A bad experience generates a review before the customer reaches their car. A menu item doesn’t land, and regulars notice before you do. A new concept opens six blocks away with better Instagram content, and suddenly your Thursday nights look different.
2026 is adding pressure from a few directions at once:
For multi-location food and beverage brands, the goal isn’t keeping up. It’s understanding what’s driving these changes well enough to do something about them.
People are spending carefully right now. That hasn’t killed discretionary spending, it’s just made it more intentional. When someone decides to eat out or picks something off a grocery shelf, they’re making a small but conscious call.
That’s changed what “value” means. It used to mean price. Now it means something closer to: does this purchase make sense for who I am and what I care about? Brands competing on cost alone are playing one card in a game that now has several.
Consumers are now weighing:
Sometimes consumers weigh them equally. Sometimes one eclipses the rest. What’s consistent is this: loyalty isn’t built by winning on a single dimension anymore.
Consumers are more specific than they used to be. They know more about ingredients. They have sharper opinions about the companies they give money to. And 50% of them are now using social media the way they use Google: to find places, evaluate them, and decide where to put their dollars.
Here’s what’s actually driving demand.
People are being proactive about their health, and it’s showing up at the point of purchase. Functional ingredients tied to the following are among the strongest innovation drivers in the category right now:
Priorities differ by generation:
Younger consumers are focused on disease prevention, energy, and fitness
Older consumers are focused on mobility, cognitive health, and staying active
The destination is the same, products that do more than just taste good, but the road there isn’t. Brands that spend time getting to know these audiences and how to appeal to them will win.
Plant-based has matured. Its original positioning as a meat substitute didn’t age perfectly, but the underlying consumer interest (caring about what goes into their bodies) absolutely did. The category evolved into a broader better-for-you and sustainability conversation, and that’s what’s kept demand alive as the early hype settled.
Where it’s still growing:
The emerging food innovation space, including fermentation, precision nutrition, and novel ingredients, is building on the foundation plant-based established. This is absolutely a space worth watching.
Consumers want to know what’s in their food and where it came from. That stopped being a niche expectation a while ago. Ingredient quality has moved from marketing differentiator to baseline, and the brands treating it like a campaign asset rather than an operational commitment are starting to feel that gap.
This isn’t about having a good sourcing story. It’s about letting people verify the story themselves. Building brand trust goes a long way to place and keep your product top of mind, and top of the list when people are recommending products to others.
Formal dining is losing ground to something more relaxed. Consumers are stepping back from occasions that feel like performances and gravitating toward experiences that don’t require a reservation, a dress code, or a reason.
Coffee shops, taprooms, and neighborhood spots are becoming “third spaces” – places outside of home and work where people connect, decompress, and feel like they belong somewhere. That shift has real implications for how food and beverage brands think about:
Case Study: Postino WineCafe: Postino has understood this for a long time. Their whole identity is built around the idea that wine and food should feel approachable, not aspirational: grainy black-and-white photography, a punk rock sensibility, bruschetta boards over bottle service. When LT rebuilt their website to support national expansion, the job was making sure that personality survived the translation to digital.
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75% of restaurant traffic in the U.S. now comes from off-premise channels: takeout, delivery, and drive-thru. |
That one number has downstream effects on almost every marketing and operational decision a food and beverage brand makes. Brands need to think carefully about:
Brands building direct ordering channels are in a structurally stronger position.
Sustainability stopped being a differentiator a while ago. Consumers are willing to pay a premium for sustainable packaging and ethical sourcing — but their tolerance for vague commitments has gotten thin.
In practice, this means:
The brands getting credit for it are making it easy for consumers to see what they’re actually doing, not just read about what they intend to do.
A QSR customer and a brewery guest are not the same person making the same decision. Consumer expectations shift significantly across the food and beverage sector, and messaging that tries to speak to all of them the same way tends to land softly everywhere.
Primary drivers: speed, consistency, and price.
Consumers at QSR and fast casual concepts aren’t looking for inspiration, they’re locked in on reliability. Loyalty here is largely transactional, built through:
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57% of food and beverage consumers will pay extra for consistency. The brands that crack the code on showing up and rewarding their most loyal customers in this way stand apart from their competition. |
Primary drivers: experience and service quality.
Trust is earned through hospitality, ingredient quality, and environment, and it’s typically established across multiple visits. Consistency is essential.
Small inconsistencies erode brand trust faster than operators often realize. The grace consumers extend at a casual neighborhood spot doesn’t automatically travel upmarket.
Primary drivers: culture, community, and brand identity.
Brewery guests aren’t just buying a pint, they’re buying into a culture. Brand identity, storytelling, and ingredient and sourcing transparency resonate here in ways they don’t in other categories.
The third space trend maps directly onto the taproom experience: people come because they want to be somewhere, not just get something. That distinction shapes everything from the physical environment to how staff talk about the menu.
Primary drivers: label claims, certifications, and product consistency.
Trust at the shelf works differently than trust in a restaurant. Consumers rely heavily on ingredient transparency and brand reputation when choosing between two options they’ve never tried. For CPG brands, clean label positioning and supply chain credibility are purchase drivers.
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“Consumers want transparency. Really want it, not the curated version of it. I saw this up close when I started feeding my son Bobbie formula. I was Googling ingredients with one hand and holding a bottle with the other at 2am, trying to make the best decision I could with the information in front of me. What built my trust wasn’t a campaign. It was their willingness to show their work, the sourcing transparency, the ingredient education, the testing tracker that let me see exactly what had been tested and when. That kind of brand behavior is something we talk about in conference rooms. It’s rare to see it actually executed. Food and beverage brands that can do the same thing, genuinely, not performatively, have a real edge right now.” - Hannah Tooker, SVP Content & Organizational Transformation, LT |
Loyalty programs are a tool, rather than a strategy. The research on what actually drives repeat behavior is worth looking at clearly.
Understanding trends is useful. Knowing what to actually do about them is the harder part.
Labor shortages remain one of the most pressing operational challenges in the industry. Self-service technology — mobile ordering, table-side tablets, self-pour systems — is being adopted to offset those gaps, and in many cases it’s working.
The question operators are navigating: how to use it in ways that improve the guest experience rather than just reduce headcount. Those aren’t the same goal, and conflating them tends to show up in reviews.
Diversifying supplier relationships and improving traceability is both a risk management strategy and a consumer trust strategy. Operators who get ahead of it — rather than waiting for a disruption to force the conversation — are better positioned on both fronts.
A clear, specific story about where your ingredients come from is a trust asset that no campaign can manufacture from scratch.
Third-party delivery platforms cost more than operators often account for. Building direct ordering channels reduces that dependency and gives brands ownership over the customer relationship and its data.
Three priorities operators need to get right:
Food trends move fast. Social media makes them move faster. The operators who can respond in real time have a real edge in a crowded market:
That kind of agility is about having the systems, the creative relationships, and the internal process to actually move.
Case Study: Barro’s Pizza: When Barro’s Pizza partnered with LT, their social presence was staged and corporate, a polished disconnect from the warm, slightly chaotic experience of actually being in one of their restaurants. The fix wasn’t a bigger content budget, it was a different posture. LT shifted toward capturing what already existed: employees who’d been tossing dough for years, families doing their weekly pizza night, staff joking with regulars. A series called “Barro’s Hot Takes” put employees on camera sharing real opinions about menu items. Engagement went up because the content finally reflected something real.
Multi-location marketers and operators face a challenge single-location concepts don’t: staying consistent everywhere while still feeling relevant and connected locally.
Consumers expect the same quality and brand experience whether they’re at a location in Phoenix or Nashville. They also respond to content and community that feels like it’s actually about where they are.
These trends all have direct marketing implications:
A brand that wins on social but has inconsistent location pages is losing people at the moment of decision. A brand with a beautiful website that breaks on mobile for delivery orders is spending money to send people somewhere frustrating.
Case Study: Upward Projects: When LT partnered with Upward Projects, the restaurant group behind Postino WineCafe, Joyride Taco House, Federal Pizza, Windsor, and Churn, the work was about building a digital foundation that could hold five distinct brand identities without collapsing into one generic restaurant group site. Each brand had its own personality, its own audience, its own culture. The site needed to honor that while still functioning as a scalable platform as the group grew across 20-plus locations.
That’s the multi-location marketing problem in one sentence: how do you stay consistent without going generic? The brands doing it well are treating marketing the same way they’re treating the consumer experience.
The food and beverage trends shaping 2026 aren’t just product or operations challenges, they’re positioning challenges. They’re about what consumers actually believe about your brand:
If that’s a problem you’re working on, we’d like to talk.