Sustainability consumer trends overview
- Sustainability matters to many consumers, but affordability often dominates
- Taste and price remain stronger purchase drivers than sustainability
- Sustainable packaging attracts greater consumer interest than regenerative agriculture
- More than half of EU consumers find sustainable food expensive
- Environmental concerns may grow as climate impacts increasingly affect prices
How important is sustainability to consumers? This is a question that has long shaped how new food products present themselves to the world.
Any food manufacturer embarking on sustainability measures, or at least those that they publicise, must understand how these measures will be perceived, and whether they will truly affect sales.
Is sustainability central to purchasing decisions? Do consumers count environmental impact alongside price, taste and nutrition as a factor that will decide whether or not they purchase food?
For some consumers, perhaps. But for many, sustainability remains an afterthought.
Sustainability remains a concern for some consumers
Many consumers still care about sustainability, at least in theory.
Around 40% of consumers want to eat foods with the least impact on the environment, according to a 2026 survey by analytics company Statista, with 36% aiming to eat more products labelled as ‘sustainable’.
Around one in five consumers are influenced by sustainability labels and claims, and around half that number say they will pay more for it, explains Tom Rees, global insights manager at analytics platform Euromonitor International.
Yet, he points out, pressing concerns such as affordability can “eat into” consumers’ ability to prioritise often expensive sustainable food.
Affordability, not sustainability, is front-of-mind for consumers
During current tough economic conditions, consumers prioritise not sustainability but taste and, above all, price.
“The truth is that the vast majority of consumers do not care enough about sustainability to actually alter their food and drink habits”, says Jonny Forsyth, principal strategist for food and drink at analytics company Mintel.
This is even less of a factor when buying groceries as other CPG goods, he explains, as sustainability is less “front-of-mind” for consumers in this case than for other product categories.
Taste and, above all, price remain the key factors influencing product purchase, stresses Mintel’s Forsyth. They are more than three times as important as sustainability for consumers. For example, in Germany 69% of consumers rank price as important and 66% view taste this way, yet only 21% give the same importance to environmentally-friendly products.
Price is indeed a major barrier to sustainable consumption. According to Statista data, more than 50% of EU respondents said that sustainable food is too expensive.
“The ongoing period of higher food prices has created what we might call ‘a lens of affordability’; the concept that affordability above all is what consumers think about when they are purchasing food”, says Euromonitor’s Rees.
Consumers are still feeling the pinch of cost of living, Forsyth explains. In these circumstances, abstract ideals such as sustainability are secondary to concrete, tangible benefits such as taste and price.
Meanwhile, many consumers are cynical about business efforts towards sustainability, with greenwashing practices prominent in many consumers’ minds.
What elements of sustainability do consumers care about the most, and least?
Different areas of sustainability attract different levels of concern from consumers.
Mintel’s data also shows that few consumers agree that environmentally friendly agriculture, such as regenerative agriculture, is very important. Only 31% of French consumers aged over 16 agree, compared with 22% in the UK and 16% in Norway.
By contrast, one area of sustainability that consumers do care about is packaging. “When it comes to sustainable practices, many consumers consider sustainable or recyclable packaging an important element of being environmentally conscious”, says Sára Pálfy, insights analyst at Statista,
More than 75% of consumers in Europe choose recycled, less attractive packaging, and more than 60% consider whether packaging is eco-friendly.
Locality is also important for consumers. According to Statista, around 35% of Gen Z consumers in Europe choose locally grown produce and products with sustainability labels.
However, in the view of Mintel’s Forsyth, the popularity of local food “owes more to the spirit of protectionism that always surfaces in economic downturns, as well as consumers prioritising fresh produce, than it does to altruism.”
The future of sustainability
Have the wildfires and droughts that assailed Europe in 2026 affected consumers’ attitudes towards sustainability?
It’s too early to say, explains Forsyth. However, he points out, in 2025, wildfires and droughts seen in that year did not have a substantial effect on how consumers thought about sustainability. It remained an “afterthought”. Therefore, he says, “any influence on consumer attitudes is likely to have been incremental at best.”
If food marketing is able to link high temperatures and low rainfall to non-sustainable food choices, this may cut through to consumers in the future, suggests Rees.
“But it may not be the disruption or new proximity of events such as forest fires that move spending power, rather it may be the resulting cost of food.”
Of course, crop yields have been pushed down by recent droughts, and the effect this may have on price, Rees suggests, could be what persuades consumers to take sustainability into greater account.
In the future, Forsyth predicts the return of sustainability as environmental crises get more frequent, albeit helped along by brands and governments.
“I expect to see sustainability 2.0 become much more influential in the late 2020s and early 2030s as more ‘future problems’ become ‘present crises’. However, brands and governments will need to incentivise consumers to choose eco-friendly products.
“Consumers will not lead this change and will ultimately vote with their wallets and their stomachs.”
In short, while there is interest in sustainability in some categories, such as packaging and locality, overall consumers continue to prioritise taste and price.
