2026 CPG Trends We Spotted in the Shelfie Awards Submissions

Every year, the Startup CPG Shelfie Awards give us a front-row seat to where the emerging CPG market is actually headed – not where trend forecasters say it’s going, but where founders are putting their bets. Over 650 brands submitted products for the 2026 awards cycle, and before a single package was opened, the submissions themselves told a story.

We dug into the data: product categories, ingredient mentions, flavor profiles, founder demographics, packaging, and how brands are positioning themselves going into the next 12 months. Here’s what stood out.

Savory is the New Default

For years, the snack category in particular has defaulted to sweet – chocolate, vanilla, caramel, peanut butter. Those flavors are still well-represented in this year’s submissions (chocolate alone showed up in 38 brand descriptions – it’s not going anywhere!). But the more striking signal is what’s surging alongside them: a decisive pivot toward savory and umami-forward profiles.

Across all submission text – product descriptions, brand missions, flavor callouts – 106 brands mentioned at least one savory flavor or ingredient. That makes the savory cluster the single largest flavor trend in the entire 2026 submission pool, larger than any sweet, functional, or tropical grouping.

The breakdown gets specific fast: garlic showed up in 18 brands, chili in 25, soy or tamari in 17, umami in 9, miso in 6, smoked in 8. Seven brands used the word “savory” explicitly in their product or mission description.

This isn’t just snack brands experimenting with salt. It’s a deliberate repositioning toward complexity – flavors that reward attention rather than just deliver a sugar hit. The “bold and savory” positioning that drove retail success for brands like Fly By Jing and Momofuku is now filtering down to the earliest stages of brand building. Founders are launching with that playbook in hand from day one.

The Specific Savory Flavor Profiles Worth Watching: Dill and Tahini

Within that broader savory surge, three flavors stood out to our team as particularly telling: dill and tahini.

Dill showed up in quite a few brands – Great Lakes Tinned Fish, YaYa’s Skordalia, Prest, Rally, Harry’s Famous Sauce, Hummus Goodness, PiCKiE, Growee, Le Zette and Five Corners Beverage Co. to name a handful. Nine brands might not sound like a trend, but dill’s presence in a CPG submission pool is meaningful – and it’s going beyond pickles – spanning food and beverage. It’s a flavor that has historically lived on the periphery of mainstream snacking, and seeing it appear across multiple product categories (sauces, pickles, dips, seafood) suggests the pickled, briny, herbaceous flavor wave has legs.

Tahini – the sesame paste that’s been earning a real following in natural foods for years is hitting the scene hard – it appeared in brands like: Aziz, Riley’s, and Beituti. Sesame as a whole showed up in 11 brands, making it the most-mentioned seed ingredient in the submission pool. Tahini specifically is interesting because it operates at the intersection of three trends at once: international flavor, seed-forward formulation, and savory positioning. It’s not a flavor that announces itself loudly, but it’s clearly landing with today’s founders – even in surprising formats like granola.

Together, these three flavors tell a similar story: condiment-adjacent, familiar but not obvious, and built for a consumer who’s grown bored with generic “bold” flavor positioning.

Stripes Are Everywhere on Packaging

This one isn’t data – it’s pattern recognition from opening hundreds of boxes. Stripes are having a major moment in CPG packaging design right now, and the 2026 Shelfies made that unmistakably clear.

From bold horizontal bands to vertical racing stripes to subtle candy-stripe details, brands across every category – snacks, beverages, supplements, beauty – are reaching for striped design as a way to communicate energy, confidence, and shelf presence. It reads retro and modern at the same time, which is a hard balance to pull off and probably explains why it’s proliferating so quickly.

The practical reason stripes work on shelf: they create strong visual movement that catches the eye at a distance, especially in the crowded mid-shelf zone where most emerging brands live. They’re also infinitely flexible – a stripe can be playful or premium depending on the color palette and finish. What’s notable about the 2026 Shelfies is how many brands across completely different categories independently landed on variations of the same design language.

Among this year’s Shelfie submitters rocking stripes: Cotto, Nymbl Ice Cream, High Tide, SAUCY YAY!, Kelsi’s, Hapsy, Great Lakes Tinned Fish, From the Farm, Birdie Bakes Co, Sfizi, Tezza Foods, Five Corners Beverage Co., and Saint Miyu. Snacks, ice cream, tinned fish, beverages, condiments – the stripe is category-agnostic. When that happens in a single submission cycle, it’s a signal worth paying attention to.

Real Sugar is So Back – and So Are Dates

The zero-sugar and low-sugar movement has shaped CPG formulation for years, and it’s not going away. But something interesting is happening at the edges: a growing cohort of founders is making an explicit choice to use real, recognizable sweeteners – and leaning into that choice as a differentiator rather than a compromise.

The data is instructive. 26 brands mentioned “no added sugar” in their positioning, and 17 brands described themselves as low-sugar. But alongside that, 24 brands featured honey, 6 brands highlighted maple syrup, and 4 brands specifically called out cane sugar or “real sugar” as an ingredient feature. Stevia appeared in just 3 brands; monk fruit in 4; allulose in 1.

What this says: the artificial and novel sweetener pipeline is not where early-stage founders are placing their bets. The emerging positioning is either no sweetener, or a sweetener you can actually picture – honey, maple, cane sugar, dates.

Dates deserve their own sentence. Our managing editor dubbed 2026 The Year of The Date back in February, and man – is it taking off as we close out summer! 9 brands in the 2026 pool are date-sweetened – using dates or date paste as a primary or featured sweetener. Brands like Gato Dates, EDEVA Snacks, Benibites, and Aayur Organic are all leaning into dates not just as a functional ingredient but as a brand identity pillar. The date as a sweetener checks every box a 2026 consumer is looking for: it’s a whole food, it carries fiber and minerals, it has a recognizable origin, and it tastes like something. If this cohort is any indication, The Year of the Date is going to keep growing and become a rule for sweetening foods, not an exception anymore.

International Flavors Are a Defining Feature

Nearly one in four brands – 158 out of 652 – checked “International Flavor” as a product claim on their submission form. This means it’s not a niche, but a defining characteristic of a generation of brands.

The flavors themselves are coming from everywhere: Indian and Ayurvedic-influenced profiles (18 brands), matcha (13), masala (7), Mexican (7), Caribbean (5), Korean (5), Mediterranean (5), and Middle Eastern (4). Tamarind appeared in 4 brands. Saffron in 4. Yuzu in 4. Jamu – the Indonesian herbal wellness tradition – had a brand of its own (Nusa). So did chicha morada, the Peruvian purple corn drink (Purple Drop).

What’s notable isn’t just the diversity of origins but the specificity of execution. These aren’t brands slapping “global flavors” on a marketing one-sheet. They’re anchoring to particular culinary traditions and building brand stories around cultural knowledge. That’s a harder thing to copy, and a more defensible position on shelf.

Protein and Functional Claims Are Now Table Stakes

Protein was the single most-mentioned functional ingredient in submission descriptions and brand missions, appearing in 77 brands. It tied exactly with “organic” – itself a signal that functional nutrition and clean sourcing have converged as the baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.

Beyond protein, the functional picture breaks down like this:

• Energy – 48 brands
• Plant-based – 37 brands
• Fiber – 28 brands
• Focus – 26 brands
• Gut health – 23 brands
• Calm / stress – 17 brands
• Electrolytes – 13 brands
• Fermented – 11 brands

The thing to notice is the pairing logic. Protein + focus. Gut health + calm. Electrolytes + energy. Founders are building products around functional benefit stacks rather than single claims – and that complexity is showing up in brand language from day one.

Gut Health is Still Growing, But the Language is Shifting

Gut health as a category benefit has been a major story in CPG for years, and the 2026 Shelfies show it hasn’t peaked. 23 brands mentioned gut health explicitly in their positioning, 28 brands featured fiber as a key claim, and 4 brands called out prebiotics specifically.

What’s shifted is the vocabulary. Psyllium, inulin, and resistant starch – the ingredient-level terms that a few years ago signaled a functional positioning – were largely absent from submission language this cycle. Brands are leading with the outcome (gut health, digestion, fiber) rather than the mechanism. That suggests consumer education has caught up enough that the outcome claim lands on its own, without needing a technical explanation behind it – or, that brands are relying on consumers not knowing or caring about the difference in soluble vs. insoluble fiber and its effects on the body.

Seeds Are Having a Big Moment

54 brands featured seeds in some form across their submissions. Sesame was the most prominent specific seed, followed by chia, hemp, pumpkin seed/pepita, and flaxseed. 

More interesting than any single seed: 8 brands explicitly called out “seed oil free” as a product claim. That’s a small number in absolute terms, but it’s meaningful given how new the term is as consumer-facing language. The seed oil conversation – driven largely by the wellness community’s pushback against highly refined oils – is clearly making it into founder positioning and onto product packaging. It’s the kind of claim that tends to grow fast once it finds a consumer hook, and it’s finding one.

Functional Beverages are the Fastest-Growing Beverage Subcategory

The beverage category continues to be one of the most crowded in the Shelfies pool, but the growth is happening in a specific lane: non-alcoholic and functional drinks are now more represented than RTD coffee, sparkling water, or traditional juice.

Across all beverage submissions:

• Functional beverages – 39 brands
• Cocktail mixers – 18 brands
• Non-alcoholic / mocktail-style – 16 brands
• Soda / sparkling – 10 brands
• RTD coffee – 9 brands

Matcha appeared in 13 submission descriptions, chai in 8. Electrolytes featured across 13 brands. The throughline is a consumer who is drinking intentionally – choosing a beverage for what it does, not just what it tastes like.

72% of Brands Opted Into the Non-UPF Award

One of the more telling data points from this cycle: when given the option to be considered for WISEcode’s “Best Non-Ultra Processed Food” award, 72% of submitting brands opted in. That’s not a fringe positioning – it’s the majority of the submission pool actively choosing to stake a claim on the non-UPF narrative.

Ultra-processed food discourse has moved fast in the consumer consciousness, and what started as a public health conversation has clearly landed in how founders are building and positioning brands from the earliest stages. Whether or not a brand explicitly calls out “non-UPF” on its packaging, the underlying formulation philosophy is showing up in how founders describe their products and their missions. The move toward real sugar, whole-food sweeteners like dates, and seed oil-free claims all connect back to the same consumer impulse.

What This Means for the Year Ahead

652 brands. 72% planning to raise capital. 71% focused on launching new SKUs or flavors. 44% actively working to reduce ingredient costs.

The picture that emerges is a cohort that is lean, scrappy, and moving fast – but also clear-eyed about the challenges. The brands that are going to break through in the next 12 months aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They’re the ones with the most specific story, the most defensible flavor or functional position, and the formulation depth to back up every claim on the label.

If this submission pool is any signal, the next generation of breakout CPG brands is going to be savory, globally specific, sweetened with something you recognize as normal now (dates!), and packaged with a stripe (okay – maybe, maybe not). That’s a better foundation than trend-chasing – and the Shelfies data suggests it’s already showing up at the earliest stages.

The Startup CPG Shelfie Awards are the largest free awards program for emerging CPG brands. Learn more at startupcpg.com/awards – keep your eyes peeled for details on the 2027 Shelfie Awards program.

Want to read about our judging process? Check out Inside the Startup CPG Shelfie Awards: How We Judged Over 2,000 CPG Products.

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