Kids Food and Beverage Market in the U.S., 9th Edition

Report Overview

Kids Food and Beverage Market in the U.S., 9th Edition

The kids’ food and beverage market is a tricky business and requires a special approach to both innovation and marketing. Industry players must meet  the needs of parents (as the purchasers) as well as kids (as the end-users), while operating in the force field of public and regulatory concerns about nutrition for children, advertising to children, and childhood obesity. Not only is there is no clear-cut way to differentiate kids’ food from regular food products, but there is no consensus on when such differentiation is desirable.

To provide the market context, Packaged Facts considers a variety of factors that influence consumer usage patterns, market innovation, and marketing strategies. Population trends, household composition, economic factors, health and wellness trends, and retail trends are all key to understanding the potential and pitfalls of the kids’ food and beverage market. It’s also vital for marketers, product developers, and retailers to better understand what influences parents’ decisions on what they feed their children. Proprietary Packaged Facts data offer insight into the degree to which product qualities, dietary lifestyle characteristics, and diet claims are sought after by kids food product purchasers

.While parents may be the purchaser of kids’ food and beverage, kids are of course key influencers over parents’ choices. For example, nearly all parents say they at least “some of the time” buy a new food or beverage that their kids ask for, with 20% indicating they almost always do so. This provides incentive for marketers to continue to target the end user in promotional efforts. Packaged Facts data also identify food categories, such as breakfast cereal, in which kids tend to have greater influence over their parents’ purchase behavior. 

This report analyzes and trends seven retail food and beverage categories that are especially significant to children’s eating choices, addressing a range of use occasions and need states: breakfast foods, lunch foods, and dinner foods; sweet snacks and salty snacks; produce; and beverages. In each case, the report provides trend data over a ten-year period (2008-2017) and analysis of food and beverage categories for which families with children at home significantly over-index in usage.  The report also covers marketing strategies and product innovation relevant to each category. 

Report Methodology

This report features proprietary data from a Packaged Facts December 2017 consumer survey. Packaged Facts surveys of U.S. adult consumers (age 18+) are based on national online research panels that are census representative on the primary demographic measures of age, gender, geographic region, race/ethnicity, and household income, with a sample of 2,000.

Data related to consumer demographics, attitudes and behaviors are also derived from Simmons Research LLC, which fields booklet-based surveys of a large and random sample of consumers (approximately 25,000 per survey release) who in aggregate represent a statistically accurate cross-section of the U.S. adult population (age 18+).