Highlight Showcase 2025: From Gifts to Groceries
In this session of Highlight Showcase 2025, join Highlight’s Senior Digital & Content Manager, Chelsea Stone, as she shares insights from our second annual proprietary research on grocery shopping habits, discretionary spending, and shifting consumer budgets through the end of 2025 and beyond. Learn how ongoing economic uncertainty is shaping choices — from day-to-day essentials to seasonal splurges — and what these trends mean for businesses and brands moving forward.
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Automated webinar transcript
Chelsea Stone: Hi everybody. We're just gonna give everyone a, a minute or two more to join and then we're gonna kick things off. I hope everyone has had an amazing day. I have really enjoyed these sessions. I've gotten nice and cozy of my seat watching all these sessions. I can't believe it's my turn to go now.
Alright, I think we're at critical mass here, so we're gonna jump right into your final session of Highlight Showcase 2025. Thank you so much for joining us, not just to this final session, but this whole day. I have, I always learned so much from our panelists and our customers who join us. So, can't appreciate our gratitude enough for, for joining today. So in this final session, we are going to look at I mean, perhaps I'm biased but I think it's my favorite session of showcase, the original research that we source from our community of highlighters across the country. This year we're looking at the same topic we looked at last year, consumer sentiment currently, and how we expect that to evolve as we move into the holiday season here.
But what's particularly exciting about this year is that we have last year's data as well. So we're gonna look at year over year changes. So we're gonna kick things off first by. I'm telling you who I am. Quick little intro. My name is Chelsea Stone. I am Senior Manager of Digital and Content Marketing here at Highlight.
So I have the great privilege of pulling original research from our highlighter community on a regular basis but also I get to moderate sessions like this one quite often. So if you wanna find, not just my sessions, but all of our past sessions, please visit our website at let'shighlight.com, go to our resources menu, and then if you look under eBooks, webinars and more you'll find these in many more.
So I was lucky enough back in Earth month in April to moderate the session on sustainable product development, especially in the beauty and personal care space with special guest Sarah Trawczynski of Billie, a brand that I use and love. And Kailey Bradt, who is CEO of Sonsei Skin, Pamela Anderson's vegan cruelty-free skincare brand and also co-founder of Beauty Accelerator Syndeo.
Back in June, I was also lucky enough to present the original research with my colleague Emma Steele, who if you don't follow her on LinkedIn please go to LinkedIn right now. Open it in a separate tab. She's always posting great thought leadership on the CPG space, and she was kind enough to join me for this session where I presented original data that was trying to predict the beverage flavor of the summer.
Of course now it's October, but I still recommend going back and looking at this. It's not just insights on what flavors were popular at the moment, but all sorts of insights on shopper behaviors. We talk a lot about what we'll get into a little bit later called Treat Yourself culture. So still super relevant even though summer has come and gone.
Before we jump in, I just wanna give you a quick idea. I know I've been using the term highlighter. For those of you that don't know highlighter is the name that we affectionately use for members of our nationwide community. We are over 60,000 nationwide, and we are picky. We pride ourselves on a lower acceptance rate than average because we are so set on finding folks who are earnest, dedicated, and articulate in their responses.
So, for example, our admission survey will contain things like red herring questions to make sure that folks are actually reading the questions and choosing answers carefully. We have open-ended questions to make sure that folks aren't just saying, no, I don't like this product, but in fact are saying, no, I don't like this product because of X, Y, and Z.
Giving us those really valuable rich verbatims that our customers have come to values so much. Excuse me. We're also able to look at really targeted consumer groups, which is exciting. Of course, we grow our community to reflect the general population, but we've also found we have more and more customers who are interested in speaking to niche consumer audiences.
So last we did some math and found that we can actually target all the way down to 3% incidence rate in the population, so that's pretty cool. One thing that I also love about working with our group of highlighters is the fact that, of course, I think our customers find their verbatims and responses and feedback so invaluable.
But I love that our highlighters love the process as well. It really does feel like a process that's mutually beneficial. For us, of course, on the innovation side, it's incredibly value to know that we're going to develop and put products into the marketplace that are gonna succeed and not end up in landfills for the highlighters as consumers themselves, they really feel like they have some sense of control over their destiny, that they have some feedback in this process process and that they're able to say what it is their needs are and assist companies in meeting those.
So it's a really, really cool and special process to be a part of. Before we jump into the data, I just want to give you an idea of who we're hearing from today. So the group of folks that we heard from are of course pulled from this community I just introduced you to. They're all highlighters.
Last year we surveyed just over 1600 folks. This year we had a slightly bigger pool of 2000 plus. And like last year just over half of them live in a single income household. We also saw some changes year over year. Last year we had sort of a bigger middle represented, whereas this year we're closer to a third and a third and a third when it comes to representation of total household income which was nice to see.
And to be clear, well today for our purposes, I divided these total household income categories up. This way you can actually grade eight further when you're doing your research in the highlight platform. For example, if you're going after high net worth consumers, you can segment by those with household incomes over 300,000, for example.
So this is just the way that I have set up that for today. We also saw some change in the ages of folks who responded in this. Gave me a lot of joy because for us it was a sign of hard work paying off. So what do I mean by that? Well, first of all, you can see that a majority was and still remains millennial and Gen X respondents, which doesn't surprise me, given that I'm myself am an older millennial, as they say, a second older millennial presenting today.
And it makes sense that we would represent the majority of respondents, right? Many of us are parents of young children. We are homeowners, right? We're in our prime earning years. So we're making a lot of those household financial decisions like grocery shopping. But what was really cool to see this year is we saw a market increase in the number of baby boomer respondents, and we even saw some silent generation respondents.
That is such a testament to the work that our community team is doing to make our response process, our feedback process as easy and user friendly as possible. Our app is so cool and it has gotten even better over this past year to make it really easy and accessible for respondents to provide their feedback.
And then what's really, really cool to see is Gen Alpha creeping up. So they're not just, well, I guess many of them are teenagers still, but we, for this particular survey asked folks 18 and up. So on the lowest end of that, that age scale we had a few members of Gen Alpha participate. So that was really exciting to see, especially as it's an increasingly important group of consumers.
In fact we have more and more customers coming to us asking for insights from this particular set of consumers and future consumers. And we're able to facilitate that by talking to their parents and asking their parents to assist with, with survey responses. And we've seen some really cool research come out of that.
Alright, without further ado, let's jump into what these folks actually said. Question number one that we kicked off with was compared to this time last year, how have your stress levels related to money changed? And what we saw here was consistency. So while last year, 66% of respondents said they were more stressed 65% said the same exact thing in 2025.
So it's interesting, right? It it could mean that there is consistent levels of money stress. It could mean that there is a consistent proportion of folks in the population who have stress related to money. But it's encouraging to see consistent responses. And likewise, when it comes to asking about groceries specifically, we asked, are you more or less concerned about the cost of groceries?
We saw the same consistency. So while 81% of respondents were more concerned about the cost of groceries last year. This year we saw 80% expressing concern over the cost of groceries. So again, we see this consistently, consistency. Luckily it's not spiking, but it does perhaps reflect the new normal that we as, as a society are all trying to wrap our heads around.
Right? I think from the innovation side, of course we feel we, we understand the inputs that are driving so much of these price increases. But of course, as shoppers ourselves, all of us we, we experience that every time we go to the grocery store to do our weekly shops. So the data that you're seeing right here is actually key research comparing prices from January, 2020 to August, 2025.
Had to give a shout out to eggs. We all know the roller coaster that eggs have been on in terms of prices. But as you can see, overall average of 28% increase across all aisles in the grocery store since 2020. It's nothing to sneeze at. And even though it's been a couple of years now that is still a reality that a lot of us are grappling with and coming to terms with.
So that could be what our, our numbers here are reflecting. We also saw that year over year there were some changes. Last year. We, we asked folks if they are making fewer just for fun purchases, and 63% said that was the case. This year we saw that jump up to 70% are, are making fewer just for fun purposes.
Purchases. Excuse me. When we ask what folks are doing to save money it appears they're doing less. So we see that fewer just for fun purchases rank as the number one most common response. But that was the only one that increased year over year. Right? In every other category, we actually see these numbers go down slightly.
So to clarify the categories you're seeing here on screen one tactic could be changing the way that you grocery shop. Another could be canceling subscriptions. Another could be looking for new streams of revenue, a new job or new side gigs. Hustles could be buying secondhand or used or canceling vacations or stopping usage of your credit card.
So it's interesting to see that these numbers across the board have dropped slightly. There could be a couple reasons for this. One could be like we were just talking about folks. Are adjusting to their new normal, right? So perhaps the pressure that we're feeling to adjust our spending habits and our household finances and budgets we're all settling into new habits already.
Another cause of this could be that. If you are trying to make improvements to your household budget, there are only so many levers that you can pull, right? And if you have, for example, already canceled all of the subscriptions that you can reasonably part with and, and you're down to just the ones that you really need, you can't cancel any more subscriptions, right?
So, next year what I'm really looking forward to doing is adding a qualitative component to questions like these in the survey. And that's what I would recommend to anyone using the Highlight platform to do, right? We, we primarily ask quantitative questions in the survey, but to really understand the, the drivers of these behaviors that we're seeing demonstrated here or stated here we would have to actually add some open-ended responses to get some great verbatims.
We can add video responses with the Highlight platform. We can even schedule in-depth interviews to have one-on-one conversations with respondents to see what it is. That's, that's driving responses like this one. So look forward to that and Highlight Showcase 2026, but also remember that it's a great component to add to your own tests that you run inside the Highlight platform.
Likewise with groceries, we are seeing a similar story. Folks are doing slightly less across the board to relieve the stress they feel from increased grocery shops. So again, just to clarify the categories you're seeing here on screen folks very popularly are still using promotions, discounts, and coupons, so that's a nice takeaway for anyone in a grocery aisle.
The only category we, we saw here that actually increased year over year was that folks are switching to store brand which is very interesting and not surprising given the headlines that we have all been seeing the past couple, couple of years, we've seen this reflected in our own research again and again.
The power of private label holds firm. That is for sure. And we saw that reflected once again in this year's data. So while it probably doesn't surprise anyone to see that nine out of 10 shoppers say that they're buying private label because they're cheaper than the alternative brand what I really like to see is that year over year consistently, folks are actually saying 25% in this year.
24, very small change. A quarter of folks are saying, I actually like store brands better, which is really cool. And great news for those. On the retail side, of course we saw that folks are really seeing the value in private label brands and any concern that that folks might have around quality of store brands seems to be decreasing as well.
So continued good news for those that are building store brands that shoppers love. So we also wanted to know when it comes to specific store brands, what is it that which ones do you really love the most? And as you might recall from the previous session, they talked a little bit about the say, do gap.
We, we employed a tactic here to try and see what the truth is. So we asked this in two parts. We asked what stores sell your favorite store brands? And as you'll see on the next slide. From what stores have you actually purchased store brands in the past three months? So the, the disparity in these results is interesting, right?
When we asked folks, what stores are actually selling your favorite store brand? Walmart is the top of the list, and I don't think that will surprise anyone given their market penetration. Every town in America has a Walmart and I think there's a strong affinity for Walmart in many places across America for, for years.
I know even growing up, Walmart was a place to hang out and gather and socialize. So I think people and, and I even remember as a kid 20 years ago there consistent value messaging on rolling back prices. And I, if you can, if you're hearing the commercial in your head right now, you know what I'm talking about.
What's very cool to see as well is Aldi moving up year over year from 28 to 32% in, in 2025. Fun story about Aldi. We back in, in June in our session that I mentioned earlier about predicting the beverage flavor of the summer. We asked a question in that survey of, of we gave a long list of beverage brands and we said.
What, which of these have you tried and liked? I don't remember exactly what the question was, but we asked folks to select all that apply and then of course, we left another option for write-ins at, at the end. So even with given 20 options of different new brands of beverages that had come out, the write-ins overwhelmingly voted for Aldi's gut healthy private label soda.
So I'm here in New York. We don't have an Aldi. I still haven't had the pleasure of trying this famous soda that apparently is so well loved that it was almost a winner by write-in. But if you have an Aldi nearby, please tell us what you think of their gut healthy soda. And if you haven't tried it yet, make sure you pick up some for yourself.
When we go back to this question around, okay, where have you actually shopped in the past three months? We see Walmart is still at the top of this list. But we also see Amazon moving up to number two, which is hardly surprising given the convenience. And perhaps you've noticed over the past year or two, Amazon has more and more of its own private label brands and they're very competitive on price.
So in a time where folks are saying that they're trying to make fewer just for fun purchases and they're trying to do more to relieve the stress related to money they might be feeling, it makes sense that Amazon would nab the number two spot here. But Aldi's still number three, so. Still lots of room for Aldi to grow across America.
I know at least my family who lives across the us. There's a lot of excitement every time someone tells me, Ooh, we're getting an, an Aldi in town. So we'll see how this changes year over year as Aldi continues to roll out across the us.
Alright. We also wanted to take a look and see what can we expect for the holiday season. This was an interesting question, right, because it's less about stated behaviors and it's more about how do you perceive yourself? And the difference year over year is really interesting because of course I don't think that we necessarily change fundamentally as people in 12 months, but I think that people are.
Desiring to see themselves differently as a response to our environmental conditions, right? So in perhaps easier financial times, it's easier to, to readily admit. Okay. Yeah. I do tend to overspend a bit during the holiday season. It's the holiday season, who doesn't, right? I wanna treat my friends and family to gifts.
I wanna host my big holiday party. But what we saw this year is far fewer people wanting to admit to usually overspending during the holidays. Although, let's be clear, it's still over half. It's still significant. And what particularly made me chuckle, honestly, was that the proportion of folks who said, I usually spend less, more than doubled.
So. Very interesting to see that in a time where it is important to be making responsible financial decisions for your household and your, and your budget. More folks are striving to see themselves as, as fiscally responsible. So it shouldn't surprise us then to see that when we asked this question around where do you plan to splurge this holiday season?
We saw at least one big change in the responses year over year. And, and that was the response. So as you can see from this, this chart, we offered many options of different categories in where you plan to splurge, but we also offered the option. I don't have any plans to splurge. And, and what was interesting this year is.
That was the number one answer, 38%. That was the most popularly chosen answer. So that they don't have plans to splurge, whereas last year it was the sixth most popular answer. So that, that's quite a big difference and it's a real indicator of how as brands, we are really going to have to fight for every dollar spent this holiday and make sure that we're prepared to compete on shelf, online and, and wherever else we show up.
So very interesting to see that change. I also selfishly wanted to segment this data even further, which is very easy to do inside the Highlight platform. And see how are millennial women planning to splurge differently from Gen Z women as a millennial woman, myself and I do have Gen Z friends, but it's just very interesting to see those generational differences.
And, and some of these are not very surprising. For example, we see that amongst millennial women, their their biggest plan is to splurge on kids' products, right? Which does make sense. A lot of people in my cohort cohort have young kids, and it's that time of life where that's what you're splurging on.
Even things like groceries being the second most popular category for millennials. If you have kids, it's also likely that you're the one hosting the holiday gatherings and you expect to splurge a little bit on, on the food and and beverage that you're gonna be providing there. When we look at Gen ZI love to see this.
And of course, speaking in generalities here, because of course there are many people in the Gen Z cohort that are also already parents, but there are many that aren't yet. And to see that amongst Gen Z women, their top choice for splurging is beauty and personal care. I'd love to see Good for you guys.
So number one this year for, for Gen Z women is beauty and personal care followed by apparel and footwear. Followed by no plans to splurge, but I was very surprised to see tech and electronics so high up for, for Gen Z women as well. So that is not something on, on my radar as an older millennial.
But to see how important that potentially is to Gen Z women as a cohort is really interesting. I can imagine a lot of them are looking forward to Black Friday sales for noise canceling headphones or the noon Nintendo switch. So quite interesting to see that generational difference. Even between two generations that are, are quite close millennial and Gen Z women.
Alright, finally, we wanted to look ahead to 2026 and see how folks are feeling. This was another one of those interesting results where actually year over year we see consistency in the proportion of folks who are saying that I think my budget is likely to just stay the same 40%. That's the most common answer, right?
But at the same time, I don't think we can ignore the growth of some pessimism here, right? Last year we had 28% of, of respondents saying that they thought managing their budget would get harder in the following year. This year we see that jump quite a bit to 37%. So I don't wanna ignore this, this growth in pessimism, but I do wanna leave us with some takeaways that showed just why it's so important that we do what we do and that we listen to our consumers in doing what we do.
And honestly after smiley's presentation, I don't know that I could phrase it better. I actually added the quote from hypnotic that from Tracy Lucko of Hypnotic that he mentioned in his presentation. The point of our business is happiness and I really, really hope that we are all taking that to heart.
In any age, but I think especially now it's so important that we remember as brands that we are here to have fun and enable fun and bring joy to our consumers every time they're walking down the grocery aisle. We have the privilege of being in these relatively high velocity categories, right?
In a, in an age where folks might be saying, I don't know if I can really swing that vacation I've been looking forward to. They still wanna treat themselves. Right, and you can be that $3 can of soda on the shelf that intrigues them, that draws them in, that gives them a sense of whimsy and fun, and allows them to inject their day-to-day lives with the fun.
So I've just here outlined just a few brands that I, I mean, I, this list could be 27 times longer, but I just wanted to call out a few brands that I think have done a particularly good job. Of course, you already heard me mention Hypnotic, which disrupted the dairy space in Isle, which. Hadn't had any disruption for 50 something years.
And why shouldn't whipped cream be fun and colorful and whimsical? You're, you're using that product at things like holidays and birthday parties. It should be brightly colored, right? Rotten Candy is another one I wanted to call out. They're actually a better for you product, right? It's something like 60% less sugar.
It's higher fiber content. This could totally have been your sort of typical better for you marketing. And instead they've gone with this branding that's totally wacky out there, different from anything else that you see cartoonish and so fun. I also wanna call out Fish Wife. If you told me 10 years ago that we'd all be lining up for tin to anchovies.
You would've surprised me, but fish Wife has single handedly transformed their little corner of CPG by bringing the most beautiful branding and design to shelves everywhere and getting folks really intrigued and excited about tinned Fish. Likewise, I think My/Mochi another Highlight customer who we love very much has, has done such a great job of bringing something that's novel to the average American consumer.
So if you stop by Kroger on your way home, pick up a My mochi, they've done a great job of taking a product like mochi, which may be relatively novel to a lot of folks. And injecting the fun, right? They're creating flavors like guava and horta. They even have a Barbie birthday cake flavor that was so much fun.
They have ice cream sandwiches now, so, they're all about fun. You might be wondering why I included Vital Farms here. How can eggs be fun? I have to give them credit for all of their branding. It's, it's beautiful branding if you've ever just seen their boxes or go to visit their website. But in particular, I need to call them out for this little insert that they put in every package.
It's like a little newspaper of news from the farm and current events. And then they'll even include some of the biography of the hen that your eggs came from. So it'll say like, meet Henrietta. And then it'll say like, Henrietta's likes Henrietta's dislikes, and have a little picture of her. It's literally just eggs.
They don't need to include that. Right? But in doing so, they've given you a little piece of joy, right? The closest analog I can think of is like, as a child reading the back of the cereal box and playing the games on that, right? Well, now I do that with my eggs in the morning when I'm making breakfast.
So I just hope that if you take away one thing from this data we really have a mission here to counter the pessimism that some people might be feeling in this economy. By making sure that we are bringing them lower cost ways to treat themselves, that we are showing the value of the products that we're offering them.
And that we really are that source of optimism and joy and delight that, that we can be right. If these examples can, can tell us anything. Alright, well thank you all so much for attending. That's a wrap for my session. But please remember that we will be sending out all of our content so that you can re-watch this session.
To be clear, you'll be able to re-watch the recording of this session or share it with colleagues to watch for the first time. But you will also be able to digest this in blog form, which is a little bit easier to, to get all of those great charts and graphs and insights and, and share them with with your colleagues as well.
So thanks so much for attending. I hope that this session was helpful and I hope that everyone gleaned something from today's sessions they can bring back to their work and continue to create products that people really love. What an incredible day It's been. On behalf of the entire Highlight team, I wanna thank you for joining us for our second annual Highlight Showcase Summit.
We heard from some truly inspiring brands and dug into the trends and insights shaping the future of product development. We also shared some of our own big news, the Highlight product intelligence platform's, latest features, along with the original research fielded with our proprietary Highlight community.
We hope you're walking away with fresh ideas, new connections, and a renewed sense of what's possible. Remember, we'll be sending you a post-event recap with links to rewatch every session, plus ways to stay connected with today's speakers. And of course, if you have any questions or wanna learn more about Highlight, our team would love to hear from you.
Simply click the get demo button at the top of your screen. Thank you again so much for spending your day with us. We cannot wait to see you next year.