Carmen Silva presents Euromonitor International’s key global consumer trends for 2026, outlining how shifting values are reshaping behaviour and driving disruption across markets.

Carmen Silva is Senior Consultant at Euromonitor International; she leads beauty and fashion research across Latin America. An economist by training, she specialises in beauty and consumer health, combining qualitative insight with econometric forecasting to assess consumption trends and market dynamics across industries.

For more information on the webinar, contact: education@plma.nl

PLMA’s Online Executive Education Programme 2026, 4–5 March, offers executives a concise yet powerful update on the fast-evolving private label landscape. Across two focused morning sessions, leading industry experts will explore the trends, strategies and skills shaping private brand success.

Highlights include insights into global retail trends, private label strategy, sourcing developments, innovation in grocery, shopper behaviour, and the latest packaging design advances. Speakers include Ray Gaul (Retail Cities), Jens Sievert (Daymon), Marijn Overvest (Procurement Tactics), Alexander Bilsing (Simon Kucher), Food by Design, and an interview with former Walmart Vice-President Arjan Both. The programme is moderated by Edgar Elzerman of Elzerman Consulting.

For more programme details, click here.

A study by NielsenIQ shows that grocery buying patterns in Europe are becoming more fragmented in how consumers shop, not just in how many large retail chains operate. French households, for example, now visit an average of nine different grocery outlets over a given period, even if they rely on one or two anchors for most of their spend.

At the same time, broader industry observations indicate that shoppers in many markets are making more frequent trips with smaller baskets. In France, inflation‑linked behaviour has driven households toward tighter control of budgets, more frequent shopping and smaller purchase baskets per occasion. Kantar data also suggest that consumers are buying fewer items per visit but visiting stores more often, reflecting changing routines formed during recent economic cycles.

These patterns appear across several Western European countries, as consumers spread their trips across supermarkets, proximity formats and online channels, and increasingly select specialist outlets for specific needs. For manufacturers and private label teams, this means success depends on meeting shoppers at more occasions with right‑sized packs, tailored offers and strong visibility across formats.

According to a Euromonitor report “Voice of the Consumer: Sustainability Survey”, sustainability is becoming central to product development, even amid global SKU rationalization. In 2025, 63% of private label launches included at least one sustainability claim, surpassing the 60% average across all products. This reflects consumer demand for affordable, eco-conscious options and retailers’ push to position private label as credible, value-driven competitors.

Private labels are addressing traditional barriers—higher prices, unclear labels, and distrust—by making sustainable products affordable, transparent, and credible. Between Q1 and Q4 2025, private label’s share of e-commerce sustainable launches grew from 16% to 29%, with half of the top 10 sustainable launches now being private labels.

Olive oil, long associated with the sun-drenched landscapes of southern Europe, is beginning to develop roots much further north. A small but growing number of companies in the UK are now cultivating olives with the ambition of producing high-quality extra virgin olive oil, marking a notable shift in European food production.

In parts of Essex, Lincolnshire and Cornwall, olive groves are being planted in carefully chosen microclimates where relatively dry conditions, higher light levels and milder coastal influences reduce the risk of frost. Warmer summers and longer growing seasons have helped make this possible. While yields remain modest, several growers have already pressed their first batches of oil, with some achieving the chemical and sensory standards required for extra virgin classification.

The challenges are considerable. Olive trees demand a delicate balance of heat, light and rainfall, and erratic weather remains the greatest risk. Timing of harvest and rapid milling are critical, particularly in a climate where early frosts and high winds can quickly damage fruit. As a result, production is currently small-scale and premium-priced, positioned closer to artisanal European oils than to mass-market Mediterranean brands.

The Schwarz Group, Europe’s largest retail conglomerate and owner of Lidl and Kaufland, is advancing plans with Deutsche Telekom to pursue one of the European Union’s flagship AI gigafactory projects, massive data centres designed to host and train next-generation artificial intelligence models.

Under current discussions, Schwarz and Deutsche Telekom aim to jointly build an AI-focused data centre in Germany and apply for funding from the EU’s €20 billion AI gigafactory initiative, which targets four to five facilities capable of hosting roughly 100,000 AI chips each. Schwarz is already executing a historic €11 billion investment in a new data centre campus in Lübbenau, Brandenburg, planned with up to 100,000 GPUs, highlighting its ambitions to offer sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure beyond its retail operations.

Ghent University Hospital has landed a four-year partnership with Kruidvat under which the drugstore retailer will supply private label diapers, baby wipes and baby food to the hospital’s maternity wards. The agreement makes Ghent University Hospital the first hospital in Belgium to use Kruidvat products for newborn care and infant nutrition. The deal also seems to be unique in Europe.

The partnership is the result of a European public tender in which multiple suppliers were evaluated. According to the hospital, bids were assessed on a predefined set of criteria including product quality, ease of use in a clinical environment, compliance with relevant regulations, delivery reliability and total cost of ownership. The tender process ran over an extended period and was assessed separately for each of the three product groups. The framework agreement entered into force in November 2025 and will run four years.

UK supermarkets are clearly rapidly responding to the consumer shift driven by appetite-suppressing GLP-1 weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy, Mounjaro and Ozempic, creating a new food occasion that could help retailers maintain sales.

In mid-December, Morrisons proudly claimed it was the first UK supermarket to launch GLP-1 friendly own brand ready meals. It partnered with Applied Nutrition for a range of 53 high-protein co-branded products. Subsequently, Marks & Spencer announced a new line of own label ‘Nutrient Dense’ foods for consumers who are eating less. 

Then Co-op followed suit and introduced its new ‘Good Fuel – Power Up Your Plate’ offer, including new mini meals, which have been specially developed for shoppers with smaller appetites. Asda brought four high-protein ‘power pots’ to market that also contain at least one of the recommended five daily servings of fruit and vegetables. Iceland Foods has expanded its weight-loss range, adding 38 new lines including ready meals, breakfast omelettes and filled pastas to its existing MyProtein and Slimming World ranges.