Creatine is in your snack aisle. Protein is in everything. Frozen is heating up. If you're trying to figure out what Expo West 2026 meant for your category, you're in the right place. If you're trying to figure out what it means for your team, we wrote that too.
Our team fanned out across the show: Dustin Cherry, Meredith Zlatkin, Anna Johnson, Lizzy Vela, Alana Edberg, Jena Lepkowski, and Eva Scofield, working the booths, the meeting rooms, and the insider events in between. Here's what we brought back.
What did Expo West 2026 reveal about the state of the consumer brand industry?
Expo West 2026 broke attendance records, but attendance was the least interesting number. The real indicator was qualitative: brands showed up with tighter stories, better-defined retail strategies, and booths that punched above their revenue. This year's event felt operationally mature.
Dustin, who has covered Expo West more times than almost anyone on our team, came away with a consistent read: founders are more focused than in recent years. Brands are showing up with a distinctive positioning, a clearer retail strategy, and more intentional teams around them. He also called out something visual and specific: the booths looked exceptional. Small brands are presenting at a scale that doesn't match their revenue. Yet. Packaging that doesn't look small. That's a design and brand investment, and companies don't make that commitment unless they're serious about what they're building.
Meredith, who spent the show in back-to-back founder and executive leadership conversations, added the strategic frame: the industry has moved from growth-at-all-costs to disciplined, profitable scaling. Margin structure. Velocity. Strategic retail expansion measured in the right doors, not just more doors. The tone of the show felt more mature and operationally grounded than in previous years. The brands earning attention weren't the loudest. They were the most focused.
Why is protein still the dominant trend in food and beverage, and where is it heading?
Protein remains the leading macro trend in food and beverage, appearing across every format and category. But the brands gaining ground aren't leading with protein alone. They're combining it with a second functional claim (e.g., collagen, fiber, gut health), creating products that address multiple health needs simultaneously.
Chips, drinks, bars, gummies, dairy, pancakes, desserts. Our entire team reported the same read from Expo West 2026, and protein still has runway remaining.
What we saw is that protein has become the foundation of a broader product story, not the headline on its own. The brands gaining ground are the ones pairing it with something: a cleaner sourcing story, a second functional claim, a specific consumer benefit that earns its own shelf space. Alana put it directly: it's about added functionality for overall health, not just a better-for-you option. Collagen in drinks. Protein in food. That multidimensional framing is where the category is moving, and it's a meaningfully different product and marketing challenge than riding a single macro claim.
The commercial and marketing leaders who understand functional nutrition and can translate it for mass consumers, at the director and VP level and above, are among the most sought-after people in the category right now. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when a trend matures faster than the available pool of people who know how to execute on it.
Is creatine going mainstream in food and beverage?
Creatine has crossed into the mainstream. What lived exclusively in supplement tubs at specialty retailers is now appearing in hydration drinks, snacks, and mass-market formats targeted at consumers who have never thought of themselves as supplement users. The word still gives some consumers pause, the way "probiotic" did in 2012, but the category is moving.
Multiple members of our team flagged creatine independently, without comparison notes. Dustin's observation captures the structural shift: the ingredient migration that took adaptogens, probiotics, and prebiotics from the supplement aisle into everyday products is now happening with creatine.
At Expo West this year, those two worlds, the supplement aisle and the food aisle, felt more adjacent than ever. Successfully merging them takes someone who has sold into GNC and at Target, who knows what you can claim on a supplement label and what sells the Aisle 12 end cap. That person is not easy to find. It takes a network deep in functional food and wellness to know where they are.
Why is fiber the functional ingredient positioned for growth?
Fiber showed up at Expo West 2026. Anna flagged new-to-world brands built entirely around fiber intake. Alana saw it alongside protein across nearly every format. Eva called it out as a category still very much in motion. The presence was real.
What Dustin noticed was the ceiling question. The average American consumes roughly half the recommended daily fiber intake. Protein had that same gap for years before the marketing story caught up to it. That story is now catching up to fiber. Whole Foods named 2026 the year of fiber frenzy. Datassential called fiber poised to overtake protein as the next leading health trend. The consumer appetite is there.
Our bet is on fiber getting its due. The brands that move early will need the same profiles that drove protein's rise: marketers who can translate functional science into consumer language, and commercial leaders who can get a rising-in-importance ingredient in front of the right buyers before everyone else.
Why is women's health emerging as a cross-category force in functional food and beverage?
Women's health is no longer a niche positioning strategy. Innovation across protein, fiber, and creatine is increasingly appearing in products designed specifically for women's health outcomes, and it was visible across nearly every category at Expo West 2026. The brands positioned to lead are the ones building multifunctional products with a single, coherent story.
Meredith called it out: the overlap between functional ingredients and women's health isn't confined to one category. It's showing up everywhere. The brands that can speak to multiple functional benefits within a single, coherent product story, and find the people who know how to take that story to market, are the ones positioned to lead when the category catches up to the science.
What other trends did Expo West 2026 surface?
Beyond protein, creatine, and fiber, several emerging trends showed up consistently enough at Expo West 2026 to warrant attention. Each one has people strategy implications. The brands that will win when these trends peak are the ones already building the teams to execute on them.
- Gut health. Probiotic sodas, functional powders, and drinks built around microbiome benefits were prominent across the show.
- Dates. The ingredient has claimed its spot as a better-for-you platform, showing up across formats as both sweetener and hero ingredient.
- Sour flavor profiles. Trending across categories, from beverages to snacks, with enough consistency to suggest a durable shift rather than a short-lived one.
- Seed oil. The backlash has sharpened from general consumer sentiment into specific product positioning, with brands leading on seed oil-free claims.
- Frozen. Attracting brand activity and capital in a way that caught our attention. Dustin called it out specifically as a category worth watching.
When we attend the show, we do it to pick up hiring signals and prepare for calibrations to people strategy. If you want to know what that means in practice, what roles brands are prioritizing, what profiles are most competed-for right now, and how the smartest operators in this space are thinking about their teams, that's what we cover in part two.
Read: Consumer Brand Hiring Trends: What Expo West 2026 Revealed
ForceBrands has spent nearly 20 years inside the consumer brand ecosystem: food, beverage, wellness, beauty, pet, and cannabis. Our work spans executive search, direct hire recruitment, freelance and fractional contract staffing, and advisory guidance. If you're growing in these categories and considering who belongs on your team next, we'd like to be part of that conversation.
