There’s little doubt that consumers are more focused on their overall well-being than they have been in the past. But they’re doing much more than simply eating healthy and getting to the gym. Whether striving to eat organic or pledging to meditate four times a week, consumers’ individual efforts to improve their lives and to be healthful are as divers e as the consumers themselves. But amid the varied approaches people take on the road to well-being, one trend is becoming universal: Consumers are paying more attention to what they buy—and that goes for foods, beverages and non-food categories like personal care, vitamins and supplements.
Today, the “why” and “how” behind the products have become as important as the product itself, oftentimes becoming the primary decision-making criteria that drives a purchase. This has added an entirely new layer of complexity to the way fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies develop and market their products to consumers.
The industry has clearly been focusing on transparency efforts across the store, and has made a push for clean label products across categories. That said, despite the growing use of the term “clean” to describe products across the FMCG space, there is no universally accepted definition for what constitutes a clean product. However, in order to provide some analytical rigor to this term and to understand how sales have shifted toward cleaner products, Nielsen and Label Insight have created a progressive definition of clean label, shown in the chart below.
