Ask somebody about brandy butter in April and you will get a shrug. Ask them in the second week of December and you will get an opinion, a brand they always buy, a story about the year somebody bought the wrong one, and a view on whether it should go on the pudding or the mince pies.
Read the full story →New product failure tends to get discussed as a marketing problem. It is more often a decision problem, and the decision happens a long way earlier than most people think. Here is how a new product gets chosen in a great many food and drink businesses.
Read the full story →You have come out of an ideation session with forty ideas. Some are strong, some are filler, and a few are genuinely different. You need to know which five are worth developing, and you need to know before anyone spends money finding out the hard way. That is what idea screening is for. It is the quick sift that sits in front of the serious investment.
Read the full story →Dave Hughes, Commercial Strategy Director at FIS Group, on why the third drought in five years should change how food businesses plan, and the three assumptions worth revisiting.
Read the full story →The drought gripping England this summer will reach the Christmas vegetables on shelf in December, and how badly is being decided right now, in fields that have had almost no water since spring. England has just had its driest July since records began in 1836. Just 6.5mm of rain fell, a tenth of the long term average and less than half the previous record set in 1911.
Read the full story →Walk the aisles right now and one word is doing a lot of the work: functional. After a decade in which protein quietly took over the shelves, the race is on to make food and drink do more, and the ingredient everyone is chasing next is fibre. The logic is sound. The execution is where it gets hard.
Read the full story →Walk down any supermarket aisle today and you are surrounded by claims. High in protein. Source of fibre. All natural. Just one ingredient. For the consumer trying to make a good choice, it has never been noisier, or more confusing. We asked Andrea Steel, Senior Insight Consultant at FIS Group, what she is seeing in the market, and she keeps returning to one idea: consumer perception is the reality.
Read the full story →Every summer, the same thing happens across food and drink. Key stakeholders disappear on holiday one by one. Diaries that were packed in June open right up. Projects that need a room full of people to move forward quietly stall. And yet the pressure to grow, to respond to a customer, to have something ready for the autumn range reviews does not pause for anyone.
Read the full story →For a long time, two principles held in food and drink. Indulgent and healthy were opposites, and cheaper often meant better value. Both are quietly breaking down, and businesses that recognise this have a real advantage. We asked Jules Greene, Senior Insight Consultant at FIS Group, about the shift she finds most thought-provoking in consumer behaviour right now.
Read the full story →Ask around the insight world right now and you will hear the same thing. Businesses are getting three quotes for almost every project, shopping brief by brief, always looking for the keenest price. It feels careful. It feels like good housekeeping. We asked Helen Blair, Group Insight Director at FIS Group, why she thinks it is quietly one of the most expensive habits in the industry.
Read the full story →The room has gone well. There are 30, 40, sometimes 50 ideas on the wall. The energy is high. Then comes the part nobody talks about much: figuring out which of those ideas are worth actually developing. Usually that involves a scoring matrix that weighs strategic fit, feasibility and internal excitement, often supported by some form of consumer testing further down the line. Matrices like these have a real place in the pipeline.
Read the full story →For the past year, FIS Group has run Appetite Shift, a syndicated study tracking what GLP-1 medications are doing to the way people in the UK eat, shop and think about food. We recently brought our client partners together for a symposium to review year one.
Read the full story →Businesses invest heavily in understanding consumers. They commission research, uncover unmet needs, identify growth opportunities and develop concepts with real potential. Yet many promising innovations still fail to make an impact. The problem often isn't the quality of the original insight. It's what happens next.
Read the full story →Ask Mike Faers where the food and drink industry is heading and he does not start with food. He starts with the world. “The impact of geopolitical instability on our industry is significant and real,” he says. “Hospitality, multiple retail, manufacturing, farming and agriculture.
Read the full story →Two agencies quote for the same piece of qualitative research. Four focus groups here, four focus groups there. On paper the proposals are identical: the same groups, the same consumers, the same debrief at the end. One comes in a couple of thousand pounds cheaper, so it wins.
Read the full story →Talk to anyone in food and drink right now and you hear the same numbers. Volumes down 15 per cent. Down 20. Down 30 in some categories. Input costs still climbing, consumers trading down the retailer ladder, and shoppers buying into premium less often than they did a year ago. The instinct in a market like this is to sit tight.
Read the full story →Three foundational planning inputs – GLP-1 impact on buying behaviour, unstable price elasticity, and a reset channel mix – are all shifting simultaneously, making last year's forecasting assumptions unreliable for food and drink planning teams.
Read the full story →Suppliers are doing far more to tackle food waste than consumers realise. When shown the reality, consumers responded with admiration – but brands need to communicate it simply, visibly and fairly to turn awareness into action.
Read the full story →GLP-1 medications are fundamentally rewiring food behaviours – reducing emotional eating, snacking and alcohol consumption while raising nutritional scrutiny. Brands that adapt to smaller, more mindful appetites will find real innovation opportunity in the shift.
Read the full story →Identifying segments is just the beginning. Making segmentation stick requires bringing it to life across teams, linking it directly to decisions, and refreshing it regularly as customers evolve.
Read the full story →The six challenges in our service architecture, and the articles we have published relevant to each.
Two to four articles per month, give or take. We do not hit a quota. Industry commentary, opinion pieces, sector analysis and trend signals go up when the team has something substantive to say. Company news appears when there is something worth announcing. We aim for useful frequency rather than content volume.
Blogs and Articles is the regular publishing stream: shorter, more reactive, opinion-led, more frequent. Articles are typically 800 to 1,500 words and respond to current sector dynamics or surface ongoing observations. Trends and Foresight is the longer-form publication library: research-led, more authoritative, less frequent, with publications including the Future Food Trend Tracker and the HFSS Legislation Compliance white paper. If you want quick commentary on what is happening now, you are in the right section. If you want deep foresight publications, Trends and Foresight is the right place.
Yes, with attribution. If you are a journalist or trade editor, contact our press team directly using the details above and we can provide quotes, high-resolution imagery and any additional context you need. Industry commentary pieces in particular are written with the expectation that they may get picked up by trade press.
Named senior team members with direct experience in the topic they are writing about. Every article carries the author’s name, role and a link to their full bio on our Leadership Team page. Articles are written in the named author’s voice rather than ghosted under a generic byline.
Yes. For high-resolution imagery, team headshots, company boilerplate copy and factsheets, email the press contact listed above and we will send it across.
If you have a topic that is relevant to the food and drink industry and would benefit from FIS Group commentary, we are happy to hear it. Contact the press team using the details above. We do not run guest contributions on the site, but we may quote or reference external perspectives in our own commentary where appropriate.
They sit in separate sections within our Thought Leadership hub. Use the “More from our Thought Leadership section” block above, or head back to the main Thought Leadership page and use the filter bar to find what you are looking for.
Every article is written by a named senior person on our team. If something we have published has prompted a question or a brief, contact the author directly using the link on the article, or explore the six challenge areas of our consultancy to find the right route into a conversation. Twenty minutes on a scoping call to talk about what you need.
