London Packaging Week 2026 : What’s Next in the Functional Food Market

In our conversation, we looked at a number of key themes, all focusing on one key concern: that functional claims have become interchangeable, a predictable stage in a much bigger shift, one in which consumers no longer buy a product’s ingredients but a route to a better version of themselves. 

Jono kicked us off with a reality check:

Is functional health a genuine shift or the latest industry trend?

And the panel answered – a bit of both.

According to the Global Wellness Institute’s Global Wellness Economy Monitor 2025, the wider wellness economy – which spans sectors such as wellness real estate, spas and tourism, not just functional food, drink and supplements – hit £5.1 trillion ($6.8 trillion, €6 trillion) in 2024, up 7.9% year on year, and has outgrown global GDP for more than a decade.

The wider wellness economy hit £5.1 trillion ($6.8 trillion, €6 trillion) in 2024, up 7.9% year on year.

McKinsey & Co’s Future of Wellness research finds that two-thirds of Gen Z and Millennials in the US, the UK and Germany bought a functional nutrition product in the past year. That is real.

But Mintel finds new functional food and drink launches peaked in 2019–2020 and have plateaued since across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and Euromonitor’s Vitamins in the United Kingdom Market report finds that combination supplements have overtaken standalone vitamins in UK growth as fortified food and drink eat into their share rather than add to the pool.

The shift is genuine: the boom has plateaued, not collapsed.

The panel concluded that the functional claim has clearly become an entry ticket, not a differentiator. Distinctiveness is legally defensible, a functional claim is not – beyond time-limited patent protection. We argued that a brand competing on claims alone is one Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruling away from losing the only asset it thought it owned.

Next, we discussed the rise of the functional consumer. The consumer has moved from passive consumption to buying outcomes, and the data is clearest when observing Gen Z. Ocado and Savanta data, tracked by The Future Laboratory, shows that health drink sales on Ocado were up 54% year on year in 2025, kefir up 30% and kombucha up 22%.

The same tracking finds that 40% of the general population now buy functional drinks several times a month, rising to 61% among Gen Z, and that 60% of Gen Z have cut back on alcohol in the past year, with 49% saying they have replaced alcohol, soft drinks or energy drinks with functional drinks entirely.

Research by Tastewise finds that 37% of consumers use functional food specifically for health, and Tastewise’s follow-up research finds that consumers now rank specific health benefits above sustainability, seeking granular specificity even in an already-functional category such as energy drinks.

Category lines are blurring exactly as the panel discussed. Euromonitor research, cited in our Beauty Futures 2025 report, finds that 50% of global consumers now define beauty as ‘looking healthy’, that active ingredient searches grew 229% in 2021, and that active ingredients comprised 70% of the most-searched beauty products that year.

37% of consumers use functional food specifically for health

An interesting talking point was that consumers are not newly virtuous, they are newly demanding. And the behaviour lags behind the sentiment badly.

Mintel research shows that fewer than half of US consumers interested in anti-ageing functional drinks actually drink them, and that roughly 70% of Americans still drink conventional soft drinks regularly, compared with more than one in 10 who drink functional beverages regularly.

PwC’s 21,075-person global survey finds 62% cite ultra-processed food as their biggest concern, yet only 35% actively avoid it.