Vince Sgabellone

As forecasters project a strengthening El Niño through the remainder of 2026, many retailers may be tempted to focus on the weather forecast itself. But history suggests the bigger opportunity lies in understanding how consumers respond.

Monitoring macroeconomic impacts on volume, price, and other aspects of the EU6 CPG industry.

Alcohol has been declining in popularity in the five or six years since the pandemic and this has now led to a wider range of alternatives and healthier products, which give us much more choice about what we drink at home and when we socialise.

Produce is facing a pivotal moment as food safety concerns, economic pressure, and shifting shopper habits reshape demand across retail and foodservice. Trust, value, convenience, and health trends are creating both near-term disruption and longer-term opportunities for the industry.

AI agents are starting to make the buying decision itself, reshaping discovery, brand visibility, and retail power dynamics faster than most CPG and retail players are prepared for.

With more than two-thirds consumers now using generative AI to explore and choose products, and AI agents dramatically narrowing the digital shelf, brands and retailers must now earn selection from both people and algorithms. Circana’s experts explore where consumer trust truly stands, what shoppers expect from AI assistants, and the strategic levers that separate category leaders from those left off the shortlist.

Category management teams get more signals than they can act on. The job is picking the two or three that will move the category before the next buyer meeting. Continuous monitoring across retailer point-of-sale, shopper and competitive data surfaces assortment gaps, white space and price or pack gaps as they appear, so the recommendation is ready before the meeting is.

Spooky season has arrived. With it comes a cauldron of swirling consumer behaviors and opportunities for brands, retailers, foodservice operators, and others with Halloween-themed offerings. Halloween remains a major holiday for many consumers, with Circana data showing that about one-half of families in the U.S. plan to celebrate the occasion.

Monitoring macroeconomic impacts on volume, price, and other aspects of the U.S. CPG industry.

How Value, Control, and Convenience Are Reshaping Consumer Behavior — and What the Industry Must Do Next

Holiday 2026 media planning is the work of deciding how early to spend, which channels to fund, and how to measure a season that no longer starts at Thanksgiving. This on-demand Circana session, recorded in September, 2026, is for brand managers, media directors, category managers and insights leads who own holiday spend or the forecast it is graded against.

Eating at home, replacement demand, and everyday convenience are fueling home-product growth, with the market expected to exceed $45.6 billion by 2028

New Circana report offers holiday advertising strategy insights for brands, retailers, and media advertisers navigating earlier demand, social commerce, AI-assisted shopping, and connected measurement

Circana data shows consumers delaying back-to-school purchases and spending later into the season as they carefully balance budgets, value, and brand preferences.

Spend continues to grow, visits have moved marginally and consumers are still eating out. However, that apparent stability is deceptive as behaviours across generations evolve.

Holiday 2026 will be shaped by earlier shopping, social commerce, creator influence, and AI-assisted discovery. Nearly half of consumers browsed before Thanksgiving in 2025, while shoppers increasingly discover and buy products through social platforms and creator content. Advertisers should start media earlier, invest in discovery channels, prepare product data for AI shopping assistants, and measure business outcomes across retail media, ecommerce, in-store, and creator ecosystems.

Insights and analytics leaders face a growing need to deliver faster, sharper decisions, and the traditional reporting cycle can no longer keep pace. Circana's Liquid AI digital intelligence platform gives these leaders a decisive edge: reducing chokepoints, swiftly surfacing what matters, and freeing their teams to focus on the high-impact work that moves the business forward.

Redesigned authoring experience in the Unify+ solution generates presentation-ready charts and written insight summaries, with export to PowerPoint, Excel and PDF

Circana's official monthly and year-to-date rankings of the top 10 best-selling DVDs and Blu-ray discs. Updated regularly — see which titles are leading physical media sales in 2026.

CPG brands are leaning into AI in a hard way. AI can help brands learn how to read demand, set prices, and decide where to compete for shelf space, among other things. But speed without responsibility creates risk, and for small and emerging brands, that risk can be costly. As consumer behavior fragments with habits shifting by channel, season, and region, and with growing expectations around convenience, scaling brands operate in an environment focused on immediacy and value. At the same...