Introduction of new food and drink products in the UK: is there a trend towards more sustainability?

Manufacturers and retailers are major influences in shaping consumers’ food preferences and choices through a variety of activities such as the distribution formats they create, the ways they operate them and the new food and drink products that they introduce. This paper focuses on the UK food and drink market and its purpose is to explore the role of retailers and manufacturers, as agents of change, when introducing food and drink products with sustainability attributes. In particular the following questions were investigated: whether there is trend as regards food and drink products with sustainability related claims in the UK market and what companies are leading the introduction of new products with sustainable claims and in what categories. The data analysed in this paper were extracted from Mintel’s Global New Products Database (GNPD), which provides information about new products launched in selected countries. The data was subject to a statistical analysis to answer the two aforementioned questions. The analysis revealed that products with sustainability claims show a positive trend, with ‘environmentally friendly package’ being the most popular claim. Overall, the results indicate that the sustainability message is increasingly present in the development of new products of retailers and manufacturers in the UK and retailers through their private labels are playing an important role except for the case of products with carbon neutral calims