Expo West 2026 Trends and Insights

0:00Welcome back to another episode of The Curious Consumer. I'm Nate. I'm Jenna. And we just got back from what everybody's calling the Super Bowl of CPG, the Disneyland of CPG. We just got back from Expo West 2026. It's 45th anniversary, which is crazy. It is the food and beverage and other natural products trade show of the year. This is the big one. It's over 70 ,000 people, nearly 4 ,000 brands exhibiting. It's kind of crazy. Every year I'm like, this is massive. This is crazy. I don't think we can emphasize the scale enough because I always say this, but like numbers mean nothing. I'm like, oh, 3 ,000 brands.

0:43Well, I don't know what that means. But then you see it and you're like, oh, that's insane. We didn't see everything. There's no way. Nowhere close, actually. Yeah. We did see a lot. And we saw a lot of just continuation of trends that we've been seeing throughout the year leading up to this show. Because at the end of the day, this show is brands that we talk about all year round that are doing things all year round that we are covering basically every day. They're showing up in the ways that more or less we expected. We're going to have a video where we explain a little bit more about what Expo West even is and actually speak to exhibitors directly.

1:21But just as a quick painting a picture for people who might not necessarily understand this. Expo West, as we said, is this enormous trade show, but who, who is it? So it's natural products. Expo is the actual name at natural products, Expo West. And the natural in that means that the only brands that can exhibit have to follow, have like certain ingredients, their ingredient standards, basically to exhibit. Basically if they're in whole foods, you're good. So like the Pepsi's of the world are not there. So when we're like every brand is there, every trendy Better For You brand is there for sure.

1:58Well, Pepsi is there, but just not with their Pepsi products. Sure. Okay. Pep, like Poppy was there. Yes. Poppy was there. Smartfoods was there. Yeah. Tropicana was there. True, true, true. But it's all of their like Better For You SKUs. Exactly. Right. Hershey's is not there as Hershey's chocolate. It's there as lesser evil. Yeah. Correct. Exactly. So like you're not seeing Cheetos. on the show floor. And while we mainly focused on the food and beverage of it all, there are also supplements and beauty products as well that are taking up a huge portion of this show too. They're also pet products.

2:34It's really anything that can be categorized as this natural product. And the people who show up are the brands, of course. Sometimes it's the founder themselves, if it's a smaller brand. Oftentimes it's brand ambassadors who are representing the brand or just people who work for the company that are representing the brand in different ways. And then on the show floor are among the 70 ,000 people that are there are people like us. So there is media or press. There's traditional press. So people who are writing for more traditional publications, influencers, so many influencers. So many influencers.

3:07I saw the most influencers I have seen yet. They realize they can get into the show and that it's worthwhile for them this year. Something about it. And lifestyle influencers, like not necessarily food influencers. Then there's also retailers, which for the brands, that's kind of the biggest deal for most of the brands. A really big deal is seeing retail buyers who are scoping out the show floor for new products that they want to buy and put into their stores. There's investors, there's service providers. So think like agencies that work with these brands in some capacity are trying to find new clients among these brands.

3:44Distributors and ingredient suppliers are really big as well. So packaging people, like there's literally like the entire food and beverage and natural product ecosystem from top to bottom. Brands have to pay a lot to exhibit and a lot to show up as a brand, even if they're not exhibiting. Service providers also have to pay a lot to show up. Retail buyers, I think, are free. And distributors, I think, are like negligible. And for the brands that exhibit, they get like, it depends on the size of their booth, but I think they get like up to seven people from the brand that can come as like part of the package.

4:24So a lot of the people there are with a brand for sure. It's the entire ecosystem who goes to this. This is, like I said, the event of the year. Because you're getting everybody in one place and it's not just the products, but it's also the people. And I made a LinkedIn post about this the other day. Like part of the exciting thing is to see all of these people in one place. And it's lovely. And we saw and heard from a lot of listeners of this podcast and viewers of this podcast as well, which was truly wonderful. It was. It was really cool. Thank you so much. If you were one of the honestly many people who saw our jackets that said Express Checkout and you were like, I listen to your podcast.

5:03So fun. Or I read your newsletter or whatever it was. We were pinching ourselves. Really? No way. Freaky. There's no way you listen to our podcast. So thank you if you came up to us and said that. And thank you for being a listener in the first place. It's so lovely to see everybody come together for sure. And for us, that's a lot of the value. But as I said, like the value for brands is really different. A lot of it comes from wanting to get into retail stores and connecting with these buyers. We also spoke to and will release the interviews that we did. We did a lot of awesome interviews with some really cool brand founders and CEOs.

5:38One of the things that even some of the bigger brands said is that they might not be trying to get into more retail doors, but Expo is this fantastic opportunity to just do sampling at mass. So there are 70 ,000 people who are all foodies, for lack of a better term, in one place. And they not only can sample as in just show them their product, but they also can really show their brand world in a way that they can't on shelf. so you're normally just seeing their product on a shelf not in the context of this whole world that they have built around the brand identity and booths really immerse you in what they want their brand world to look like the characters the colors like the vibe so booths as much as the things that we're all sampling and the people that we're meeting are a huge part of this show It's almost like an art show in that way.

6:32I know that sounds silly, but you are like going from exhibit to exhibit of these booths that are full visual representations of these brands. Yeah. Not all of them. Some of them are just a table and tablecloth, which is great. Depends what you can afford. Yeah. Depends what you can afford. But for a lot of the brands we talk to with very extravagant booths like Goodles and Poppy. Chobani. And Chobani had a crazy booth. booth for those brands, like it's, Chobani's everywhere already. They don't necessarily need to be talking to the target buyer or anything. I think it's beneficial for them to continue to have that FaceTime, but we were talking to them and one of the things they said was like, we're reintroducing our acquisitions to the world that we've acquired Daily Harvest, that we acquired La Cologne.

7:18Not everybody realizes that. I watched a TikTok where somebody was talking about the Chobani booth and they're like, oh, they were serving La Cologne. Like it was a separate company. And I was like, right. Like a lot of people, even people within the industry don't always know this stuff. And it's our job to know it. Like there's no value judgment if you don't, but Chobani owns Daily Harvest and La Cologne. And this was a great opportunity for them to reshare that fact and show the integration of the brands in a physical setting. And another thing with Chobani specifically is, so their whole booth looked like a soccer stadium.

7:53It was incredible. But that was because they were showcasing the fact that they are sponsors of the U.S. soccer team for the World Cup this year. This incredible partnership that I'm sure they're pouring more money than we can comprehend into. And someone who's not watching the World Cup might not know that. And so this is a really great opportunity to milk some of those other partnerships that they're working on by exposing a different audience to them. Yeah, and having it show up in a physical world, like a press release would not have the same impact as that booth. And they told us, I'm pretty sure that was the largest booth at the show.

8:30Yes. It felt like it. It had literal stadium lights. It had stadium seating. Like, everything. It was insane. It was great. The show overall, this is something we said in the newsletter, and I've been saying to people who've been asking me, despite the extravagant nature of that booth and some of the booths who were saying, this is a much more sensible show than in years past. It didn't feel as crazy as it has to me, at least in the past three years that I've gone. And everything felt very on brand for what I would have expected there to be this year. Caveat to that is this is also our job that we track this stuff all year round.

9:09But I feel like in previous years, companies have leaned into much more niche ingredients or much more niche trends that weren't as widely adopted. This year, it felt a lot more sensible, both in terms of who was there, the things that they were exhibiting. We even saw fewer collaborations between brands that I feel like we saw a lot of last year. I think it's a mixture of brands are focused on profitability and sustainable growth. The funding environment has shifted for a lot of brands. It's becoming, the goalposts have shifted for the funders, putting money into the brands. So they're focused on different things now.

9:50And there was also a lot of anti-Expo rhetoric online. It was very thoughtful anti-Expo rhetoric. It wasn't like Expo was the worst thing ever, but it was like, hey, like it wasn't right for us. Here's why it wasn't right for us. Here's why it might not be right for you at your current stage. I think Sarah Nguyen put out a really good LinkedIn post sometime in the past year talking about this. And I thought that was a really thoughtful piece that I think a lot of younger founders especially need to hear. Like if you just launched your brand, unless you can swing a free booth, there's probably better ways for you to show up walking, co-exhibiting with somebody else.

10:27It's really hard and expensive. Yeah. I mean, for context on that, I think the cheapest booth you can possibly get is$30 ,000. Is that right? So I believe it's like for like a corner booth in one section, it could be like 5K, but that's for like a legitimate corner. Yeah. And for just the space, it's maybe 10K for a 10 by 10. But on top of that, it gets to 30K really quickly. You're flying people out. You're flying products out. You're flying product out. You're flying product back out as well. You're building and designing the booth. You're getting merch. You're sending the people. You're having the people having to stay somewhere.

11:10You're eating. There's a lot of hidden costs to this. It's not just, oh, it's a 10K booth. Yeah. Yeah, it's a 10K booth plus$20 ,000 of other expenses that you're not seeing yet. And the expectation for some of these brands that are already fairly ubiquitous in terms of retail distribution is to have a pretty large booth. And we spoke to one founder who chose not to exhibit of a brand that's pretty well distributed. And actually, I can just say it, right? We spoke to YC from Hero Bread. They didn't decide to exhibit. And the reason was because he was like, if we wanted to show up in a way that we felt actually reflected the scale of what we've built, our booth would have been at least$100 ,000.

11:55So like we're talking six figures plus easily for a lot of these brands. Like it's just not the best financial decision for everyone. So I think you're right. Like people were a little bit more vocal about that in a great way. I think there is so much weird pressure and expectation for a lot of these founders that they need to show up or exhibit and they're not considered a legitimate brand if they're not exhibiting. And that's just not true. Also, a lot of brands, and we'll talk about this, we're going to put it on Friday, some of our favorite bites and sips from the show. Some of my favorite bites and sips were brands that were not exhibiting.

12:32Things that people just found me and handed me product. So there are ways to be really scrappy. An example I'm thinking of is the founder of Cotto, which is this cottage cheese dip company. She's really early. She just launched a few months ago, I think. She wore a cooler backpack and just handed people samples while she came across them. So there are ways that you can show up without having to actually have a booth, and that's really smart. But back to your point of this felt like a more sensible show, I think it's really interesting because it's very hard for us at this point to parse out whether it actually was more sensible or if we are getting more used to it.

13:10Even to your point of being like nothing, like there weren't any crazy flavors or whatever. I mean, I think that in general, not just us, but the consumer palette has evolved so much. Like we are more used to global flavors. We'll get to this a little bit more later. So true. TikTok has made some traditionally foreign flavors to the American consumer completely normal. Matcha, for instance, we might have thought was crazy five years ago, and now it is everywhere. One, it's about us adapting what we think is normal. And two, it's also about the consumer being exposed to like wackier flavor profiles and non-American flavor profiles a lot more than they used to.

13:49So I think it's like really hard for us to parse it out, but I do think it was a more sensible show in a lot of the ways that you mentioned still. and one of the things we talked about ourselves is it also felt a little bit less in your face political so last year there was a maha or make america healthy again rfk's campaign booth like just a book which is really rare for a movement to have a booth usually it's brands so there was a maha booth last year there were a lot of people wearing like maha merch and it felt very divided on the show floor, I would almost say, of you're with this movement or you're not.

14:29This year, there were undertones of that for sure, but it was definitely quieter. I think it was more implicit. So there were a lot of no seed oil call outs, which has become political. But I said this to the newsletter, there was less telling and more showing. Like it wasn't just like, this is what we believe. It was more like, these are our ingredients. So that felt a little less loud than it did last year. I think another side of that, and this is something that I've been talking to founders about this year, is there are a lot of brands and founders who have products and have desires for their products that ultimately do sit in within the Maha movement, but they themselves are not aligning with that movement.

15:12Absolutely. And I think this is an effect of that aspect of it where people are like, I want to remove X or I want to add X, but I don't want to align with this. So they're just going to just do it. And the people who maybe they don't personally align with on a political or social level, they'll come by, they'll buy their product. But they're really trying to target the people who want this quote unquote better for you product that happened to align with a political party that they don't align with. I think it's also a part of that too where it's like a cognizant effort to be like hey people clearly want this but we don't need to align ourselves with something that we personally don't vibe with but yeah plenty of seed oil free stuff plenty of beef tallow I will say one of my favorite bites might have been the steak and shake beef tallow fries you're allowed to have you're allowed to like it I mean yeah with that why don't we just get into some of the themes that we saw and we can start with what I called this new era of fats.

16:14I think we're talking a lot about beef tallow. We're talking a lot about avocado oil without recognizing that every year there's some fat that's like the fat of the moment. I remember ghee used to be like so big. Coconut oil and MCT oil were so big. All three of those were pretty big in like keto era, I would say, but still trickled a little bit later. And then olive oil was really big last year because Graza, I would say. Graza's rise to success really uplifted the whole olive oil category. And this year, didn't see much olive oil. Saw almost no coconut oil. No one's talking about coconut oil.

16:54No one's talking about ghee. No one's really talking about butter. It's beef tallow and avocado oil. Yes. So I think it's definitely about the demonization of seed oils. There is no doubt. Anywhere that it said this product has beef tallow, it also said no seed oils. Those went hand in hand. But it's interesting because olive oil is also not a seed oil. Coconut oil is also not a seed oil. Butter is not a seed oil. So why these two? I think beef tallow is pretty political and it's hard to separate. A lot of beef tallow's rise to fame came from this storytelling around how McDonald's used to use it, and now they don't.

17:36And I know the president of this nation talked about that a lot. And that, I really think, is how beef tallow became this hero fat. Yeah, probably some beef lobby thing as well. I think a key thing for all of these oils, especially to your point that olive oil is not a seed oil. Like where's the olive oil? Why are we seeing more avocado oil? I'm sure there's some supply chain thing that maybe we're not seeing, but I think it's a perceived health benefit is really what it is at the end of the day. It leans into marketing. Like maybe it tastes a little bit better. Maybe it doesn't. But I think it's a perceived health benefit of having no seed oils or having avocado oil.

18:21It's all about the marketing, the perceived benefit. it. For the beef tallow stuff, I'm going to say beef lobby. There's probably something with the beef lobby going on. This is America. We love a lobby. We love a lobby. Love a lobby. No, you're totally right. I think another theme and trend that we saw around the show that aligns the fats and the seed oils of it all is this concept of real ingredients and few ingredient call-outs everywhere in everything from chips to just yogurts, which I hope my yogurt is just a few ingredients. This is why I don't buy Yoplait much anymore. This is why I'm getting a Painter and Sisters or a Sour Milk.

19:02But a lot of real ingredient and few ingredient call-outs literally across the board, which again, this is people wanting different types of better for you. Because better for you in the past was like, hey, we're going to make this thing, but make it low sugar and that was it but it still had a bunch of ingredients and that stuff still exists but now i think people are like we just can you just give me like some dairy some meat just like something simple and easy we saw a lot of meat sticks on the show this is new primals rotisserie chicken flavored meat stick which i was very excited to get and to try but i think a reason we're seeing so many meat sticks at the show and i'll link a reel that i saw that this woman found like over a hundred different meat sticks at the show is because of yes, it's processed.

19:47Obviously it's a meat jerky stick, but it's simple. Like I know what I'm getting. I know what it is. There's no complexity there. And I think, and a few of the other trends that we're going to talk about, the undertone of those trends is still this like few ingredient or quote unquote real ingredients overall theme. I mean, there's a lot, a lot there of just the recent rhetoric around, I think chem phobia has a big place in this of people being concerned with seeing certain ingredients on their ingredient label, but also so fair to want to only have a few ingredients closer to the source of whatever it is that you're eating.

20:26And I think one place that we definitely saw that show up was one of the trends that like, I was not expecting in the slightest, which was that eggs were a trend. Oh, I love this one. And this is a huge thing with, again, this like few ingredient, real ingredient, because they were just literally eggs. I'm not talking about eggs being the main ingredient in something. I'm talking about just egg products, although we also did see a few brands where eggs were the main ingredient, like egg life. There were some egg chips. But one of the first bites that we actually had at the show was a jammy egg, which like a packaged jammy egg, which I think it's the first ever packaged soft boiled egg by this brand called Chino Valley Ranchers.

21:14And this is a single ingredient innovation. It's just taking eggs, one ingredient and cooking it in a certain way and putting it in a package in a certain way that makes it a ready to eat product. And then we just kept seeing more eggs. Like there were quail, more than one quail eggs I saw, which is really interesting. I know there were poached eggs. I spoke to a representative of a brand called Kipster, which is an egg company that is coming in from the Netherlands. And their whole shtick is that the chickens essentially live in a playground. They had pictures all over of their chickens, honestly, living a better life than I do.

21:55So love that. But this is a mix of storytelling around, one, this single ingredient piece, and two, around this family farm, knowing where your food comes from, piece that I think a lot of consumers are really interested in, especially coming off of Vital Farms recently. had a big scandal, basically critiquing the sourcing of these eggs. And so people care a lot about sourcing. They care a lot about the storytelling around it. Obviously, protein is playing a big role here as well because eggs are a protein source. They are a whole ingredient protein source. And so when people are growing more skeptical over added protein and products, they might be seeking out more of these single ingredient protein sources.

22:45So that's on eggs. That's on eggs. We've never seen so many eggs. I don't know if I've ever seen eggs at Expo. At Expo? No. At Fancy Food? Sure. But that's a whole different ballgame. But my God, there were a lot of eggs. And luckily, a lot of them were very good, which I really – They were good. I really like that jammy egg, honestly. I think about that jammy egg a lot. I would buy that. I would buy that. And the people behind them were so nice. They were like, yeah, it's our family farm. And I was like, that's so cool. I mean, that's what I love about Painterland Sisters. That's what I love about Lundberg family farms.

23:22I also think from like a marketing standpoint, being like, hey, this is like our family's farms products. People are like, oh, okay, cool. I'll pay a little bit more. I'll give it a little bit more attention. It's a way to get a little bit more consumer love. it's also like america kind of has become so anti-farmer because of corporate greed to be honest so it's really nice to just see just real like americana kind of things which is like family owned farms that is when you picture america it's a family owned farmer somewhere in the middle of the country it's just it's cool to see i think you can you know that it's a better product you feel that it's a better product because of where it's coming from because you know where it's coming from.

24:07It's this interesting phenomenon of consumers wanting to get closer to the source. And I think you're totally right that a lot of this comes from skepticism around corporate greed and just big companies, big food people are trying to pull away from. It's interesting what the catalyst was for this, the message that ended up being sold more to get people closer to family farms was a message around health more than anything else. I think people feel like they're being healthier when they know everything about where their product comes from. When, from my perspective, eating local was part of the sustainability rhetoric for much longer, but people weren't listening to that message.

24:53No, people don't care about sustainability and it's so sad. It's so sad. So it's one of those like horseshoe moments where I actually think this is a little bit more not to get political about it again but i do think this stems from more like right-wing beliefs of caring about your individual health and therefore caring about the source of something as opposed to the more like left-wing sustainability perspective but it all comes around to the same result so i'm happy that it's happening regardless right but it's one of those very interesting political phenomenons no and i i think a lot of the trends that we're seeing like obviously they roll up to real ingredients few ingredients like that kind of thing like that might be the overarching trend in general that we're seeing.

25:32But the other side is like, okay, what can it do for me? Not what can it do for us? And I think that's why sustainability and a lot of the rhetoric around that just doesn't work. It's because Americans are very individualistic despite patriotism. We're a very individualistic nation, all in all. And that leads into how we buy things and how we consume things. And I think to your point, the switch up from sustainability to, oh, this will make you healthy or will shift your health, that makes sense that that has worked and has stuck around so prominently. And like this is why like I think protein and fiber are like not really going to go away other than those trends obviously being very tangible trends to people like protein gives me muscles if you work out and fiber makes me poop better.

26:24If you also eat a full diet, it's personal. It's not for the masses. And I think that's why we're seeing some of these trends also just last a little bit longer is because the positioning has been about you, not us. Exactly. Exactly. But again, if it leads to the same outcome, it is what it is. It's the ultimate example of I always think about I was a marketing minor and I always think about I was told that the best way to think about a marketing campaign is WIIFM. What's in it for me? Or sales. Same thing with sales. Basically, you need to communicate what's in it for the person who's listening or reading or consuming whatever it is that you're advertising.

27:04This is the way that it's working. Exactly. Is that people need to understand how it works for them. And I'm just happy that it landed here, even if it's a little bit circuitous. Hopefully it'll still be net good. I think it will. And I think a lot of the people who are producing these products come from wanting net good. They want to change the food system. It isn't about them. but from a consumer lens, it needs to be a little bit about them. But yeah, let's get into the fiber and protein of it all because we knew that was going to be a theme of the show. That was no question. We have been talking about fiber maxing and protein maxing for the last year.