Every January the forecast tells the same story, and earlier this year, Circana put a fine point on it. In its Future of Produce report, released Jan. 13, 2026, it projects fresh produce dollar sales to rise about 2% through 2026 while pound volume stays flat. The category is moving more dollars and not one more pound. The growth is price, not demand.
Jonna Parker, vice president of the fresh foods group at Circana, was clear about the cause: the category has spent its energy pushing supply while losing touch with the shopper, and that flat volume is demand the industry is leaving on the table.
Produce does not have a supply problem or a quality problem. It has a PR problem. The industry has spent decades perfecting how to grow and ship a commodity and almost no time building a brand around it. A new bag, a dietitian tip sheet, and a retail promotion are not a brand. A brand is a point of view, a reason to choose you before price enters the conversation, and a relationship with the shopper that outlasts the display.
We know it can be done. Avocados From Mexico took a single commodity, gave it a story, and seized the biggest advertising stage in the country. Guacamole became a Super Bowl ritual, and demand followed the brand rather than the harvest. That was the CPG playbook — run with discipline in a category everyone else still treats as produce.
The shopper the industry needs most makes this urgent. The fastest-growing produce consumer in America is younger and more multicultural and diverse than the one our marketing was built around.
One in four members of Gen Z is Latino, according to Pew Research Center, and this is a generation that buys from brands that reflect them and scrolls past the ones that do not.
A category that stays generic becomes invisible to exactly the people driving its future. Here, culture is the growth strategy and it is the discipline my firm calls “Culturenomics:" reading a market’s culture as a business input, then building the message and the presence that turn it into demand.
None of this takes a Super Bowl budget. It takes thinking like a brand instead of a supplier. It requires a clear point of view on why your fruit or vegetable matters, a culturally fluent creator strategy that reaches younger shoppers where they already are, and earned media that grows the category rather than clearing a pallet. It means creative brand activations that connect people, not to a commodity, but to a product and the experience it brings to the table. And it leans on storytelling that carries the voices and texture of the whole supply chain from the grower to the shelf.
Today’s shopper has earned that effort. Consumers are more discerning than the category assumes and value to them is no longer a price tag. They will pay for connection to the story, to the product and to the people behind it, and they reward the brands that offer that.
Circana has noted that the younger, digital-first shopper is the industry’s blind spot. Closing it means showing up with these communities year round, not with a produce-aisle sign for one season.
I have built this in produce, most recently an influencer-driven PR program for the Global Grape Group, and I make this case wherever I can reach the industry, including from the stage at The Packer’s West Coast Produce Expo. The recognition in the room is always the same. The industry has been selling pounds when it should have been building demand.
The volume will not grow itself. The prescription is a brand, and building brands is what PR does.
Ruth Villalonga, founder and CEO of Villa Communications, is an award-winning strategic communications and corporate affairs executive specializing in agrifood and other high-trust industries, where she helps companies build trust and drive growth in the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. market.
