A third of UK shoppers now think too many food and drink products make health claims. For brands with several health claims on pack, it raises an important question. It’s also the clearest sign yet that functional food marketing has entered a new phase.

This is a topic close to my heart. I’ve lived with food intolerances for years, which has made me a committed label reader. I’m the shopper you’ll find standing in the aisle for far too long, checking every pack. Fitness is a big part of my life too, so I’m exactly the person functional food marketing is trying to reach. Increasingly, I’m also the person it’s struggling to convince.

That opening statistic comes from The Grocer Vision report on the new functional food consumer, produced in partnership with Danone and based on a Censuswide survey of 2,001 UK adults in July 2026. Getting a benefit onto the pack used to be the hard part. Now it’s the easy part. The real contest happens in the few seconds a shopper spends at the fixture.

Functional food trends in the UK: from niche to crowded fixture

Demand is genuinely mainstream. In the same survey, 61.2% of people said they were more interested in products offering benefits such as protein, fibre, gut health or hydration support than they were a year ago. Younger shoppers are leading the charge, with 70.3% of 18 to 24-year-olds and 73% of 25 to 34-year-olds reporting more interest. Weight-loss medication is adding to the momentum. According to NIQ and IGD figures cited in the report, 8% of people in the UK now use a GLP-1 medication, and NIQ says food is increasingly seen by these users as fuel, making function more important. We’ve looked in more detail at how GLP-1 medications are changing what shoppers buy.

Supply has followed fast. Mintel data shows that 10% of UK food and non-alcoholic drink launches carried functional claims in the 12 months to May 2026, up two percentage points on the year before.

And there’s the catch. When everyone adds protein, protein stops being a reason to choose you. The survey found that 33.3% of consumers think too many products make health claims, 26.7% question how trustworthy those claims are and 26.1% are suspicious of how many products now claim to be high in protein. Experts quoted in the report stop short of calling it functional fatigue. The problem is claims that feel bolted on.

Matt Thomas, director of category and commercial strategy for Danone UK & Ireland, offers a useful test. He says a good fixture answers three questions for the shopper: what’s the benefit, when would I use it and why should I trust it? Each of those is a marketing job, not just an NPD one.

What’s the benefit? Why one clear claim beats four

In a crowded functional fixture, the brand that says less often sells more.

Most shoppers don’t study packs at the shelf. They glance, recognise and reach. A pack carrying four benefit badges asks them to compare, decode and rank, which is work very few people will do on a Tuesday evening with a full basket.

Walnut, part of Accenture Song, tested this with fibre claims. It found that gram-based fibre claims and “% of daily requirement” claims were the least motivating options it tested, because people have no reference point for what good looks like. A plain “high fibre” claim won because it needs no interpretation.

That’s a lesson for functional food packaging as much as for claims. Pick the one benefit that matters most to your shopper and give it the clearest position on pack. Everything else can move to the side or back panel.

Any approach to claims needs to work within the regulations. In Great Britain, nutrition and health claims on food are tightly controlled, and terms such as “high fibre” and “high protein” must meet specific conditions. Simplifying a pack doesn’t mean using looser language. It means deciding which compliant claim should take priority.

When would I use it? Sell the occasion, not the ingredient

Early adopters shop by ingredient. Mainstream shoppers shop by moment.

Breakfast tops the list, with 28.3% of consumers naming it as one of the main times they’d choose a functional product. Snacking between meals follows at 20.9%. Danone’s John Hoare also argues that the meal deal is overdue for reform, given how heavily it still leans on sandwiches, salty and sugary snacks and sugary fizzy drinks.

Owning a recognisable occasion is often more powerful than owning an ingredient. When a product is clearly positioned for a specific moment, such as a mid-morning snack or a post-gym top-up, shoppers can see why it suits them more easily than they can interpret a nutritional figure. That occasion also gives brands a consistent story to carry across point of sale, social and retail media.

It matters for placement too. Independent food industry adviser Louis Bedwell points out that supermarkets are still mostly organised around what a product is, not the need it meets. Until that changes, the occasion must travel with your brand.

Why should I trust it? Credibility in a sceptical aisle

Trust is where functional brands are most exposed. The report describes a TikTok video filmed in a dairy aisle with the caption “The biggest supermarket scam is high-protein marketing”. Content like this is everywhere, and it resonates with broad audiences. A fifth of consumers, and a quarter of 18 to 24-year-olds, say they find it hard to know which health advice to trust.

I can relate to this. As someone who trains regularly, I’ve picked up plenty of products labelled high protein, only to turn them over and find more sugar and a longer ingredients list than I expected. When the claim on the front doesn’t match the panel on the back, I’ll usually leave the product on the shelf.

Shoppers are conflicted rather than closed, though. While 55.3% believe most processed foods are unhealthy, 46.4% say they’d rather choose products with added health benefits than focus only on processing. The door is open for brands that explain themselves well.

Technology is adding new pressure. More shoppers are starting to use AI tools to compare products and build their baskets, and these tools can check a pack’s claims against its nutrition information and price in seconds. Walnut found that 38% of self-described loyal customers would let an AI assistant switch them to a different brand if it could show better value or quality. Products that over-promise may find themselves overlooked.

So what builds trust? Consistency, mostly. A benefit explained the same way on pack, online and in store feels credible. Simple proof points help. And brand reputation still does a lot of heavy lifting, which is why the fundamentals of marketing your food or drink brand to UK consumers apply here as much as in any category.

Functional food marketing for FMCG brands that don’t own the fixture

Much of the current advice is aimed at retailers and the largest manufacturers, who can test and rebuild whole fixtures. Most brands work with far less control: a limited number of facings, little influence over the planogram and a promotional calendar shared with many competitors.

Even so, brands control more than they might think: the hierarchy of their pack, the occasion they claim, the proof they offer and how they appear around the shelf.

Take a challenger snack bar brand with a high-fibre recipe. Rather than listing every attribute, it could lead with a single compliant fibre claim on pack and position the bar as a mid-afternoon snack. It could then carry that same message onto shelf-edge materials and retail media and support it with a simple sampling activity that encourages shoppers to try the bar for a week. None of this requires control of the fixture. Each element reinforces the same benefit and the same moment, so the shopper meets one consistent idea wherever they encounter the brand.

That’s integrated shopper marketing in practice. It’s also where a specialist food shopper marketing agency can add the most value, connecting pack, display, retail media and activation into one clear story.

So before adding another claim to your next pack, it’s worth asking a harder question. Which one could you remove?

Emily Downes
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