Even as consumers embrace AI to discover new products, meal plan and order groceries, they are pushing back against “artificial perfection and inauthentic brands or marketing,” which is forcing food manufacturers to rethink their go to market strategies, including how they develop and promote new products, according to one industry insider.
“The paradox of our time is that we’re more connected digitally than ever before, yet more isolated as human beings,” which places brands in a tenuous position of balancing consumer demand for the convenience AI offers and authentic connection they crave, said Jo-Ann McArthur, president of Nourish Food Marketing.
She predicts that 2026 consumers will embrace “the return of real,” including “choosing the reality of imperfections over polish, human connection over digital efficiency, and authentic experience over algorithmic optimization.”
As such, she predicts, the “successful food brands of the next decade will be those that understand the role of social catalyst, rather than mere nutritional providers” and which “foster human interaction” or “facilitate shared moments.”
Celebrity-backed brands offer consumers connection
One way this is already playing out is with the rise of celebrity-backed, not just endorsed, brands, which are part of a broader category of insurgent brands that may represent less than 2% of the market share in their categories, but which captured nearly 39% of incremental category growth in 2024, she said.
“The power of celebrity brands lies in their ability to solve the most expensive problem in modern marketing: attention,” she said.
She explained that traditional CPG companies spend billions of dollars annually trying to catch consumers’ attention, but “celebrity founders start with a ready-made audience who are emotionally invested in their success.”
In other words, consumers feel connected with celebrity-founders and when they buy their products they perceive their purchases almost as a shared moment.
The ‘rise of bot shoppers’
Consumer desire for authentic engagement, ironically, also will fuel the “rise of bot shoppers” in 2026, predicts McArthur.
She claims that as AI agents become the primary intermediaries between brands and consumers and businesses, they could represent “the biggest retail disruption since the introduction of ecommerce, with AI agents predicted to drive $9 trillion in sales by 2030.”
Nearly three-quarters of consumers say they tried a new food they found on social media and AI platforms, 46% have made purchases based on generative AI recommendations and 72% say they would trust an AI personal shopper, according to McArthur.
A significant part of the appeal for consumers is the ability to search using “conversational interactions” that feel more authentical and more closely mimic interactions with other people versus using key words in a search bar to discover something new, she explained.
For food and beverage brands, this means “traditional SEO optimization will become less relevant as AI agents aggregate information from multiple sources to provide comprehensive product comparisons and recommendations,” McArthur said.
The brands that win in this future are the ones that simultaneously restructure content for AI versus human reading patterns, she added.
Even as brands adapt marketing to capitalize on AI algorithms, they need to avoid the trap of “algorithmic sameness” that suggests “mass produced uniformity,” and instead convey authenticity and realness by embracing “raw and unfiltered content,” which generates engagement rates up to five times that of “overly edited photos, polished captions and staged lifestyles,” McArthur said.
She explained, “imperfections are not flaws to be hidden, but badges of authenticity that create emotional connection.”
Will 2026 mark a ‘more sophisticated approach to nutrient balance’?
Consumer acceptance of imperfection and quest for authenticity in 2026 also will drive them to choose more “real” food and follow more balanced diets, rather than continuing to gravitate to ultra-processed foods or extreme eating, McArthur predicts.
“The celebration of imperfection has created a premium market for handmade, artisanal products that proudly display their human origins. Artisanal bread with irregular crusts command higher prices than uniform factory loaves,” she said.
In addition, the new year “will mark the emergence of a more sophisticated approach to nutrient balance. Consumers are moving beyond the reductive, maximize this, minimize that mentality and single nutrient fixation towards understanding food as a complex orchestra of interconnected nutrients that work in harmony with our increasingly complex bodies to optimize wellness, performance and longevity,” she said.
Ironically, the fiber-maxxing trend that took TikTok by storm and turbo-charged modern extreme dieting will also be its own undoing, said McArthur. She argued,“Fiber-maxxing inadvertently taught consumers to think about nutrients as building blocks rather than magical bullets.”
Ultimately, these shifts point to a marketplace where consumers will reward brands that feel human and which coax them out their isolation, but which also strategically leverage technology for initial connection and to deliver the convenience they demand.
