Hi,
This edition covers snacks, but the finding applies to any category where promotions have become the default response to private-label pressure.
When nearly half of consumers openly admit they will return to the cheaper option the moment a sale ends, the question stops being about snacks and starts being about what discounting is actually doing to your brand's pricing architecture.
Your promotion isn't a recovery. It's a confession.
The packaged snack category assumed that promotional investment could hold the line against private label, that a well-timed discount would remind the consumer what they were missing. A new dataset suggests the opposite: promotions are confirming the trade-down, not reversing it.
The Observation
Private label snacks in the US captured 24% unit share of the total CPG market in 2026, according to Circana, with food and beverage leading the expansion. National brands responded the way they always have: with promotional spend. The bet is that volume recovery during a promotional window signals loyalty recovery. The data says those two things are not the same.
Siete Foods is running a different play entirely. In a market where 73.5% of consumers cite price difference as their primary reason for switching to store brands, Siete has achieved category-leading trust scores without competing on price. Their positioning, cultural identity, ingredient specificity, a brand that reflects something about who the buyer is, removes them from the price comparison entirely.
The structural problem for legacy brands is that the consumer doing the most damage is not the one cutting their budget. The income signal in this dataset is the one that should change how CMOs read their own promotional ROI: 62% of households earning $75,000 or more have already switched at least one name-brand snack to a store-brand equivalent. These are not distressed buyers. They have concluded the premium is not justified.
When 45.5% of consumers will stock up during a sale and return to private label the moment it ends, what is a promotion actually buying?
WHAT 554 US CONSUMERS ACTUALLY SAID
Standard Insights · May 2026 · Nationally representative
45.5%
Will stock up during a name-brand promotion, then return to the store brand when it ends. Discounts are renting volume, not rebuilding loyalty.
24.4%
Have cut entire snack categories from their grocery budget. The threat is not just substitution; it is total category exit.
Read together, these two numbers redefine the problem. The consumer who takes your promotion is not the consumer you lost, and the consumer you lost may not be coming back through the snack aisle at all.
Brand positioning snapshot
We mapped 15 handpicked snack brands on attention versus trust, and the spread reveals a market where scale is becoming a liability faster than the volume numbers show.
Full brand scores across all six dimensions are in the report.
Leading
high attention, high trust
Siete Family Foods
SkinnyPop
Frito-Lay
Holding
high trust, lower discovery
Enjoy Life Foods
Nature’s Bakery
Snyder’s of Hanover
At Risk
high fatigue, low trust recovery
Frito-Lay
Mondelēz International
What the map confirms is that the brands holding pricing power in this market are not the ones spending the most; they are the ones whose purchase decision is no longer a price comparison.
Promotions are buying volume. They are not buying loyalty back.
Personas from the online report.
According to Standard Insights' May 2026 survey of 507 active snack buyers, 45.5% of consumers will stock up during a name-brand promotion and immediately return to the cheaper option when it ends. Promotions are functioning as a margin-destroying volume tactic, not a loyalty mechanism, for the majority of the market.
The exception is real but narrow. According to the same survey, 35% of Active Buyers will stay with the name brand following a price promotion, versus only 12% of Non-Buyers. Promotions do reward consumers who were already purchasing. They do not convert the consumers who have left.
The strategic implication is direct: a brand whose primary recovery tool is promotional spend is investing most heavily in the segment that needed the least convincing, while the segment that actually left is being offered a reason to confirm their decision was correct. The path back requires a product argument, not a pricing one.
Want the full breakdown?
The full analysis covers the complete brand positioning map across 12 brands, the three buyer gaps that explain why promotions are misfiring, and the segment signals, by age and income, that identify which consumers are recoverable and which have exited for good.
Shape the next edition
Every edition of The Modern Strategist is built around one trend stress-tested with real consumer data. We pick the trends, but we want to know what questions you are actually sitting with.
Reply to this email with the category or strategic question you would most want us to put in front of 500 consumers. The best suggestion shapes a future edition, and we will quote you by name when we run it.
What is the assumption your category is making about consumer behavior right now that no one has actually tested?
The number that stayed with me from this survey was not the 73.5% who cited price as their reason for switching; that figure was expected. It was the 24.4% who have cut snack categories entirely.
Those consumers are not in the aisle anymore. No promotion reaches them. No brand matrix captures them. They have simply left, and the category has not yet priced that into its planning assumptions.
See you next month.
Florian