The Trends, Challenges, and Solutions Defining Food & Beverage in 2027

The food & beverage market is in a unique place. 

With 11% of Americans on GLP-1s, consumers are curbing their appetites, along with their interest in snacking—a formerly long-reliable category. Political shifts are rapidly changing regulation around dyes, processed foods, and even nutritional labels. Food trends are operating at the speed of social media fads.  

A recent podcast from The Wall Street Journal covers these shifts, outlining declines in traditional cornerstones of food and beverage such as salted snacks, baked goods, and alcohol. JPMorgan reports that “GLP-1 treatments are projected to lead to an annual revenue reduction of $30–55 billion by 2030–2034 for the food and beverage industry.” Another study found that the “world’s 100 most valuable food brands face a $73 billion risk” due to GLP-1 use. As this happens, shifts at the FDA are driving more rigid regulation enforcement, and cultural shifts prompted the introduction of the first non-ultraprocessed label. 

“We’re seeing our customers become increasingly deliberate about where and how they’re investing their capital,” adds Brett Goode, Gray’s Executive Vice President of Food & Beverage. “Consumer preferences are changing quickly, and manufacturers are having to make significant investment decisions while considering how those demands may evolve over the next several years.”

Where the Industry Is Headed 

Given the speed of trends, brands are opting to add trend-based offerings instead of substituting. Those additions include nutrient-stacked snacks, more functional ingredients, dietary restriction-friendly options, fresher foods, and trendy novelty items.  

The beverage segment is a strong representation of this, which remains stable or thriving as compared to food counterparts. Gatorade topped the 2026 U.S. beverage rankings as a legacy product with the functional benefit of electrolyte hydration, but other brands are quickly following suit as they incorporate protein, natural caffeine, collagen, and vitamins into their beverage offerings. 

Even where cultural shifts impact the beverage segment—as in alcohol—brands have adapted quickly to introduce zero-proof offerings or repackage traditional products in ready-to-drink cocktails. 

Meanwhile, protein additions continue to dominate food trends, especially given the needs of a GLP-1 audience. However, a recent analysis shows that nearly 90% of Americans already get enough protein, and this, coupled with market oversaturation, could mean an inevitable waning in protein’s reign.  

“Product formulations are changing all the time now, so [customers] need production flexibility,” Hall explains. “Like the protein boom. Now everything is protein-infused pretzels, protein Cheez-Its, alternative protein products. But when that that trend dies out, these customers are still going to have to produce their pretzels and Cheez-Its. They’re just not going to have the protein additive. So they need that flexibility in their production lines to easily swap ingredients.” 

What will the swap be? Potentially fiber, which is already seeing some traction with 64% of Americans trying to incorporate more of it into their diets. Whichever trend wins out next, it’s almost certain to fall under the cleaner, more wellness-minded approach to diets—novelties included.  

The explosion of the brand JonnyPops this summer is a great case study; boasting “USDA organic,” “no sugar added,” and “simple ingredients” labels, these ice pops won new shoppers to the category. It’s not just the clean-conscious benefits either—the company maximized novelty by packing more flavors into a pop than traditional ice pop brands, while manufacturing products in a fully gluten- and peanut-free space that opened their product line to more consumers. The secret to this success isn’t just clever marketing, it’s precision engineering in manufacturing. 

Equipment to Meet the Moment 

With a social media-driven trend cycle, the most consistent trend is uncertainty about what’s next, which makes manufacturing flexibility more crucial than ever. The challenge of the moment for food & beverage companies is not whether they have the vision to see where the market is going, but whether they have the tools, facilities, and partners to adapt to it quickly and economically. 

“We’re seeing an increase in brownfield opportunities, as companies are looking to leverage existing facilities before committing to new greenfield investments,” Goode explains. “The opportunity to increase capacity within an existing facility can be attractive, particularly when the infrastructure is already in place to mitigate the need for long-lead equipment.” 

“Rather than scrapping a 30-year-old piece of equipment and buying new, we’re getting more customer requests to look at existing equipment, modify and fix it, to get it working for them again,” adds Hall. 

Gray’s fabrication and equipment manufacturing company, Anderson Dahlen Inc (ADI), is built for these requests with the shop capabilities to maintain, modify, and modernize existing equipment, as well as to provide OEM contract manufacturing and custom equipment design and fabrication services. Gray can even create custom equipment that resembles a customer’s legacy equipment, but with modern controls, instrumentation, and safety.  

Hall explains, “customers have a lot of very bespoke equipment to treat a product a certain way, so if that custom equipment from 30 years ago is the only way they’re comfortable making a product today but they need to replace it, Gray can replicate that, but in a more modern, safer way that will last another 30 years.” 

Jeff Rehm, Gray’s Vice President of Process Engineering, points out that the demand for product additions and swaps is translating to facilities that lean toward high-mix, low-volume output in order to stay flexible. “With that comes challenges with equipment design; it’s hard to design for everything at one time, but understanding customer needs early can help us tailor to them.” 

Even when facilities are “landlocked,” as Rehm describes, close collaboration with customers is crucial to Gray’s solutions to the demand for new production lines or increased throughput in an operational facility. 

“The challenge isn’t always finding the space for additional equipment,” Goode notes. “It’s understanding whether the existing infrastructure can support increased demand and how those improvements can be made without disrupting existing operations.” 

Innovative, Sustainable Solutions 

With beverages and fresher food categories holding steady or gaining popularity in an otherwise turbulent market, there’s more opportunity for innovation in these areas. These developments often enable other overlapping trends, as well, like cleaner ingredients or more sustainable processing and packaging. 

“Water consumption is huge for our customers right now,” Rehm explains, “Any effort we can make to minimize excess water use, we’ll design that.” 

For example, Rehm outlined some of Gray’s recent work with a beverage customer, where Gray designed a simulation of the customer’s entire bottling and manufacturing process to understand where they could optimize cleaning processes. The solution Gray implemented not only supports optimized production lines, but also smarter, less wasteful water consumption. 

“Being able to run those simulations and optimize the process really saved [the customer] water. And when they’re doing that every day, it really adds up over the course of the year.” 

In addition to water consumption efforts, Gray is also leaning into new uses for up-and-coming technologies like supercritical CO2 (scCO2), which Gray’s Principal of Engineering Operations, Landon Mills, notes is an emerging innovation with many potential applications: 

“While use of scCO2 in applications such as coffee decaffeination has long been prevalent, its versatility as a powerful, easily separable solvent has seen growing use in isolating flavors and other food additives,” Mills notes, citing Gray’s work on multiple such applications just this year. “This remains only the tip of many potential future applications of this technology, with exciting new and novel applications continuing to emerge—such as the unique in–container sterilization technology developed by Farther Farms which provides shelf stability, clean labels, and better quality.” 

For Gray’s work with Farther Farms, Mills explains, the project team leveraged this technology to create shelf-stable food products without traditional added preservatives, and with cold chain requirements significantly reduced or eliminated altogether. 

“With a global push towards a clearer understanding of food ingredients and a focus on nutritional value, technologies like the Farther Farms’ scCO2 sterilization process—that can improve food quality and safety of fresh foods without the need for additives or alternation of the base nutritional value—will continue to see more attention in the U.S. and the world at large.” 

Another global demand—functional beverages and digestive health products—brought Yakult USA to Georgia to expand manufacturing of their probiotic beverages to the U.S. East Coast.  

“What makes this project particularly interesting is the level of coordination required between the facility’s design and Yakult’s proprietary manufacturing process,” Goode says. He explains that Gray’s “integrated design-build approach allowed us to work closely with Yakult and their equipment partners to align the facility’s requirements with their processing goals.” 

One of the ways Gray met Yakult’s goals for this facility was designing for automated and robotic processes that ultimately equip this facility to produce 1.8 million bottles per day. 

Even so, Goode says, “I believe projects like Yakult demonstrate that innovation isn’t always about introducing new technology. Sometimes, it’s about bringing the right experience together, challenging conventional thinking, and finding a better way to accomplish what our customer has set out to achieve.” 

Holistic Approaches for Dynamic Challenges 

As food and beverage brands navigate an unpredictable market, the flexibility and innovation like that seen in Gray’s recent work will continue to be crucial—as will be having experienced partners who can incorporate these solutions into practical, everyday operations. 

“Our customers are looking for more than a company to deliver a facility. They want a partner who understands their business case, challenges conventional thinking, and believes that cost reduction doesn’t come with compromising quality,” Goode says.  

“This is where our integrated design, engineering, and construction come together early to make a meaningful difference. Rather than evaluating the building and manufacturing requirements independently, we can consider how decisions in one area may influence the overall investment.” 

Hall reiterates this advantage, explaining how teams across Gray can come together, “have all the resources, internally work together, visit the customer together, and make sure we’re looking at every aspect of a customer’s needs from all these different disciplines.” 

“We’ve got experts who understand the latest, greatest packaging and process equipment. We have the know-how to implement the most bang-for-the-buck automation, and we’ve got a team of professionals who can build and install based on what the engineers say we need. That really helps us be flexible as far as supporting a very dynamic food & beverage market right now.” 

To learn more about Gray’s services and how we can support your Food & Beverage business in this market, contact us.