The International Food Information Council conducts its Food and Health Survey annually to help the industry better understand what information consumers seek to help them make more informed choices.
Registered dietitian Kris Sollid, senior director of research and consumer insights for IFIC, joined “The Packer Podcast” to discuss some of the findings from its most recent surveys.
“Among Americans, we’ve been asking about the safety or the perceived confidence in the safety of the U.S. food supply,” he says. “And for three straight years we’ve seen a decline in that confidence, so [there’s] some erosion in that confidence, and that cuts across just about every demographic that we capture.”
Sollid says this means there has been a decline in confidence in the safety of the food supply across household incomes, education levels, ethnicities and more.
“Last year, we saw that about 55% of Americans were either very or somewhat confident in the safety of the U.S. food supply,” he says. “When we began tracking this data back in 2012, 78% of Americans were confident, very or somewhat confident in the safety of the U.S. food supply.”
This decline has been sharp within the last three years; in 2023, 70% of Americans said they were at least somewhat confident in the safety of the U.S. food supply. That’s a 15-percentage-point drop in confidence from 2023 to 2025.
Sollid says there is a bright spot: Confidence rose slightly in the 2026 survey, though he acknowledges that the survey was conducted in the spring before this summer’s cyclospora outbreak.
IFIC also asked consumers what would help increase their level of confidence in the food supply. Sollid says the results centered on interest in hearing from food companies and the government and seeing stricter food safety regulations.
“Americans really expressed a desire to hear more communication related to transparency about what the government and what food companies are doing to both keep food safe, so [something] more on the proactive level, but also how they’re responding when they deem food or something in the supply chain to be unsafe, so more on the reactive,” he says.
Sollid says it’s also interesting that around the same number of both consumers who expressed low confidence in the safety of the food supply and consumers who expressed a high level of confidence in food safety echoed similar themes, which means it is “more of a perception issue.”
“Some people perceive that either the regulations aren’t strong enough or profit is being prioritized by companies over safety,” he says. “But those are also some of the same things that people who have confidence in the safety of the food supply believe are happening.”
And this is where key messaging comes in, Sollid says. Repetition is a critical element of assuring consumers of the safety of the fresh produce industry.
“Whether it’s reassurance or whether it’s just simple communication, transparent information about what you’re doing on the reactive and the proactive side, you can’t assume that everybody’s hearing all of your messages the first time you put them out,” he says. “It is nice to repeat those steps that you are taking or remind people of where the corrections have been made, or making sure when a recall is over and things are safe.”
Sollid says it’s easy for consumers to focus on the category or item recalled and then be hesitant to purchase the product afterward.
“[It’s] just reminding people, being in front of people, openly communicating about all the things that are happening and reassuring them that it’s safe to be consuming these healthful products again,” he says.
IFIC also plans to release data from its August survey about the cyclospora outbreak, in which Sollid says around two-thirds of Americans indicated paying attention to developments around this outbreak. He says IFIC’s data echoes reports that the outbreak has had an impact on consumers’ purchasing habits.
“Among those people who at least have heard about this outbreak, we’ve seen somewhere in the range of 25% to 30% of people saying they’ve either stopped eating lettuce altogether or they’ve stopped eating produce altogether or at least reduced their intake,” he says.
Sollid says this is another opportunity for the industry to communicate with consumers and reassure them that the fresh produce on the market is safe through transparent communication and repetition of messaging.
“One of the fears in the food safety and agriculture space is that these are products that are recommended by dietitians such as myself to build healthy eating patterns,” he says. “So, if consumers are hearing or fearing about the safety of some of these products and avoiding them and not returning to them to get them back into the regular eating pattern, it’s very possible that those things could be pushed to the side for longer than we might want.”
Sollid also says consumers are more attuned to the technical issues in the regulatory space, and this is another opportunity for the industry to lean into communication to better explain and assure consumers of the safety of fresh produce and the regulations in place to keep consumers safe.
“[Think] about reaching today’s consumer and the segmented nature of today’s consumer, repeating your messages across multiple channels, multiple platforms, multiple times, to really be hitting all of the folks so that we’re not leaving people behind who need to hear this kind of information,” he says. “It’s not safe to assume that one message is going to reach everybody.”
