Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer, and back in sunny Los Angeles for the next month — let me know if you’re around. I knew I was back in the US when I walked into Sprouts and immediately saw PROTEIN HYDRATION and a MICRO PLASTICS DETOX kit. (Might I suggest a bundle?)

Presented by Shopify

93% of aspiring US founders say they feel ready to start a business — The advice sounds reasonable: wait until you’re ready. New research from Shopify and The Harris Poll suggests that’s exactly what keeps people from starting.

In a survey of business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs across five markets, 93% of aspiring US founders said they feel at least somewhat ready to start a business, and more than half said they could start today. Yet most haven’t. It’s the preparedness paradox: the readiness people wait for tends to arrive only after they begin.

The founders who already gave the same reasons once — they just started anyway. In four of five markets, roughly 7 in 10 worked through their earliest challenges by trial and error, learning as they went. And among those who waited before launching, up to 57% say they wish they’d started sooner.

They didn’t start with nothing. Up to 8 in 10 say technology and AI have made it easier to start with limited resources or expertise, helping them find customers and get set up to sell. Money is still the barrier most name (38-46% across markets), so most founders began small, within their means.

The readiness you’re waiting for? You probably won’t feel it until after you begin. Read the research.

Read the research

If brands are a key part of the modern consumer identity, which brands do today’s consumers identify most with?

Last month, we asked more than 3,500 US consumers to write in — not choose from a list — the name of one brand that “feels like it was made for someone like you.” We then asked them to write in “a brand you wish you could buy more of, but feels like it’s meant for someone with more money.” This research was part of my latest Consumer Trends Survey, in partnership with Coefficient Capital; Toluna fielded the survey in June.

Chart of the Day

A brand “made for someone like you”: Nike was the top submission, by far, among our overall survey panel — nearly 17% of those who submitted a legible brand name wrote in the world’s top athletic shoe brand. Apple came in second place with around 4% of submissions. Then Amazon, Walmart, and Great Value, the Walmart private-label store brand. No other submission got more than 2% of write-ins.

A brand “you wish you could buy more of, but feels like it’s meant for someone with more money”: Gucci (the Italian luxury and fashion house) and Nike tied for the top brand here; more than 8% of respondents wrote in each of those brands. Apple came in third place with around 4% of submissions, followed by Louis Vuitton, the French luxury brand; Coach, the US handbag and leather goods brand; Rolex, the Swiss watch brand; and Chanel, another French luxury house.

The two lists do overlap. Of the top 25 “for me” brands, 10 also made the list of more aspirational brands — though only a few, led by Nike, Apple, and Gucci, rank highly on both. “For me” brands tend to concentrate in everyday apparel, groceries, and mass retail, while the aspirational brands are dominated by luxury houses and premium cars.

And people wrote in a lot of different brands — we tallied more than 900 that were legible and distinct. (People also spelled Louis Vuitton 24 different ways; 51 of 78 mentions got it right.)

On the “for me” list, the top 25 brands represented 55% of submissions (among those who wrote in a legible brand), and on the aspirational list, the top 25 brands represented 61%. Even still, 17% declined to name a “for me” brand, and 31% declined to name an aspirational brand. (We also purposely didn’t ask for a specific type of brand or vertical, which likely contributed to the diversity, and also confused some respondents — fair enough.)

Of course, different groups of people gravitate toward different brands. And it’s worth noting that this was not designed to be a nationally representative survey. While we’ve controlled and weighted for age and gender, our overall panel was lower-income, on average, than the overall US population, and had different racial concentrations — both of which affect brand preferences to some degree.

Among men and women, on the “for me” list, Nike ranked no. 1 among both, but men wrote it in at twice the rate, on average; women overindexed writing in Walmart, Great Value, Dove, and Coach.

Read more

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. How are you?

One quick plug: I was back on the This Is Taste podcast this week, live-snacking in studio with Matt Rodbard. (Instagram highlights Reel here.) We talked about our favorites from the Fancy Food show — Mr. Pickles, Ginja Snap, The Great Chestnut Experiment, etc. — and a few points from my new Consumer Trends report with Coefficient Capital.

I’ll be off next week for vacation, then back in the US for a while in July and August. What’s good in LA these days?

Presented by Aboard

You built your product and brand from scratch. You’d never sell someone else’s stuff with your name on it. But that’s exactly what you’ve been doing with your internal tools — running your business on software that was built for everyone and no one. That doesn’t have to be the deal anymore.

The math has changed. The cost and speed of building custom software have dropped so dramatically that it’s now a real option for consumer brands, not just giant companies with engineering departments.

Think about what you’d build if you could: The operational tool that doesn’t exist yet. The dashboard that would actually show you what matters. The workflow your team currently runs on spreadsheets and inertia. You can probably have it now — built around how your company actually works, in weeks instead of months.

Aboard is a software studio led by experienced builders who’ve shipped for some of the world’s biggest companies. We use modern tools and AI to move fast, but every project is led by senior engineers and designers who ensure the software is secure, professionally built, and actually works. Custom business tools, at a speed and price that would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago.

See what Aboard can build for you →

Our Consumer Trends research has identified a consumer group that’s a brand operator’s dream: Around one third of Americans — 36% in our June survey — say they consider themselves in “optimization mode,” actively making choices to improve their energy, appearance, and long-term health.

We’re calling them the Optimizers, and we’ll be following them closely. These people have money, they’re in their spending years, they’re paying attention, and they’re trading up to more premium products and services. As consumer investor Jarret Christie noted on LinkedIn, sharing our latest report, “the ‘Optimizer’ is becoming one of the most important wellness consumers.”

Here are some of the findings from our three latest reports — though primarily from our most recent, the 2026 Mid-Year Report we launched last week — produced in partnership with Coefficient Capital.

Who are the Optimizers?

Optimizers are nearly equally split among men and women, according to our latest Consumer Trends Survey of more than 3,500 US consumers, fielded in June by Toluna. They overindex among Gen. Z (40% consider themselves in optimization mode) and Millennials (44%), people with kids in their household (43%), business owners and founders (46%), remote and hybrid workers (49%), and Black (45%) and Hispanic (40%) consumers.

Optimizers overindex among the affluent, but most aren’t rich. Among those with household income under $50k, 33% consider themselves in optimization mode; it’s 44% among those with $100k-$150k income, and 52% among those earning $150k+. Geographically, Optimizer incidence is relatively even, including across urban, suburban, and rural consumers, with less of an urban concentration than you might expect — though it is higher (56%) among high-earning city-dwellers.

How do Optimizers consume?

Optimizers are doing health things and pleasure things at the same time.

Nearly three quarters of them (71%) say they’re “actively trying to get more protein in their diet,” 1.6x the rate of everyone else (45%). More than half (54%) exercise four or more days a week, vs. 28% of everyone else. They avoid ultra-processed foods (49% say they try to, vs. 36% of everyone else).

Optimizers are nearly twice as likely to say they’ve ever taken a GLP-1 medication like Ozempic or Zepbound (27% vs. 16%). But most aren’t using one — it’s just one tool in the kit. They also love eating: 31% of Optimizers say they “love food more than most people,” as opposed to 17% of everyone else.

And they’re “trading up” — paying more for the better version — across nearly every consumer category we asked about, led by fitness and wellness products (47% of Optimizers trading up vs. 22% of everyone else), supplements (37% vs. 15%), and beauty (39% vs. 15%).

Optimizers spend on the body: They’re nearly twice as likely (23%) to say they’ve visited a sauna, steam room, or bathhouse in the past year. And 12% said they’ve had a cosmetic procedure, such as Botox or fillers, over the past year — twice the rate of everyone else.

More Optimizers would rather feel ten years younger than look ten years younger, but they choose “look younger” at a higher rate than comparable non-Optimizers.

They’re also relatively heavy drinkers: 29% of Optimizers ages 21+ say they drink alcohol multiple times a week or daily, vs. 22% of everyone else. (One third of 21+ Optimizers who drink say they’re trading up their alcohol, too.) More than a third say they use cannabis more than once a week, 1.7x the rate of everyone else.

Optimization mode is about enjoying life and using shortcuts as much as it’s about making healthier choices. It’s also a marker of status: asked whether “being healthy and fit is one of today’s biggest status symbols,” 56% of Optimizers strongly agree, versus 21% of everyone else.

Where to find them?

The digital, AI, and creator economies are Optimizer economies.

Read more

I’m excited to share a new Consumer Trends report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital.

This latest Consumer Trends report is a 93-slide presentation that you can view and download for free. Because this is Substack, here’s a direct link to download the report as a PDF. Please feel free to share widely.

It’s the latest in our ongoing Consumer Trends series, which has now generated 18 reports. (All of this continues to be inspired, of course, by analyst and investor Mary Meeker’s legendary Internet Trends report.)

Topics include:

• A third of Americans say they’re in “optimization mode” — trying to get an edge on life through healthier choices and smart shortcuts. Who are they, how do they live, and how to reach them?

• Peptides are exploding in interest. How much do consumers already know? In what circumstances would they try?

• Our annual deep dive into consumer AI: How are people using it right now? How do they want to? How do they think about AI?

• Where do people actually want more protein? Our expanded investigation.

• Results from our 16th original Consumer Trends survey of 3,000 US consumers, conducted in June, in partnership with Toluna.

I’ll be exploring many of these topics further for members. And more Consumer Trends reports are coming soon — thanks for reading.

Questions? Feedback? Want me to present this at your event or to your team? I’m at dan@newconsumer.com.

(One more link to the report!)

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer, en route to New York, where I’ll be speaking next Monday afternoon, June 29, at the Summer Fancy Food Show — come to my presentation!

Merci beaucoup to the Five Seasons Ventures team for letting me borrow a desk this week in their blissfully air conditioned office. Paris in 100+ degree heat, sans AC, is a problem that needs serious rethinking. I also spent 24 hours in Cannes, just enough time for precisely one (1) beach-adjacent rager with Casey Lewis and Day One Agency and a few coffee meetings. It was great to see a bunch of you there!

Today’s newsletter is free — thanks to Whatnot for sponsoring The New Consumer.

Presented by Whatnot

The Live Shopping Update — Fashion is now the biggest vertical on Whatnot by order volume. The category’s growth reflects a broader shift in how consumers want to shop online: not through static product pages, but through interactive experiences that combine discovery, expertise, and community.

For many shoppers, Whatnot functions like having a personal shopper on demand. Through live shows, buyers can ask questions in real time, request specific styles or colors, and get close-up looks at stitching, materials, craftsmanship, and condition before making a purchase. Sellers often develop relationships with repeat customers over time, learning their preferences and even sourcing items based on requests from previous shows.

The platform is especially resonating in luxury and resale fashion, where buyers value expertise and confidence as much as the product itself. Rather than shopping alone, buyers can enjoy the best parts of the in-person boutique experience online by interacting directly with knowledgeable sellers and fellow shoppers, celebrating great finds, comparing notes, and sharing the excitement.

The opportunity is translating into real business growth, and fashion sellers are building thriving businesses on the platform. For example, luxury handbag seller FashioNica has sold more than 10,000 luxury bags on Whatnot over the past two years.

Live shopping is creating new pathways for entrepreneurs while giving shoppers a more engaging way to discover and purchase their favorite products. Download Whatnot to learn more.

Explore Whatnot

One of the bigger questions for the next decade of The New Consumer is how profoundly AI will reshape e-commerce, shopping more broadly, and — while we’re at it — the entire human-digital consumer experience.

As people increasingly route more of their queries and needs through AI assistants and apps, these tools will obviously have some role in helping decide what people buy, where they buy it, and how it’s purchased.

And as we’ll reveal in next week’s Consumer Trends report with Coefficient Capital, AI chat is already driving purchases, especially among younger users, according to our latest survey of more than 3,000 US consumers. Among Gen. Z and Millennials who say they’re weekly active users of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, about two-thirds say they’ve purchased at least one product they learned about in a chat with an AI tool. Almost half of those purchasers said ‘many products.’

For brands, merchants, and marketing, this has implications that are either huge or not — and it’s still too early to know what’s really going to happen.

But here’s what we’re seeing now.

AI is driving more traffic and sales to retail and commerce sites, but it’s still a very small percentage.

Shopify, the e-commerce platform, said in May that AI-driven store traffic on its network grew 8x year over year in the first quarter of 2026, and orders from AI-powered searches grew almost 13x.

That’s showing faster growth than mobile and social — the last two major technological shifts — did at similar points in their maturity, Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s VP of Product, told me last week. “AI-driven commerce,” Lee said, citing industry data, is “growing nine times faster than social and three times faster than mobile did at this slightly-before-the-inflection-point stage.”

Shopify won’t share exactly how much traffic and sales that AI is currently driving across its network — my guess is that it’s a low-single-digit percentage. But it did provide a mini case study for one merchant: AI referral channels drove 3% of total revenue for Omnilux, which sells LED light masks, since mid-May. And in the brand’s customer surveys, ‘How did you first hear about us?’ grew to 10% attributed to AI channels, compared to 2% the same time last year.

Here’s another view: AI traffic to retail sites more than doubled year over year in May — up 138% — according to a new report from Adobe, which measures e-commerce traffic and sales. AI traffic to travel sites, specifically, nearly tripled in May, up 194%. Adobe also doesn’t disclose what these portions actually represent, but says they have grown 10-20x since the company started tracking AI traffic in late 2024.

(For what it’s worth, over the past 90 days, Google Analytics attributes about 1% of The New Consumer’s web sessions to ChatGPT, but about 4% of tracked new subscription revenue.)

AI traffic is converting better… or worse… for bigger orders.

AI-referred sessions on the Shopify network convert at 49% higher rates than organic search, the company disclosed in May. This is nearly universal across categories — AI conversion beat organic in 23 of 25 categories, an average of 56% higher. And those AI-referred customers place orders that are, on average, 14% larger than those from organic search.

In Adobe’s network of retail sites, AI traffic converted 54% better than non-AI sources, “a sharp reversal from a year ago when conversion rates were nearly half as high.” And it said that AI visits are now worth 53% more. But in the travel category specifically, it said AI-driven traffic converted 28% less than from non-AI sources.

The AI shopper shows up later in the funnel.

Why does traffic from AI chatbots convert better? Part of it is that shoppers are arriving on merchants’ sites later in the sales process, or funnel, when they’re more primed to purchase.

More than half — 55% — of AI-referred sessions in the Shopify network start on a specific product page, compared to 20% that come from organic search. This suggests that the AI tool is taking care of a lot more of the initial filtering process than a web search does — which makes total sense. Or as Lee puts it, “By the time they reach your webpage, they might have already talked to ChatGPT several turns about your product.”

But first, the AI needs to know what you’re selling.

One basic hurdle: Even on top-performing sites, Adobe estimates that 30%–40% of high-value page content still can’t be read by AI.

To make this work better, Shopify has launched what it’s calling the Shopify Catalog, a structured data feed of every product for sale on Shopify’s network, with detailed information, that partners and agents can use to improve their recommendations.

And this is already helping, too: “Catalog-powered AI searches, when we know that they’re using our catalog to help power those searches, they actually convert about two times better than just ChatGPT searching the web,” Lee says.

For brands and merchants, there are obvious tradeoffs here.

It’s great to land a customer who’s already most of the way to purchasing something, especially without having to share a cut with an ad network like Google or Meta, or a third-party retailer.

But it also means you’re less in control of the marketing and product conversation with the customer in the first place. And because ChatGPT and other AI chatbots don’t share any details about the conversation or customer, you don’t have any additional context for their visit.

This matters because if chatbots become consumers’ preferred tools for finding products, they’ll have tremendous power as intermediaries. At the very least, they could start auctioning that click to the highest bidder — which could be you, a marketplace that stocks your stuff, or your competitors. (ChatGPT is moving full-force ahead with its advertising product.)

The big AI chatbot companies — or vertical specialists in travel, clothing, food, etc. — could also decide to try owning more of the checkout and purchase flow, treating brands and merchants more as fulfillment endpoints and retail-media ad buyers.

But this is trickier than it seems. ChatGPT, for one, has already pulled back some of its integrated checkout ambitions, and Claude seems more focused on coding and utility than shopping. Google has been trying to turn its search portal into more of a shopping property for decades, and I’d expect the same within Gemini. (Though advertising remains the bigger, higher-margin opportunity.)

One piece of good news for brands…

At least today, AI chatbots tend to be sending traffic to brands’ own websites, as opposed to marketplaces, according to research by MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Morton.

“In traditional Google Search,” Morton explained to Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, a brand’s website — which he calls brand.com, “would outpace Amazon, Wayfair, Chewy, eBay, Etsy — the marketplaces — sometimes by about 2x, depending on the time of year.”

But “When we aggregate the traffic coming from AI platforms … to the different marketplaces and brand.com, brand.com is outpacing what I’ll call the legacy marketplaces 4-8x.”

So brands are getting customers later in the funnel, and the traffic is more concentrated to their direct-to-consumer channel than to marketplaces and aggregators. That’s about as good as it gets.

But it’s still early. Things haven’t changed much yet. And they probably will.

“If you think about … how much social and mobile have changed how people shop,” Shopify’s Lee told me, “we can only make sure that we are prepared, and that our merchants are prepared for the eventuality that that’s also going to happen with AI.”

For now, brands are getting a boost. But there’s still a lot of game left — and new economics are coming.

Also on my radar:

Starbucks employees will be able to earn an ad rev-share for posting on TikTok. It’s the first brand to pilot a new TikTok feature called “custom Creator Networks,” which the companies announced this week at Cannes.

I love this: Here, Starbucks is supporting employee creativity, getting more free/cheap promotional content onto TikTok that makes the brand seem appealing to younger consumers. And it’s giving baristas a new potential income stream that isn’t just a tip jar.

One of the most important parts to Starbucks’ turnaround under CEO Brian Niccol is attracting and retaining the best store staffing possible. Niccol has smartly been talking about making Starbucks the “best job in retail” since taking over in 2024, and this feels like a cool perk.

“Roughly half” of the beverages served at Blue Bottle cafes globally are iced, CEO Karl Strovink posted. So it’s launching a new, cold-process, “Kyoto-Style” espresso. Curious to try. (Will also be interesting to see how much more Blue Bottle leans on Japan soft power under its new Chinese PE ownership.)

I’m excited to share a new Consumer Trends special(!) report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital.

This latest Consumer Trends report is a 50-slide presentation that you can view and download for free.

It’s the latest in our ongoing Consumer Trends series, which has now generated 17 reports. (All of this continues to be inspired, of course, by analyst and investor Mary Meeker’s legendary Internet Trends report.)

Topics include:

• Is alcohol really the new tobacco? (Is the industry collapsing?)

• Is Gen. Z causing the decline in drinking?

• Are health concerns — or GLP-1s, or cannabis — causing people to drink dramatically less?

• More results from our 15th original Consumer Trends survey of 3,000 US consumers, conducted in February, in partnership with Toluna.

I’ll be exploring many of these topics further for members. More Consumer Trends reports coming soon — thanks for reading.

Questions? Feedback? Want me to present this at your event or to your team? I’m at dan@newconsumer.com.

(One more link to the report!)

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. How are you?

I’ve just returned from 3daysofdesign, Copenhagen’s design week, where the city was transformed into exhibitions and parties for cool-looking chairs, sustainable building materials, scent and sound collabs, and other designobjekter. It’s the sort of situation where you might walk past a packed storefront to find that French design god Erwan Bouroullec is giving a talk inside about a Tyvek couch he just made.

By now you may know that my aesthetic leans both Japanese and Scandinavian, so it was a special treat to meet the team behind Japan’s Ishinomaki Lab in Denmark. The original Ishinomaki Stool started as a post-2011-earthquake recovery project, and the group now has a full line of smart DIY-looking wooden furniture. (I’d previously mentioned founder and designer Keiji Ashizawa for his work on Tokyo’s Trunk Hotel Yoyogi Park.) Sourcing one to import (via slow-boat shipping forwarder) was one of my COVID-era quests; it’s since been our prized entryway stool at home.

Thanks also to the Norm Architects and Noma Projects teams for the HQ tours. Count me in for 3days next year — you should join!

Presented by Oatly

Live from Oatly Aftertaste, the “Davos of Beverage” — Last week in New York, I presented at Oatly Aftertaste, a highly caffeinated summit on the future of drinks, complete with live band and matcha fountain.

My keynote, as you might guess, was a data-rich look at how Gen. Z and young Americans are reshaping the beverage industry. (You can download my slides here.) But it was also neat to hear from café and roastery owners about how some of those same trends show up every day in their stores.

Beverage as identity. The big picture is that while everyone has to drink every day, young consumers especially love beverages and consider them part of their image. Some 55% of Gen. Z and Millennials agreed that “My favorite beverages are part of how I express my personality” in our latest Consumer Trends Survey with Coefficient Capital — more than double Gen. X and older generations.

This is also expressed by where people get their favorite beverages, and many of the coolest new cafés are not traditional shops.

On a panel moderated by Emily Sundberg, Sydney Wayser talked about opening and running Granada, a fun and cute new coffee shop in Los Angeles’ Angelino Heights neighborhood that’s on the ground floor of her house.

“We thought, ‘well, maybe we’ll just get to know our neighbors’,” Wayser said. But instead it’s become a must-go destination that people set out to visit — “people drive from San Diego, people fly from Prague” — with its own community. “A lot of people meet in person all day, become new friends. There’s a Granada couple. We’re waiting for the engagement.”

Function is the new flavor. Gen. Z and Millennials are also driving the boom in “functional” beverages as they look for benefits other than just taste.

Energy and hydration are the mature categories here — coffee and tea are the original functional beverages — but young consumers want more from their drinks, including calming or relaxing vibes, focus and clarity, gut health, and occasional euphoria.

Protein is one of the top things consumers say they want more of, and fiber is climbing fast behind it (Google searches for “fiber foods” recently set an all-time high). And as I detailed last week, younger generations are much more interested in trying high-protein coffee, milk, and cold foam. (We’re asking about matcha next.)

The future is surely weirder. Gen. Z and Millennials have led the matcha trend and turned it into a vehicle for dessert-like treats, shared globally on social media.

How will Gen. Alpha shape the beverage world next? My take is that today’s novel “global flavors” and other experimental ideas — slippery and chewy textures — are just going to be normal. All these mixtures of culture, and the way that information travels so quickly now, is going to make it so that none of these things seem weird to the most connected generation yet. (At the event, Oatly served “everything bagel”-flavored oat jello shots and a stupidly good tortilla and agave latté with a spicy chip rim.) So crank the weirdness up even more!

One of my favorite moments from Aftertaste was when Tohm Ifergan, the founder of Dayglow — an excellent coffee shop in Chicago, LA, and Brooklyn — answered a lightning round question: “Make a prediction for a flavor that we’re about to see everywhere.” His answer: “Salt.” Now we’re talking!

Explore Oatly Aftertaste

There’s a new status bottled water brand in town. And in true 2026 The New Consumer fashion, I didn’t find out about Loonen at Expo West, on BevNet, or even from the Whole Foods drinks fridge.

I learned about it a few months ago from Tinx, the New York-based influencer, writer, and satellite radio host, who sometimes posts a glass bottle of Loonen — with its unmistakable bright yellow label — between workout photos and relationship advice to her more than 640,000 Instagram followers.

Most consumer brands launch with an influencer playbook these days; if you’re running the venture-growth route, you basically have to.

But Loonen’s influencer heat has become more of the story than usual, especially for a company whose founder isn’t one herself. (Before starting Loonen last year, CEO Clara Sieg spent almost 15 years at Revolution, the venture firm founded by Steve Case.)

“Sorry to report I love the sparkling influencer wellness water,” Alison Roman — the cookbook author and food personality who’s helped shape Millennial eating and drinking for a decade — posted last month to her 800,000 followers. (“I almost fell off my stool,” Sieg says. “I’ve cooked an inordinate number of her recipes.”)

Loonen is, in many ways, the perfect product for this cultural moment.

It’s a nice-looking, thoughtfully designed object that’s hefty in hand, priced at a premium, and Stories well. It also genuinely tastes great.

It earnestly aims to solve a problem — our flawed and sometimes toxic water system — that shouldn’t exist.

And it satisfies both extremes of the wellness spectrum, serving bicoastal elite tastemaker types and also obsessive cleanmaxxers who would do anything to avoid microplastics or chemicals.

Loonen’s big pitch is that it’s extremely clean and is willing to prove it with regular test results — implying that other bottled water isn’t, or at least might not be.

It’s primarily addressing two problems: One is the water itself, which could be contaminated at the source with chemicals or other substances that have appeared in the US water supply system. (“Every source has a footnote,” Sieg says.)

The other is the packaging and distribution process, in which drinking water sits in plastic bottles — often at high temperatures — for months before it’s consumed, which could leach chemicals or microplastics.

Loonen currently sources its water from a spring in the Palomar Mountains outside San Diego, not from a municipal water source. (It’s open to using multiple sources in the future; unlike Evian or Fiji, there’s no terroir story here.)

But then it moves the water in stainless steel tanks to its production facility, where it filters it using stainless lines and physical membrane filtration. “Never any chemical intervention, and never any plastics,” Sieg says.

It then adds minerals back to the water, including Celtic sea salt, magnesium, potassium, and calcium.

“And then we only ever put it in glass. And that’s an imperative, because it’s the only practical material from a bottling perspective that doesn’t leach,” Sieg says.

To minimize any contamination from the FDA-required plastic seal on its cap, Loonen built a “cap car wash” on its production line, where the caps are rinsed twice and sanitized before application.

Loonen’s custom glass bottle is also a big part of the story. It, too, was thoughtfully designed, with wavy lines molded into the bottle for grip.

It’s slender enough to fit into a car’s standard cup holder, which large versions of other glass-bottled waters, such as Mountain Valley, can’t. Loonen’s bottle also has a wide mouth, both to make drinking nicer and to make it easier to slip in a sleeve of electrolytes or greens powder. “You don’t have this plume of sweet smoke coming into your face,” Sieg says.

The bottle is also noticeably heavy. “I think it’s nicely luxurious,” Sieg says, “but it’s not meant to be a super heavy bottle.” I, of course, weighed mine, and it seems heavier than it needs to be — 485g empty for the 750ml bottle, almost a third greater mass than Velleminfroy, the fancy French mineral water brand, uses for its 1-liter bottles.

Tough tossup here — the weight adds to the premium perception — à la metal credit cards — but from a unit economics perspective, you don’t want to be unnecessarily extra when you’re shipping bottles of liquid across the country.

Loonen’s brand design was also done well, including a bright yellow label for the still version, with soft green and blue branding that skews a little feminine but not girly.

It’s unmissable on the shelf, and people will notice it when you’re walking around. A bottle of Loonen would look equally at home at REI as it does at Happier Grocer. The company worked with Colony, the design agency that’s also done work for Truff, the fashion brand Dôen, and for Spindrift, where Loonen co-founder David Kimmell was a longtime executive.

“When folks ask about what brands I like and think have done a really good job, I always go back to Levi’s,” Sieg says. “They are a heritage American brand that stands for quality. You can find them for $9.99 at TJ Maxx, and you can find them for $1,200 at Neiman Marcus. And when you wear a pair of Levi’s, you feel this sense of quality and happiness. That’s what we want to do in the water category.”

If all of this sounds obsessive, it totally is. And that’s the point.

Loonen started from a consumer need, Sieg says, “which was my own,” going through IVF and then pregnancy and postpartum, “learning a lot about plastics and endocrine disruptors and how bad they are for you broadly.”

Read more

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. And back in Paris after a very quick trip last week to New York, where I presented about Gen. Z beverage trends at Oatly’s Aftertaste event in the Flatiron.

(Btw: I’ll be in Copenhagen this week for 3daysofdesign. Let me know if you’ll be around!)

I’ll share more from the event and my talk soon, but here’s one of my favorite slides: Matcha continues its incredible growth story, as seen here in new point-of-sale data that Square pulled for me. Matcha passed chai a couple of years ago and continues to grow.

One interesting difference between matcha and chai is an emerging reverse seasonality. Chai sales peak in cold-weather months, while matcha increasingly peaks during the summer. This tracks: Chai’s warming spices make the most sense when served hot, while matcha has become a more iced-dessert-like beverage platform.

Case in point: Here’s a blurry creepshot I took in London a couple of weeks ago of the Blank Street employee cheat sheet, taped up on the wall, for assembling its current seasonal iced drinks. These include “Lemon Loaf Matcha” and “Cherry Glaze Matcha” — two beverages that I can say with confidence did not originate in Kyoto, but probably taste disturbingly great and look cool.

More soon! Thanks again to Oatly for inviting me as a partner. And kudos to the Care of Chan team on a smart and stylish event.

As protein continues to creep into more food and beverage products, two recent launches could prove interesting case studies in the making: Oon Iced Protein Coffee, a new sub-brand and product line from Oats Overnight, the company that’s built a successful subscription business around its protein-fortified overnight oats breakfast kits. And David Protein, the fast-growing and controversial protein brand, has just expanded into ice cream.

Unlike mature protein categories like snack bars and smoothies, it’s not clear that consumers want protein in their coffee or frozen dessert. But our Consumer Trends research suggests that younger consumers are more open to the idea.

Each pouch of Oon’s instant coffee includes 10g of protein (from whey) as well as about 100mg of caffeine — the equivalent of a normal cup of coffee — and a light sweetness with 4g of sugar. It’s a powder designed to be “spoon-stir soluble” for maximum convenience, founder and CEO Brian Tate tells me. “You just rip and pour” — no frother or shaker required.

Tate considers “extreme flavor variety” one of Oats Overnight’s core tenets: It has more than 60 flavors, and tests new ones continuously with its subscribers, which keeps them curious and engaged. (Oon itself was incubated among and refined by Oats Overnight subscribers for more than a year.)

And that extreme flavor variety is a key part of the strategy for Oon, too: At launch, it’s available in 13 flavors, including traditional latté flavors like French vanilla and mocha, as well as more dessert-y options like toasted marshmallow, chocolate cherry, and creme brulée.

“We found with our data that customers really prefer to not have this flavor bomb, super-sweet thing,” Tate says. “Light sweet, light flavor is the way to go.”

Subscriber feedback also led the company to upgrade the coffee base to a more premium, Colombian medium-roast that costs around four times as much. “We learned that it’s very important towards overall taste. This final product is very good for coffee lovers.”

The plan is to launch a new flavor every month for a while, and subscribers will receive in-development packs to help test and refine.

Who’s this for?

My research partners at Coefficient Capital and I recently surveyed 3,000 US consumers about their protein goals for our Consumer Trends Food & Beverage report. We learned that a large number of consumers want more protein in their diets: 65% of Gen. Z and Millennials said they consider themselves someone who’s “actively trying to consume more protein.” (Thus all the new products coming to market.)

But where do they actually want to eat or drink it?

We asked our panel to rate 18 food and beverage items — from snack bars and popcorn to coffee and beer — on two dimensions: How much does adding protein to each product feel like a natural or unnatural fit? And how interested would they be in trying a high-protein version?

The obvious winners were obvious: Snack bars, milk, breakfast cereal, and pasta were the four products (among our 18) where people, on average, thought adding protein made a lot of sense and were interested in trying high-protein versions. The weird losers were also obvious: Beer, for example.

But then there were a bunch of products in the middle: Coffee, chocolate, ice cream, chips, popcorn, water. Consumers, in aggregate, rated them near the neutral baseline on both dimensions.

Protein coffee turned out to be one of the more polarizing items. It averaged near zero because people disagreed — there was a near-equal split of very positive and very negative ratings — not because they felt indifferent. Younger consumers, in particular — Gen. Z and Millennials — think of protein coffee as more natural than older consumers do, and are more interested in trying it.

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. Ça va?

Quick note: I’ll be co-hosting a free online event in a couple of weeks with Consumer Edge, looking at consumer spending in the beauty vertical, including a bunch of new charts based on their panels of US and UK credit and debit card transaction data. It’s on Wednesday, May 27 at 11am ET. Join us!

Presented by Aboard

For most of the digital era, having tools built for your specific business meant a massive budget and a year-long timeline. So you did what everyone does — you bought off-the-shelf platforms and made them work.

The math has changed. The cost and speed of building custom software have dropped so dramatically that it’s now a real option for consumer brands, not just giant companies with engineering departments.

Think about what you’d build if you could: The operational tool that doesn’t exist yet. The dashboard that would actually show you what matters. The workflow your team currently runs on spreadsheets and inertia. You can probably have it now — built around how your company actually works, in weeks instead of months.

Aboard is a software studio led by experienced builders who’ve shipped for some of the world’s biggest companies. We use modern tools and AI to move fast, but every project is led by senior engineers and designers who ensure the software is secure, professionally built, and actually works. Custom business tools, at a speed and price that would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago.

See what Aboard can build for you →

Twenty weeks into 2026, there have already been dozens of new beverage brands, companies, and products launched in the US alone.

Just this week, my inbox alerts include a new “juicy sparkling drink for kids” startup, a new hop seltzer from a weed soda brand “designed to deliver calm, focused alertness,” and something from Starbucks called “Tropical Butterfly Refreshers” that sounds like it was invented by ChatGPT: “An all-natural blend of guava and passionfruit flavors with mango-pineapple flavored popping pearls and a splash of vibrant butterfly pea flower infusion.”

Not a bubble — just how this market works.

Entry is cheap

The barrier to entry in the beverage market is low. As a would-be founder, you don’t even need to know how to make anything: There’s a large, mature marketplace of co-manufacturers, flavor suppliers, canners and bottlers, packaging suppliers, brokers, and distributors.

It’s real work to learn and navigate this maze — and to come up with something new and different — but it’s doable. You can start small with hand-labeled blanks, launch at a farmer’s market, and level up as you go. Amazon, TikTok Shop, Instacart, DoorDash, and GoPuff give you proof-of-concept channels that didn’t exist a decade ago — and targeted advertising with sales attribution.

Many of the best brands, large and small, have something unique to their process, provenance, or formulation, such as Olipop’s proprietary blend of fiber and prebiotics, Kimino’s supply chain for Japanese yuzu, and Unified Ferments’ life-changing artisanal kombuchas that focus on the tea.

But if you have an idea for a beverage product — sparkling espresso sodas, low-sugar classic sodas with “no fake stuff” and your famous name on the can, mini Spindrifts for kids, or luxury water that’s tested for microplastics — you can get it made without much upfront domain expertise or capital.

People want to try new drinks all the time

Beverage trial is an essential part of modern life — everyone has to drink multiple times per day. And right now, a lot of people want to drink differently than they have been.

When we asked 3,000 US consumers in our latest Consumer Trends survey to write the three things they want to consume less of this year, soda ranked third — behind only sugar and salt, and mentioned three times as often as alcohol. Yet the soda market is growing again.

Many people also genuinely enjoy the process of finding new options, especially younger consumers.

The majority of Gen. Z and Millennials — 71% — say they “love” trying and drinking different beverages. (That compares to 42% of those Gen. X and older.) Nearly 60% of Gen. Z and Millennials agree that “trying new beverages is a fun part of my routine” — almost twice as high as older generations.

(These stats come from our new Consumer Trends Food & Beverage Special, published in partnership with Coefficient Capital. It’s a good one — check it out.)

So today’s grocery stores devote a large section to beverage discovery, and keep new SKUs rotating in and out frequently.

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer, and just back from a quick weekend TGV trip to Basel with my son. Go check out the Vitra campus and design museum if it’s ever convenient — a great example of a company using its land to host customers and community with neat architecture and public spaces, not just shoo them into a corny tour and a gift shop full of bad merch.

Also, two quick plugs: I spoke with Sally Ekus, the food and lifestyle literary agent, about cookbooks and how they intersect with recent trends in eating, drinking, and brand-building. I also joined the Marketing Meeting podcast with Itir Eraslan to talk about some of our recent Consumer Trends research — protein preferences, GLP-1s, and more.

Presented by Aboard

Every tool your business runs on was designed for a thousand other businesses, too. You’ve spent years adapting how you work to fit someone else’s software — because having your own was never a realistic option. It is now.

The cost and speed of building custom software have dropped so dramatically that it’s now a real option for consumer brands, not just giant companies with engineering departments.

Think about what you’d build if you could: The operational tool that doesn’t exist yet. The dashboard that would actually show you what matters. The workflow your team currently runs on spreadsheets and inertia. You can probably have it now — built around how your company actually works, in weeks instead of months.

Aboard is a software studio led by experienced builders who’ve shipped for some of the world’s biggest companies. We use modern tools and AI to move fast, but every project is led by senior engineers and designers who ensure the software is secure, professionally built, and actually works. Custom business tools, at a speed and price that would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago.

See what Aboard can build for you →

Claude, the AI service owned by Anthropic, has a fraction of ChatGPT’s paid users, but its users are spending dramatically more on a per-user basis — and the gap is widening.

Today, millions of American consumers pay for an AI subscription, primarily ChatGPT, which is owned by OpenAI. Claude has been a distant follower.

But around the end of last year, something started to shift. Claude hit an inflection point in paid consumer spending, according to transaction data from Consumer Edge, which tracks US consumer credit and debit card purchases.

CHART OF THE DAY

In March, OpenAI had around five times the number of unique paid accounts as Anthropic, according to Consumer Edge. But the Anthropic users, in aggregate, spent nearly half as much as OpenAI users. Claude users are making more purchases per month, at a higher average ticket price. In March, the average paid OpenAI customer spent $22, while Anthropic customers spent almost three times as much — $63, according to Consumer Edge.

This suggests that Claude has been significantly more effective at getting consumers to upgrade to its premium subscription tiers — $100/month or $200/month; real money! — from its $20/month base subscription, and/or pay overage charges for extra usage.

What’s going on here? It seems as though Anthropic has been able to position Claude — and increasingly charge for it — as more of a prosumer tool for making and doing things, which may justify a significantly higher subscription fee.

Read more

Allbirds’ recent fire sale to a licensing firm — $39 million for the shoe brand’s IP and assets, after peaking at a $4 billion market cap on the Nasdaq — marked a new low point in the direct-to-consumer e-commerce canon.

Let’s be clear — this was a disaster. But Allbirds’ failure doesn’t speak for the whole model.

Presented by Shopify

89% of US entrepreneurs would start their business again in 2026. Here’s why. The conventional story about entrepreneurship goes like this: It’s a risk worth taking, but 9–5 employment is the safer bet. New research from Shopify and The Harris Poll says otherwise.

In a survey of US business owners, respondents were more than twice as likely to say owning a business feels more financially secure than holding a traditional job (39% vs. 18%). Most also said starting their business felt less like an escape and more like a move toward something they wanted: Greater control, flexibility, and meaning.

But it’s more than conviction: 89% of US founders say they’d make the same choice again in 2026. The barriers that once made entrepreneurship feel out of reach are coming down. 86% of US founders say e-commerce platforms have made it easier to start a business than a decade ago. 67% say AI tools are making entrepreneurship more accessible, compressing what once required a team into something a solo founder can do alone.

The hard part of building a business used to be getting started. Increasingly, it isn’t. Read the research and hear from the founders bringing this data to life.

Read the research

The truth is that DTC — the concept of brands selling products directly to customers over the internet — is alive and well. It’s just different than what some had hoped it’d become a decade ago, when a lot of smart people made a lot of misplaced assumptions about consumer behavior and economics.

And so when the New York Times, covering the Allbirds sale, makes assertions like “much of that direct-to-consumer luster has been lost,” it highlights a problem: “DTC” still means different things to different people.

Direct-to-consumer has long been, and remains, an important sales channel for many types of brands. But in the 2010s, it also became a shorthand — “DTC brand” — for a certain type of company-building and digital-native brand approach. And then there was the “DTC era,” where venture investors poured money into these sorts of brands, thinking they had an unfair advantage for the next generation of consumers, and would command premium valuations.

Since the Allbirds sale got people talking in recent weeks, I thought now would be a good time to take a look at the state of DTC: What it is, what it isn’t, what it wasn’t, and what it will become. The truth is more complex and nuanced than “DTC brands didn’t work.”

What’s working

It’s actually pretty easy to make a list of brands generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue — even more than a billion — in direct-to-consumer e-commerce sales.

Hims & Hers, the online pharmacy that’s almost entirely DTC, reported $2.2 billion in US revenue last year, up 53%. Quince, the fast-growing clothing and accessories brand, said its total revenue passed $1 billion last year. Hungryroot, an online meals and grocery subscription business, announced $700 million in net revenue for 2025. ButcherBox, a DTC meat subscription, generated more than $500 million in sales in 2024. Rhode, the skincare brand, passed $200 million in DTC sales in a yearlong period ahead of its $800 million acquisition by Elf.

Here’s how a broader set of brands performed last year.

This is each brand’s estimated online sales for 2025, as provided by Consumer Edge, which tracks US consumer credit and debit card spending. I’ve indexed Quince to 100, so you can get a sense of how the following brands performed last year, relative to Quince, among Consumer Edge’s card transaction data.

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer.

What’s on your mind? I’m collecting questions now for a special mailbag issue of The New Consumer. There’s no question too mass or too niche — just shoot me an email at dan@newconsumer.com or add to the comments. Send yours in and I’ll answer the best ones in a future newsletter. Thanks in advance!

Let’s do some spring members Office Hours! I’ve just added some slots to the calendar for next Wednesday, Apr. 22. As always, these 20-minute Zoom sessions are off-the-record by default, and the time is yours — I’m here for advice, ideas, feedback, a quick pitch, whatever is most useful. Become a member or log in here for the link. I look forward to speaking!

Presented by Whatnot

The Live Shopping Update — Snacks are quickly becoming one of live shopping’s most engaging categories. On Whatnot, sellers are turning everything from international snacks to candy into interactive shopping experiences that feel more like visiting a grocery store or specialty shop than browsing online. Buyers can watch tastings, ask questions in real time, and discover new products, just as they would when talking to a shop owner or sampling products in store.

This format is resonating with consumers. Snacks and candy sales on Whatnot have grown roughly 30% month-over-month since July 2025, while transactions have increased 2.5x, signaling strong demand for live shopping in everyday product categories. International snacks have become a particularly strong segment — sales are up 388% since last July — as sellers source hard-to-find products from around the world and introduce them to buyers in real time.

Some of the biggest moments in the category come from limited-edition snack drops and releases, where hundreds of items can sell out in seconds while thousands of viewers watch live. For example, Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia and Whatnot seller (@veefriends), took to Whatnot to sell his special collector’s box of Jolly Rancher’s new “Heat Wave” gummies — all 1,055 units sold out in minutes.

The rising popularity of snacks on live shopping platforms points to a broader shift in retail: Live commerce is taking everyday purchases from simple transactions to interactive, community-driven experiences. Download Whatnot to learn more.

Explore Whatnot

Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications — highly effective, life-changing weight-loss drugs — are among the most important forces shaping consumption today and in the future. Now they’re about to go mass.

In a new research report published last week, Morgan Stanley projected that the number of Americans on GLP-1s will quadruple over the next decade. Specifically, it estimates that 55 million Americans — around 15% of the US population — will be on a GLP-1 medication by 2035, up from around 13 million at the end of 2025.

(One quick note: These numbers are actually much lower than other estimates I’ve seen. For instance, a KFF poll from last November found that 12% of US adults said they were currently taking a GLP-1 drug, implying around 30 million active users — roughly double Morgan Stanley’s estimate. Why the gap? One thought is that Morgan Stanley is undercounting the booming compounded market — people getting GLP-1s through Hims and less reputable online pharmacies. There’s also a lot of churn of people going on and off GLP-1s, and probably some noise in self-reported survey data. So it’s actually somewhat tricky to model an active-user count. And different models are based on different assumptions, making them tough to compare apples-to-apples. My guess is that the real number is somewhere in the middle.)

Either way, most of that growth is forecast to happen in the next few years, driven by lower prices, new pill-based options that are far less invasive than today’s injectables, and expanded Medicare coverage.

CHART OF THE DAY

The key question for The New Consumer has always been how GLP-1s — which cause users to consume fewer calories, and eat and drink differently — will affect consumption and spending. Especially once tens of millions of people are on them.

What’s happening now?

For a while, there were concerns that the food industry could get hit hard if people just stop buying certain products. So far, that hasn’t happened: Hershey’s is still growing, the J.M. Smucker Company is still growing, etc. Part of that is diversification, part is that the GLP-1 population is still relatively small, and part is that people tend to go back to some previous habits when they stop taking GLP-1s.

But people who are on GLP-1s do eat less — that’s the whole point.

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer.

Last weekend, on March 21, The New Consumer turned seven years old. It’s been a while since I’ve reflected much about the site/newsletter/business itself — who has the time?! But I want to say THANK YOU for supporting my work; for reading and replying; for asking me to speak at your events and offsites; for hiring me on advisory projects; for sharing my slides and charts; for making this whole thing possible.

This continues to be the best job I’ve ever had, and I’m more excited about the year ahead than I have been in a while.

If there’s one thing I’m most proud of from the past few years, it’s the growth of my Consumer Trends research series with Coefficient Capital — easily the most “me” thing I’ve done with The New Consumer, and maybe the most successful thing I’ve created since helping start Business Insider 19 years ago. We plan to publish four main reports again this year, plus a new micro report — stay tuned. And I’m working on making it easier for you to browse the archives and get more use out of all that research and data.

In the meantime, the best way to support my work is to become a member, add colleagues by upgrading to a team plan, or reach out about speaking, consulting, or brand partnerships. Thank you again!

“Cigarettes are back!” the New York Post has declared.

“From trays filled with cigarettes at the Vanity Fair Oscar’s Party to Kylie Jenner smoking on the mag’s latest cover,” Allison Lax wrote last week, “…smoking is well and truly back — Surgeon General’s warnings be damned.”

This has been coming up more in conversation: After all that wellness posturing, are young people really smoking?!

On a mass scale, no.

In mid-2025, 11% of Americans said they had smoked a cigarette in the past week, tied for the lowest percentage ever, and down by nearly half from a decade ago, according to Gallup, which has been conducting this survey for more than 80 years. That percentage has been in decline since the 1950s. And while it moves a little year to year, the overall trendline is that fewer people are smoking, not more.

The smoking rate is even lower among young Americans, both in comparison to young people in the past and to older consumers today, according to Gallup’s polling.

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. It was great to see a bunch of you at Expo West in Anaheim, and record another fun This Is Taste podcast with Matt Rodbard. We talked about our favorites from the show and the big new Consumer Trends Food & Beverage Special report that I just launched with Coefficient Capital.

Btw, major congrats to my research partners at Coefficient on closing their second fund! I’m proud to be an extension of the team.

Americans — especially younger ones — want to consume more protein: 54% of US consumers, and 65% of Gen. Z and Millennials (ages 15–45), say they consider themselves “someone who is actively trying to get more protein” in their diet, according to our latest Consumer Trends Survey of 3,000 US consumers, conducted last month by Toluna.

The protein boom has been happening for a while, but it’s recently reached a new level. For instance, Google search volume for “protein” set new all-time records in the US and globally last month. In our survey, more than half of the people trying to get more protein in their diet — and nearly two thirds of Gen. Z and Millennials — say they started trying in the past year.

That’s translating to sales: Five of the 10 top-growing categories on Instacart last year were protein-coded, including Greek and Icelandic yogurt, protein bars, and protein drinks, according to exclusive data the grocery delivery giant contributed to our new Consumer Trends Food & Beverage special report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital.

But where does protein actually belong?

We just asked those 3,000 US consumers to rate 18 food and beverage items — from snack bars and popcorn to coffee and beer — on two dimensions: How much does adding protein to each product feel like a natural or unnatural fit? And how interested would they be in trying a high-protein version?

The results are organized neatly. We’re calling it the Protein Feelings Matrix.

The obvious winners are obvious: There are some products — pasta, cereal, snack bars, and milk — where people, on average, think adding protein makes a lot of sense and are interested in trying high-protein versions. Many of these are established, mature categories for high-protein offerings, and should continue to be successful.

The clearest gimmicks are clear, too. Beer and ready-to-drink cocktails were the two items in our set where people, on average, think adding protein seems especially unnatural, and they’re not interested in trying high-protein versions. These won’t take over the world.

And among our items, there’s nothing really in the “weird but tempting” or “natural but gross” quadrants.

But then there’s a bunch in the middle: Chocolate, ice cream, chips, popcorn, water, coffee. Consumers, in aggregate, rate them near the neutral baseline on both dimensions.

One important distinction: Most of those middle products genuinely land in lukewarm territory, with many people selecting neutral responses for things like protein pretzels and popcorn. But protein water and coffee are more polarizing: They average near zero because people disagree — a near-equal force of very positive and very negative ratings — not because they’re indifferent.

This is where it will be up to food and beverage brands to create their own success: They’ll have to innovate to make high-protein products that actually taste good and are enjoyable to eat or drink. And they’ll have to figure out how to communicate to consumers that these products are worth whatever added cost, textural weirdness, or friction they add for the extra protein. Otherwise, they’ll never make a dent.

The good news, when you slice the data by different consumer groups, is that there are key demographics that are more interested than others in these products.

Younger consumers, for example — Gen. Z and Millennials, ages 15–45 in our survey — think it’s more natural to add protein to more products, and are more interested in trying those products.

Specifically, protein chips, chocolate, water, and coffee all appeal to younger consumers significantly more than they do to older generations.

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I’m excited to share a new Consumer Trends special(!) report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital.

This latest Consumer Trends report is a 68-slide presentation that you can view and download for free on my website, just in time for Expo West. Because you’re a TNC on Substack reader, here’s a direct link to download the report as a PDF. Please feel free to share widely.

It’s the latest in our ongoing Consumer Trends series, which has now generated 16 reports. (All of this continues to be inspired, of course, by analyst and investor Mary Meeker’s legendary Internet Trends report.)

• Topics include: Are we at peak protein? What’s the future of beverage?

• A third of Americans say they’re in “optimization mode.”

• And: Is online grocery experiencing a new inflection point in growth?

• More results from our 15th original Consumer Trends survey of 3,000 US consumers, conducted in February, in partnership with Toluna.

I’ll also be exploring many of these topics further for members — join today to receive those and support my work. And we plan to keep this series going. Thanks again for your support.

Questions? Feedback? Want me to present this at your event or to your team? I’m dan@newconsumer.com.

(One more link to the report!)

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer. It’s The New Consumer. What’s on your mind?

I’ve been deep in the weeds this week, finishing up my next Consumer Trends report with Coefficient Capital, our annual food- and grocery-focused slide deck timed to the Expo West conference. Stay tuned for that next week — and say hi if you’re at the show.

Presented by Whatnot

The Live Shopping Update — Live commerce is redefining how consumers discover and shop, and beauty is emerging as one of its biggest breakout categories.

On Whatnot, beauty sales surged 791% in 2025, now representing one of the platform’s fastest-growing verticals. But what’s fueling this momentum? Real-time discovery and exclusivity, with buyers having access to deals on some of the most popular products on the market. From brands like Dior, Chloé, K18, and more, inventory also includes coveted limited-edition products, driving more excitement and engagement than traditional channels.

Today, buyers are watching more than 570,000 hours of beauty shows weekly and purchasing nearly 4,000 beauty items per hour – a pace comparable to stocking a mid-sized beauty retailer every afternoon.

For sellers, the live commerce opportunity is transformative. Joy Nahmani of Danya Beach, Florida (@beautyfinds) grew her account to 300,000+ followers in under a year, becoming the platform’s most-followed beauty channel. She now runs 3-4 shows per day and has sold 500,000+ units, with live selling now accounting for the majority of her revenue.

What’s happening isn’t just the rise of another digital storefront, but a broader retail evolution where shopping is interactive, community-driven, and built around live moments. Beauty is proving especially well-suited to this format, where sellers can easily combine product education and entertainment. Live commerce will no doubt transform how this industry meaningfully connects with consumers in 2026 and beyond.

Explore Whatnot

Sweetgreen is a company where the product, brand, ambition, and operations have never really worked in concert.

Now the salad chain is in a real rut, as shown by its fourth quarter results, released on Thursday.

In Q4 of 2025, its same-store sales declined 11.5% year over year. Worse, its “traffic and mix” — the number of people eating Sweetgreen, and how much they ordered — declined 13.3%. (This was offset by 1.8% in price increases.) This January was also bad, with comp sales down 11.8%, due in part to bad winter weather. Shares are down more than 75% over the past year, and around 90% since its market debut in late 2021.

CHART OF THE DAY

This shouldn’t be happening. We are a nation that’s obsessed with health, wellness, and looks — or at least thinks it is. Sweetgreen, which is best known for its salads and healthy grain bowls, should be winning, not shrinking.

In our latest Consumer Trends survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, two thirds of Gen. Z and Millennials said they agreed that “being healthy and fit is one of today’s biggest status symbols.” And as GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy become more widespread for weight loss — including less invasive pills entering the market — Sweetgreen was supposed to be the fast-casual chain that benefitted the most.

More than a decade ago, when Sweetgreen first expanded to New York, it was really something special: A higher-end, fast-casual take on the deli salad, with great dressings and superb aesthetics that were easily worth the premium. For a while, it was on the forefront of food culture and synonymous with the aspirational desk salad.

But as it tried to scale across the country — and impress investors after going public — quality declined and innovation stalled. The pandemic reprogrammed its core customer base of coastal-elite knowledge workers, which was an added level of difficulty for every restaurant group. But it seems to have been especially tough for Sweetgreen.

After that early optimism faded, it hasn’t been able to figure out its next great product. Instead, it has fallen out of fashion, as shown by the traffic and mix stats.

The reason is simple yet complex: Sweetgreen isn’t as good as it was, and isn’t as good as it could be.

It knows this, and promises that it’s trying to fix this — with co-founder and CEO Jonathan Neman itemizing at least three new change-management projects on its earnings call, each with its own corporate codename. It’s a little sad, and a little corny, for what was once the cool salad brand. But this is the work.

Its latest COO, Jason Cochran, joined last year and seems to have agency: Neman said about two thirds of Sweetgreens are now hitting “great” performance goals; six months ago, two thirds were below standard.

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. How are you?

A few quick plugs: How should restaurants think about tweaking their menus and experiences for the GLP-1 era? I spoke with Expedite’s Kristen Hawley about our new Consumer Trends 2026 research and my thoughts for the restaurant business. Also: Sara Wilson interviewed me about our new data on the creator economy for her Community Catalysts newsletter. And you can check me out on a recent episode of the Aboard podcast talking about AI and a bunch more.

David Protein has become one of the fastest-growing food brands in America by pairing an innovative product that’s tuned to the moment — high-protein, zero-sugar, relatively low-calorie bars — with provocative marketing.

Walking around New York a couple of weeks ago, it was hard to miss David’s new billboard campaign, featuring a lounging Julia Fox: “Men disappoint. David satisfies.”

Now the bigger picture is taking shape. After passing $100 million in sales last year — David’s first full year in the market — co-founder and CEO Peter Rahal is expanding the aperture.

The company plans to add more products and brands to the portfolio as soon as this year, under an umbrella brand called Medici, he told me during a recent visit to David’s headquarters in Manhattan.

Like David, these new brands will feature healthier-leaning, protein-forward products built around EPG, the controversial alternative-fat technology that it acquired last year by merging with its supplier, Epogee.

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I’m excited to announce a new collaboration with Whatnot, the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe. Over the next several months, Whatnot will contribute new data to The New Consumer about what’s working in the fast-growing live commerce market.

Live shopping — e-commerce via live video streams, generally in smartphone apps — is finally getting big in the US, around a decade after taking off in China.

On platforms like Whatnot, every minute of the day, consumers are buying items like sports cards, handbags, electronics, beauty products, and even food from live sellers, who act as expert guides, entertainers, and community leaders. It’s a “content to commerce” model that’s actually scaling — something that eluded earlier attempts by Meta, Amazon, and others.

For a sense of size, the live shopping market reached around $22 billion in North America and Europe last year, Whatnot estimates in its new State of Live Selling Report, more than doubling over the previous year. (In China, it’s approaching $1 trillion, representing an estimated 60% of the e-commerce market there.) Whatnot alone generated over $8 billion in live sales last year, more than doubling year over year. You can download Whatnot’s full report here.

On Thanksgiving Day, while many Americans were watching football, I was tuned into Whatnot. In The Collector Crew channel, more than 500 viewers gathered concurrently to watch as users bid on sports cards auctions — one of Whatnot’s earliest categories — including an Aaron Rodgers rookie card. “This is the most quality I’ve ever had in a show,” the host said. “Let’s make history today.”

“People are coming in, finding community, and geeking out on products,” says Armand Wilson, Whatnot’s VP of Categories and Expansion — a longtime employee responsible for growing the platform beyond its collectibles roots.

“They’re definitely transacting as well,” Wilson says. Whatnot shoppers spend a lot of time in the app — 95 minutes per day, globally, according to the State of Live Selling report — and often make multiple purchases per week.

Whatnot’s sellers are individual entrepreneurs and small business owners, typically organized around a category, like sports cards, sneakers and streetwear, women’s fashion, and electronics. Many start as solo operators; some have scaled into the hundreds of millions of dollars in GMV. One in eight now works selling full-time on Whatnot, up 20% from 2024, the company says.

The growth can be dramatic. A Boca Raton card shop says it went from $40,000 in monthly revenue into the millions after adding live selling to its business model, and expanded from two to 39 employees. But most remain small businesses at heart: 99% of sellers on Whatnot have fewer than 50 employees, according to a recent poll.

What drives success? Just like offline, top live sellers have to put great stores together, featuring interesting and unique merchandise, either offered as auctions — these are very fast on Whatnot, at times lasting just seconds — or in larger lots.

Successful sellers tend to be passionate hosts who know how to build fandom, suspense, hype, and intrigue.

Many sports card sellers use segments called “breaks,” where hosts open packs of sports cards live on the air, with the possibility of unearthing super-rare cards worth millions of dollars. Fresh produce sellers have gone live from the farm, picking fruit that they then ship across the country. For some fashion and jewelry sellers, live shows provide the opportunity to demonstrate different customization options, like colors, textures, and hardware.

Those sellers, at their best, build genuine communities, attracting people who want to hang out in an environment tuned to their interests, whether it’s makeup or Legos. Shoppers often join for the products and then stay for that connection (and the entertainment).

Top sellers are also consistent: US sellers who go live daily generate $69,000 per month in sales, on average, according to Whatnot; that’s around 20 times the sales of those who go live once per week.

And while sports cards and trading card games still lead in volume, the fastest growth is coming from lifestyle categories: Beauty sales grew nearly 800% last year, electronics more than 400%, and jewelry and women’s fashion each more than 200%, according to Whatnot’s report. Wilson is eyeing food and drinks as a big category for 2026; he’d someday like to get into the automotive auction game.

Zooming out, the recent success of live shopping in the US reflects the intersection of multiple trends: A generational shift toward digital-native culture and community; social video as a particularly compelling medium to promote and sell products; the transfer of attention share toward individual creators and away from legacy media brands; and growing interest in entrepreneurship via the creator economy.

Each of these continues to grow, and each is concentrated among younger generations — the shoppers and business owners of the future. (More in the Consumer Trends 2026 report I recently published with Coefficient Capital.)

For instance, in our latest Consumer Trends Survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, more than half of Gen. Z and Millennials — 55% — said they felt most like themselves “online” versus “offline.” A greater portion of Gen. Z and Millennials, 62%, said they felt most connected to others “online.” This was even higher — 77% — among our respondents, across all age groups, who said they used Whatnot at least monthly.

Meanwhile, in our survey, 45% of Gen. Z and Millennials said they consider themselves a “content creator,” whether as a profession, as a hobby, or for fun.

And creators have credibility among many young consumers: 42% of Gen. Z and Millennials in our poll said they trust product recommendations from content creators or social media influencers “much more” or “somewhat more” than from traditional advertising.

Younger Americans also tend to value entrepreneurship more than older generations. When we asked our survey panel to choose among a list of things that are important to their definition of success, twice the proportion of Gen. Z and Millennials selected “Owning your own business / working for yourself” as those Gen. X and older.

So it’s no surprise that young entrepreneurs are looking to social commerce platforms to build businesses online.

On Whatnot, many new sellers are coming from a retail or sales background, Wilson tells me; it helps to have experience selling products and a pipeline for obtaining inventory. But now that live shopping marketplaces can reach a critical mass of customers, they can be compelling complements or alternatives to other types of stores, both online and offline.

“If you’re really into comic books and you buy a bunch of products, sign a lease, decorate the store, build it all up, whatever that investment may cost… And you compare that to opening up a Whatnot account… You can get way more foot traffic than if you’d just opened up a shop in your town,” Wilson says.

You also don’t need to be in a huge city to build a successful business online. On Whatnot, Florida’s suburban corridor — Boca Raton, Delray Beach, Largo — generates more GMV relative to population than major metros, the company says. Mid-sized cities like Rochester, Dayton, and Raleigh “out-earn Los Angeles and Chicago on a per-resident basis,” according to the report.

Live shopping’s US success is still far from replicating China’s trajectory — the markets differ in mobile commerce maturity, social platform integration, and consumer habits. But it’s finally working here, as both buyers and sellers spend more time on live shopping marketplaces.

“We think there’s a part of Whatnot that’s expanding the pie of sellers,” Wilson says, “and giving more access to folks that may not have the capital you need to open a big brick-and-mortar store.”

Stay tuned to The New Consumer for more data and trends from the live shopping market over the coming months.

I’ll be back in New York next week, speaking at the big NRF retail show, along with Tecovas, the fast-growing cowboy boot/Western wear brand, and Consumer Edge. If you’re at the show, please join us! It’d be great to see you there — Tuesday, Jan. 13 at 11:30am.

And now, our year-end-ish tradition for the seventh time… “Instead of a holiday gift guide,” I wrote near the end of 2019, “here are some of the things that made me smarter this year.” After 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 editions, let’s keep that going.

The newsletters I read every time

I continue to spend an oversized portion of my attention budget on email newsletters. I’m talking my own book here, but that direct connection to (and investment in) writers still feels special, even as it has become very common.

In addition to my picks from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019, my open rate is around 100% for the following few that I found (or that launched) this year, in no particular order:

For Starters, the practical and inspirational weekly newsletter “for starting the small business of your dreams,” by former Courier and Monocle journalist Danny Giacopelli.

Food Time with Matt Rodbard, a new newsletter from the Taste editor and prolific host of the This Is Taste podcast (our latest episode here).

Elly Truesdell’s New Fare Partners newsletter, offering an early stage investor’s (and longtime former Whole Foods leader’s) take on the latest in food, restaurants, grocery, and cpg. (Our previous conversation here.)

The Stanza, on the business of boutique hotels and hospitality.

No Filter, on social media and brand marketing, by Kendall Dickieson.

Alex Greifeld’s No Best Practices, on e-commerce marketing.

From Billy Parks (Sorry), on investing in creator CEOs, from the longtime Chernin Group operating partner now working with the Slow Ventures Creator Fund.

99% Derisible, smart ideas around startups, tech, and society from Yoni Rechtman, also a partner at Slow.

The Eastside Rag, hyperlocal, hyperniche, and hyperfraiche from the Eastside of LA, by John Fulton. And: Bite Sized, where to eat in LA, by Kate Ludwig, aka kactus dot jpeg.

I’m also excited for The Angel’s relaunch: editor/writer Emily Wilson moved back to New York last fall and has taken her former LA-focused food newsletter bicoastal, starting with her New York in 25 Restaurants.

The best morning of the year

Perhaps my favorite thing about my job — now 20 years into writing about business and tech — is when an entrepreneur at the top of their craft shows me, in extreme detail, how they make the thing they make and what they do all day.

Whether it’s a startup founder, a chef, or a bag designer, seeing and learning about someone’s creative process is still among the most fun, interesting, and inspiring things I get to do.

So it was a special treat to spend some time in the spring at my favorite saké brewery, Terada Honke, in a small town a couple of hours by train outside of Tokyo.

I’d been following the company for a few years after discovering its Daigo No Shizuku, which, after one sip, completely changed my mind about saké. Unlike the sharp, dry stuff I was used to drinking at sushi bars, Daigo is round, complex, and feels alive.

On a rainy morning, I got to taste a few works in progress with 24th-generation owner Masaru Terada, and learn more about the process of brewing Daigo and its other sakés. Then, lunch next door with some of the team, at Café Ufufu, the company’s fermentation-forward canteen.

I’m ever grateful for your support as a member, which allows me to follow my curiosity and learn about craft and innovation around the world. More soon on Daigo No Shizuku and Terada Honke.

One actual gift idea

I’m hoping to squeeze in a couple of new projects and hobbies this year. So I’m trying a new system where I write a list of the week’s important projects and tasks on paper before adding them to any digital trackers or to-do apps. My hope is that the extra step will help me prioritize and allocate my time better. We’ll see!

Anyway, the tool I’m using is the very neat Snap Pad system by Postalco, one of my favorite design studios. It’s a rigid clothbound pad — I’m using the A5 size — that lets you snap in and out a variety of different paper types, including an extra-fine graph print, steno lined paper in a pleasing green, calendar pages, Moon Lists, and a manilla envelope for storing random stuff. (You can also get a standard two-hole punch and make anything Snap Pad-compatible.)

If you’re ordering direct from Postalco, you should also grab a copy of their new book, Viewpoint in the Fog. Founders Mike and Yuri Abelson are so great describing the how and why of their design process — we did an interview about it a few years ago — and this is a special view into some of their work and thinking. As a bonus, it’s a fun and interesting way to read a book: 15 fold-out sections with photos, sketches, and words in English and Japanese. I love it for the binding alone.

Thank you again for your time, attention, and support over the past year! I’m looking forward to spending 2026 with you. Want to work together? Email me about my Advisory, Consulting, Sponsorship, and Speaking availability: dan@newconsumer.com.

Or, if you had a great year, have some extra budget, received outsized value from my work over the past year, or are feeling generous, you’re always welcome to upgrade to a lifetime membership. I have ambitious plans for this year and beyond, and I’d be incredibly grateful for your upfront investment. Thanks for your support!

I’m excited to share a new Consumer Trends report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital.

This latest Consumer Trends report is a 122-slide presentation that you can view and download for free. Because Substack is a wild land, here’s a direct link to download the report as a PDF. Please feel free to share widely. If you find this useful, please subscribe!

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It’s the latest in our ongoing Consumer Trends series, which has now generated 15 reports. (All of this continues to be inspired, of course, by analyst and investor Mary Meeker’s legendary Internet Trends report.)

• Topics include: The creator economy, from careers and brands to TikTok Shop and OnlyFans. (40% of Gen. Z and Millennials say they’re “extremely” or “very” interested in a career as a professional content creator.)

• A third of Americans say they’re in “optimization mode.” What does that mean?

• GLP-1 users say they feel like a different person — and are shopping like it.

• More results from our 14th original Consumer Trends survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, conducted in November, in partnership with Toluna.

I’ll also be exploring many of these topics further for members. And we plan to keep this series going. Thanks again for your support.

Questions? Feedback? Want me to present this at your event or to your team? I’m dan@newconsumer.com.

(One more link to the report!)

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It was great to see many of you around the city last week, including the excellent New Fare Partners dinner at Una Pizza Napoletana, the Human Ventures / Casa Komos roast for Alex Heath, and Ben Settle’s stylish hang at Undercote. I think I was the first paying Sourmilk yogurt customer at their Happier Grocer retail debut — neat. And as always, major gratitude to my Consumer Trends collaborators at Coefficient Capital for letting me take over their big office table between meetings. We’ll be launching our next big report in a few weeks.

Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs have not torpedoed the food and CPG industries the way some had feared. But they do drive meaningful shifts in users’ spending.

I recently watched a new, hourlong presentation from Circana about GLP-1 users’ changing grocery and retail shopping habits, based on its checkout-scanner and omnichannel shopping data (link to full slide deck).

Here are some of the highlights.

The number of Americans taking GLP-1 drugs continues to grow substantially. There’s no official tally, but Circana believes that 23% of US households — about 30 million — had at least one GLP-1 user in September, suggesting there are tens of millions of users. By 2030, five years from now, it expects GLP-1 households to purchase 35% of food sold in the US (measured by units), up from 24% today.

GLP-1 usage continues to shift toward weight loss and cosmetic/aesthetic/casual/microdosing usage, away from diabetes management. As usage has grown, 78% of GLP-1 users now cite weight loss as a motivating factor for using the drugs, up from 37% in 2021. Meanwhile, 43% cite diabetes as a motivating factor today, down from 75% in 2021. Almost half of users are now “weight only,” twice the proportion as two years ago.

Deli meats are a big winner as GLP-1 users shift their grocery spending toward products high in protein and fiber. Protein is a top food trend for many consumers, but especially for GLP-1 users, who need to preserve muscle mass while losing weight.

The top-gaining categories among active GLP-1 users, as tracked by Circana, include prepared deli meats; snack bars and granola; refrigerated lunches, seafood, and yogurt; beverages, including sports drinks; fresh citrus; gum; and dried meat snacks.

Here’s how to read the data on these slides, btw: The “average pre-GLP baseline index” shows how GLP-1 users’ spending compares to the average US household (100) before they started using the medication. So in the case of deli prepared meats, active GLP-1 users were at 106 to begin — roughly 6% bigger shoppers than the average household. Adding another 8.8 points in a year, then, as they did in the case of deli meat, is pretty significant.

Fries — the great equalizer. Balancing sensible foods with treats, weight-loss focused GLP-1 users over-index in eating protein-rich eggs for breakfast (20% of the time) and chicken for lunch.

But they way over-index in eating fries at lunch (12% of the time) and cookies at dinner. Hey, why not — those calories were earned!

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