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After a six-year hiatus, Bryce Clark, strategist at STRAT7 Incite, spent a week on the floor at Natural Products Expo West 2026 in Anaheim, California. As the flagship annual gathering for natural, organic, and better‑for‑you brands, she came back with a generous helping of food for thought.
Seeing the future of CPG
Expo West used to be the place where you saw the future. New formats, unexpected ingredients, brands with a point of view you hadn’t encountered before. Walk the halls in March Q1, know what consumers would be buying in Q4.
That was then.
This year’s show continues the trend of… not being trendy. It feels very different compared to when I attended six years ago. Not because innovation has slowed, but because the source code of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) innovation has changed. Direct-to-consumer channels, TikTok micro-trends, and the sheer ease of fast-following have compressed the gap between ‘emerging’ and ‘everywhere’. By the time a concept reaches Anaheim, there are already twelve versions of it.
The result? A marketplace that is simultaneously full of new products and short on genuine distinctiveness.
When everything looks the same, nothing stands out
The most striking thing about walking the expo floor in 2026 wasn’t any single trend. It was the visual and verbal homogeneity of the show as a whole. Same colour palettes. Same claims. Same booth aesthetic. Same tone of voice. In some cases, it was genuinely difficult to tell whether you were looking at a rebrand or a copycat.
This is what happens when brands optimise for category convention rather than consumer truth. If your positioning is built on what other brands in your category are already doing, you are not positioning – you are following.
Protein is the clearest example. It appeared on everything at this year’s show: snacks, desserts, sauces, candy. Some applications made intuitive sense. Others felt like protein for protein’s sake – a functional claim bolted onto a product that didn’t need it, because the rest of the category had done the same.
The question brands need to be honest about: are we adding this because it actually matters to the consumer in this specific consumption moment, or because we didn’t want to be the only one without it?
The brands that cut through
The counterexamples were instructive. In gut health – a space drowning in fibre messaging and digestive wellness claims – a handful of brands cut through by being unusually direct about the reality of what they were solving for. Blunt, functional, benefit-first. Some of it was genuinely funny. All of it was memorable.
The brands making it work weren’t just riding an ingredient trend. They were articulating a philosophy that their consumer already held. That’s the difference. Not the ingredient, not the claim, not the format. The specificity of the thinking behind it.
The human element
For years, the best insight work has been built on trusted advisor relationships. Researchers who understand the business context, know the history, and can interpret findings through the lens of what the organisation actually needs.
Many AI tools promise to skip that step. Plug in your brief, get your insights, skip the expensive consultants. But in doing so, they skip the judgment, context, and pattern recognition that makes insight actually useful. Businesses get outputs faster, but lose the human intelligence that turns those outputs into decisions. They save money on the research, then waste it on the wrong strategy.
What this tells CPG leaders about where to compete
The era of passion-led innovation in the natural products space – a founder who had a genuine problem, built a product to solve it, and built a brand around that story – is increasingly being replaced by trend-led innovation. Money follows momentum. Momentum follows algorithm. The result is a show floor full of brands chasing the same signals.
This matters commercially because it’s not just an aesthetic problem. It’s a growth problem. Brands without clear, defensible positioning are the first to lose distribution when retailers rationalise. They’re the first to discount when category competition intensifies. And they’re the hardest to build loyalty around, because the consumer has no particular reason to choose them over the next version that appears.
The brands that will win in this environment won’t be the ones with the most innovative product. They’ll be the ones with the clearest answer to why their consumer chooses them, in what moment, and what it would take to pull them away. That’s not a creative question. It’s a research and strategy question – and it’s one the market is making increasingly urgent.
We help CPG brands make sense of the chaos – turning consumer and cultural signals into strategies that create real, measurable growth.
If you’d like a category‑specific implications workshop, or help pressure‑testing your innovation roadmap, we’d love to talk.
About the author
Bryce Clark is a strategist at STRAT7 Incite, specialising in helping consumer brands unlock growth through insight-led strategy. She works at the intersection of data, brand, and customer experience, supporting organisations as they navigate shifting consumer expectations. With a focus on innovation and practical impact, Bryce is particularly interested in how emerging trends and technologies are reshaping the future of consumer packaged goods.