Food and Drink Market Research: What the Big Brands Get Wrong

Food and drink market research is the process of gathering and interpreting data about consumer preferences, category trends, competitive positioning, and purchase behaviour in the food and beverage sector. Done well, it tells you not just what people buy, but why they buy it, what they’d switch for, and where the white space is that your competitors haven’t spotted yet.

The challenge is that most food and drink brands, from challenger startups to established FMCG players, commission research that confirms what they already believe. The methodology is sound. The questions are wrong.

I’ve worked across enough food, drink, and FMCG accounts to see the pattern repeat itself. A brand spends five figures on a consumer segmentation study, gets back a deck full of persona archetypes with names like “Conscious Clara” and “Adventurous Alex,” and then the sales team ignores it entirely because it doesn’t map to how they think about the trade. The research wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t built to answer a commercial question.

Why Food and Drink Research Has a Reliability Problem

Food and drink is one of the hardest categories to research accurately, and the reason is simple: people lie. Not deliberately, but habitually. They overreport healthy eating. They underreport indulgence. They say they’d pay a premium for sustainable packaging and then reach for the cheaper product every time they’re standing in an aisle making a real decision under time pressure.

This is the stated versus revealed preference problem, and it’s more acute in food and drink than almost any other category. Eating is emotional, habitual, social, and often unconscious. Asking someone to articulate their purchase decisions in a survey or a focus group removes all of that context. You get a rationalised version of behaviour that may bear little resemblance to what happens at the point of purchase.

I judged the Effie Awards and reviewed dozens of food and drink campaigns over several years. The ones that won were almost always built on a behavioural insight, not a stated preference. The brand had watched what people actually did, not just what they said they’d do. That distinction is worth building your entire research methodology around.

If you want to understand the broader landscape of research methods and where food and drink fits within a commercial research framework, the market research hub covers the full range of approaches, from primary to secondary, qualitative to quantitative.

What Questions Are Actually Worth Asking?

Most food and drink research briefs start in the wrong place. They ask “who is our consumer?” when the more useful question is “what job is our product being hired to do?” The jobs-to-be-done framing is not new, but it remains underused in food and drink because it requires a different kind of research design.

Instead of building personas, you map occasions. When is the product consumed? With whom? What is it replacing? What would happen if it weren’t available? These questions produce commercially actionable answers. Personas produce slide decks.

The other question worth asking early is: what decision does this research need to support? This sounds obvious but it’s ignored constantly. I’ve seen food and drink clients commission brand health tracking studies when the actual decision they needed to make was whether to reformulate a product. The data they collected was interesting but irrelevant to the choice in front of them. Good research starts with the decision, not the data.

This connects directly to pain point research, which is one of the most underused tools in food and drink. Understanding what frustrates consumers about existing products in a category, what they compromise on, what they wish existed, often reveals more actionable insight than any brand tracking study.

Secondary Research: The Sources Most Food Brands Underuse

Before you commission a single piece of primary research, there is a substantial amount of intelligence available that most food and drink teams either don’t know about or don’t use systematically.

Retail scan data, when you can access it, is the most honest behavioural dataset in the category. It shows what people actually bought, in what quantities, at what price points, and at what frequency. Nielsen and Kantar both publish category-level data, and if you’re working with a major retailer, their own data teams often have more granular insight than any commissioned study.

Search data is the other major underused source. When someone searches for “high protein snacks under 200 calories” or “oat milk that froths properly,” they are telling you exactly what they want and what they’re frustrated by. That is consumer insight in its rawest form. Search engine marketing intelligence methods give you access to this behavioural data at scale, and it costs a fraction of a commissioned consumer study.

At lastminute.com, I ran a paid search campaign for a music festival that generated six figures of revenue within roughly 24 hours. What made it work wasn’t creative genius. It was search intent data that told us exactly what people were looking for and when. The same logic applies to food and drink research. If you know what people are searching for in your category, you know what they actually want, not what they say they want in a focus group.

Social listening is a third source worth treating seriously. Reddit threads, TikTok comments, Amazon reviews, and community forums in food and drink categories contain unfiltered consumer language that is gold for product development and positioning. The language people use to describe a product they love or a product that disappointed them is often more useful than any structured survey response. Social comment analysis has become a legitimate research method, not just a community management task.

The Problem With How the Industry Uses Focus Groups

Focus groups remain the default qualitative method in food and drink, and they have genuine value when used correctly. The problem is that they are frequently used to validate decisions that have already been made, rather than to generate genuine insight.

I’ve sat in more than a few focus group observation rooms over the years. The moderator is good. The participants are engaged. The discussion is lively. And then the client team behind the glass spends the entire session cherry-picking quotes that support their pre-existing view and dismissing the rest as “outliers.” The research process was rigorous. The analysis was not.

When focus groups work well in food and drink, it’s usually because they’re designed to explore rather than confirm. You’re not asking “do you like this product?” You’re asking “walk me through the last time you bought something in this category. What prompted it? Where were you? What else did you consider?” The narrative approach surfaces behavioural context that closed questions never reach.

There’s a detailed breakdown of how to design and run qualitative sessions properly in this piece on focus groups and research methods, which is worth reading alongside any food and drink research planning exercise.

One practical note: in food and drink, in-context research almost always beats a focus group facility. Watching someone shop in an actual supermarket, or interviewing them immediately after a food purchase, gives you data that a recruited group sitting around a table in a research suite simply cannot replicate.

Competitive Intelligence in Food and Drink: Beyond the Obvious

Most food and drink brands track their direct competitors. Fewer track the category edges, the products that are growing in adjacent spaces that haven’t yet crossed into their core market but will. That’s where the real competitive intelligence work happens.

The energy drink category didn’t disrupt soft drinks overnight. The plant-based category didn’t appear from nowhere. Both had years of signal in niche channels, health food retailers, gym communities, and early-adopter social media behaviour, before they hit mainstream distribution. Brands that were watching those signals had time to respond. Brands that were only tracking their immediate shelf competitors were caught off guard.

This is where grey market research becomes relevant. In food and drink, grey market dynamics often show up first in import products, regional speciality items, or direct-to-consumer brands that haven’t yet scaled to retail. These are early signals of where mainstream consumer taste is heading, and they’re worth monitoring systematically.

Competitive intelligence in food and drink also means tracking the trade press seriously. The Grocer, Food Navigator, and similar publications often report on NPD pipeline, distribution wins, and category trends months before they show up in consumer data. Reading them regularly isn’t glamorous research. It’s just effective.

For brands thinking about how to structure competitive intelligence as a repeatable process rather than an ad hoc exercise, the approach used in technology consulting strategy alignment and SWOT analysis translates well to food and drink, particularly the discipline of connecting external market signals to internal capability gaps before making positioning decisions.

How to Research Occasions, Not Just Consumers

The most commercially useful unit of analysis in food and drink research is not the consumer segment. It’s the consumption occasion. Who is eating or drinking what, when, where, with whom, and in what emotional state. Occasion mapping produces insight that drives packaging decisions, distribution strategy, pricing architecture, and media planning simultaneously.

A soft drink brand that understands its occasions knows that its product is bought differently on a Friday afternoon than on a Tuesday morning, that the convenience channel serves a different occasion than the grocery channel, and that the decision driver in each case is different. That understanding shapes everything from where you invest in trade marketing to how you write copy for a paid social ad.

Occasion research is best conducted through a combination of diary studies, where consumers log their consumption in real time over several days, and ethnographic observation, which removes the recall bias that plagues retrospective surveys. Neither method is cheap, but both are significantly more actionable than a standard segmentation study.

The discipline of focusing research effort on the decisions that actually matter, rather than trying to understand everything about everyone, is something the principle of doing less to get more captures well. In food and drink research, scope creep is the enemy of insight. The more questions you try to answer simultaneously, the less actionable any individual answer becomes.

Pricing Research: The Most Mishandled Area in Food and Drink

Pricing research in food and drink is where stated preference problems are most damaging. Ask someone what they’d pay for a new product and they will almost always understate it. They know they’re being asked about price, so they anchor low. The result is that brands systematically underestimate their pricing power and leave margin on the table.

Van Westendorp price sensitivity analysis is the standard approach, and it has value, but it should be treated as directional rather than definitive. Conjoint analysis, which asks respondents to make trade-off choices between product configurations at different price points, produces more realistic data because it forces actual choices rather than abstract price estimates.

The most reliable pricing insight in food and drink, though, comes from controlled retail experiments. If you have the distribution relationships to test a price point in a defined set of stores against a control group, the resulting sales data is worth more than any survey. It’s real behaviour under real conditions. Building an experimentation culture in food and drink marketing means treating the trade environment as a testing ground, not just a distribution channel.

Early in my career, I asked the MD I was working for to approve budget for a new website. He said no. Rather than accept that as a dead end, I taught myself to code and built it myself. The lesson wasn’t about resourcefulness for its own sake. It was about finding a way to test and learn without waiting for permission or budget. Pricing experiments in food and drink often work the same way. You don’t need a perfect test design. You need a real-world signal.

Turning Food and Drink Research Into Commercial Decisions

Research that doesn’t change a decision is a cost, not an investment. This sounds harsh but it’s the right frame. Every food and drink research project should be evaluated against a simple question before it starts: what decision will we make differently as a result of this data?

If the answer is “we’ll know more about our consumers,” that’s not a decision. If the answer is “we’ll decide whether to extend the range into the breakfast occasion or invest in deepening penetration in the evening snacking occasion,” that’s a decision. The research design should flow from the decision, not the other way around.

This is also where the ICP framing from B2B marketing has an underused application in food and drink. The discipline of defining your ideal customer profile with precision, understanding not just demographics but behavioural and attitudinal characteristics, is directly applicable to food and drink consumer targeting. The ICP scoring rubric approach translates well when you’re trying to prioritise which consumer segments to invest behind and which to deprioritise.

The final step that most food and drink research processes skip is the so-what session. Not a debrief where the research agency presents findings, but a working session where the brand team, the commercial team, and ideally the trade marketing team sit in a room and answer the question: given what we now know, what are we going to do differently? Without that session, even excellent research tends to sit in a deck that gets reviewed once and then archived.

Simplicity in how you present and use research findings matters as much as the quality of the research itself. The case for simplicity applies directly to research output: a one-page summary of the three things you now know that you didn’t know before, and the three decisions those findings support, is worth more than a 60-slide deck that nobody reads past slide 12.

If you’re building a broader research capability and want to see how food and drink research fits within a full market intelligence framework, the market research section of The Marketing Juice covers everything from research design to competitive intelligence to qualitative methods in depth.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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