Consumer Trends
Introducing the Consumer Trends Food Feelings Matrix
We asked thousands of Americans to rate 96 food and drinks, from almond butter to whiskey. Here are the healthiest and funnest.
By Dan Frommer on Saturday, May 24, 2025 at 8:00 am
We spend a lot of time here exploring food and beverages that are some mix of: Healthy, increasing in popularity, and innovative in their story, positioning, marketing, packaging, etc.
But food is also fun! Fun to eat, fun to share, and — for many — fun to post about on the internet. It’s important to consider that enjoyment aspect, too.
Most Americans, in our Consumer Trends research, say they try to eat healthy food at least a lot of the time. Most also say it’s important to their mental health to treat themselves with food.
So over the past several months, my research partners at Coefficient Capital and I have asked thousands of US consumers to rate almost 100 food and beverage items — from almond butter to whiskey — in two ways: How healthy they consider them, and how happy it makes them feel to consume them. The results are fascinating.
Here’s the wide view — 96 food and beverage items plotted on two axes, ranging from “very unhealthy” to “very healthy” and “very unhappy” to “very happy.” We’re calling it the Consumer Trends Food Feelings Matrix.
This is the result of hundreds of thousands of data points: You’re seeing the mean average for each item across our entire survey panel. (Toluna is our Consumer Trends Survey partner and ran these this February and last December.)
We’ve highlighted some outliers, and you can hover over the rest to see which item is in which place.
The big picture: Most food and beverage items — at least the ones we’ve picked — make people, on average, at least a little happy to consume them.
Only a few items have a negative overall happiness score, and even then, they’re barely negative: Non-alcoholic canned cocktails, plant-based-meat burgers, non-alcoholic beer, diet soda, and the worst overall performer in our list, caviar. (Caviar!? We’ll revisit that in a bit.)
The highest happiness scores are mostly obvious: Chocolate, steak, pizza, and ice cream. But our latest survey uncovered the item that is now our single highest-ranked by happiness: Grapes!
If you isolate the upper-right-most items — those that people, on average, think are both very healthy and make them very happy — three new items are the clear winners: Grapes (highest total score), blueberries, and broccoli, which has the highest total healthiness score and a surprisingly high happiness score. I’m pretty sure blueberries are objectively healthier than grapes, but the people have spoken, and they think grapes are better for you.
Other top scorers here include eggs, almonds, avocado, and salad with a vinaigrette dressing. This chart specifically shows all items that people have rated, on average, “somewhat healthy” to “very healthy.”
Where it starts to get interesting is when you see how different groups of people rate items differently.
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Hi, I’m Dan Frommer and this is The New Consumer, a publication about how and why people spend their time and money.
I’m a longtime tech and business journalist, and I’m excited to focus my attention on how technology continues to profoundly change how things are created, experienced, bought, and sold. The New Consumer is supported by your membership — join now to receive my reporting, analysis, and commentary directly in your inbox, via my member-exclusive newsletter. Thanks in advance.