Walk the aisles right now and one phrase is doing a lot of the work: functional food and drink. 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.
We asked Sarah-Jayne Koen, Insight Manager at FIS Group, what she is seeing across the concept tests her team runs. Her view is that the appetite for functional is genuine, but a functional benefit on its own is not a proposition, and the businesses treating it as one are the ones most likely to be caught out. What she keeps coming back to is the gap between adding a benefit and building something people genuinely want.
“Protein has been in food for about a decade now,” Sarah-Jayne says, “so it is not surprising that something else is going to come in and take centre stage.” That something is fibre. Across the concept testing we have been running at FIS Group, protein is becoming a given rather than a headline, and fibre is where a growing share of the new thinking is going, as businesses look for the next way to make a product feel like it is working harder. “A lot of businesses are trying to figure out how they can make products more functional,” she says.
She is quick to add a note of caution, though. The audience for functional is real, and so is a growing group of consumers who are sceptical of it. “There is definitely an audience for it,” she says, “but there is also, rightly so, a set of consumers that are critiquing it.” The difference between winning them and losing them, she argues, is positioning. It is not enough to add the benefit. You have to be clear about the occasion it is for, why it belongs there, and how it is communicated on pack. A functional claim with no reason to exist gets seen straight through.
There is a quieter challenge underneath it, too. Consumers feel more informed than ever, but a lot of what they are taking in is noise. They are, as Sarah-Jayne puts it, people “who believe that they are informed when in fact they are just overconsuming information” that may not be helpful. For a business, that means a claim cannot rely on the shopper to do the work. Two claims that sound almost identical can mean very different things, and most people will read them the same way. If a benefit is subtle or hard to grasp at a glance, it may as well not be there. The job is not only to have the benefit, but to give consumers something they can understand and believe in.
Fibre also brings a practical problem that protein did not. It is, in Sarah-Jayne’s words, “a lot trickier to build into food.” Protein slots into all sorts of formats and tends to sit comfortably with lower-calorie positioning. Fibre is more stubborn. Some of the ingredients used to lift fibre content are calorie-dense in their own right, which can push a product outside the very range its audience wants it to sit in. That makes it a genuine formulation challenge, not only a marketing one.
And there is one more thing the rush to add functionality can forget. Taste is back, or rather, it never really left. What has changed, and what we are seeing across our strategic and product innovation work, is that consumers are increasingly unwilling to compromise on it. It has become an even stronger non-negotiable than before. That raises the bar for functional products further. Add an ingredient in a way that dulls the eating experience, and no claim will rescue it. The benefit and the pleasure have to arrive together.
Put those together, protein maturing, fibre rising, sceptical and time-poor consumers, and taste refusing to be sidelined, and a pattern appears. The hard part of functional is not the ingredient. It is knowing which idea is worth building in the first place. And that, Sarah-Jayne argues, is the step most businesses skip.
Asked where a business should start, her answer is immediate. “Concept testing, hands down.” The principle is simple. Before committing time and money to development, put a range of concepts in front of real consumers and find out which ones land. Each concept can be little more than an image, a name, a price and a short description. Each consumer sees a handful, evenly rotated, so with a large enough sample the concepts can be compared directly against one another. A clear picture emerges of where people actually sit, before a single product is made.
What surprises her is how few businesses realise how quickly and affordably this can be done. “Few businesses know that they can do that,” she says, “and do it fairly easily and quickly, and help them to troubleshoot or just think ahead about what is next.” It is why FIS Group built Idea Arena, an online concept testing tool that uses our consumer panel to run a set of concepts, as few or as many as you like, and show clearly which ones stand out. It is a low-risk way to test the temperature before you invest, whether you are weighing up a fibre launch or any other move.
The functional wave is not going away, and the opportunity in it is real. But the winners will not be the businesses that add a claim the fastest. They will be the ones who understand what their consumers actually want before they build it. “Anyone who works in food and drink and does it well,” Sarah-Jayne says, “does it because they feel inspired.” The businesses that pair that instinct with real evidence are the ones that tend to get it right. If you are weighing up where functional goes next, the first step is a conversation, and a look at what consumers make of your ideas. We would love to have it.