One of the most common buzzwords in food and nutrition, “wellness” encompasses far more than physical and mental health. It’s a multi-faceted, nuanced lens through which consumers view the way they live, what they eat, how they sleep, what they do at work, and how they spend days off.
But wellness is far more than a trendy term — it’s a booming business. According to a report by McKinsey, 82% of U.S. consumers view wellness as their top priority. No wonder the wellness market has grown as much as 10% per year and is worth more than $480 billion.
The numbers don’t lie: Wellness isn’t a trend — it’s a consumer mentality that speaks to a societal shift. With the right strategy, it also opens up real opportunities to a relevant and resonant connection with your audience.
Using a wellness mindset to inform your marketing is fundamentally about understanding how consumers define wellbeing for themselves. However, you need to also take into account the ways that definition varies dramatically based on individual circumstances, cultural background and personal values.
Navigating a Transformed Consumer Landscape
Think of wellness as a nesting doll: Health and the broader needs of the body forms the core, and nutrition builds upon it with functional benefits of how you eat. Wellness is the overarching umbrella encompassing how food fits into our lifestyle.
Depending on your audience, that could mean satisfying functional needs such as energy, healthy aging, or dietary restrictions. Or it could mean prioritizing foods that reinforce their emotional well-being or culture. But consumers must navigate a barrage of confusing messages in choosing the products right for their needs.
Consumers are navigating a fascinating paradox. They’re more educated and engaged with food than ever before—they want to know where their food comes from, how it was grown or manufactured, what ingredients are used, and of course, its basic nutrition profile. But at the same time, they’re drowning in misinformation. As social media replaces traditional information sources, consumers struggle to separate facts from conflicting advice from self-proclaimed experts. Who do you trust?
You can’t simply rely on a nutrition profile alone to sell your product. Wellness allows food brands and commodity boards to move beyond basic nutrition and health claims and into more lifestyle-driven storytelling. You have a unique opportunity to show how everyday, wellness-oriented foods can play a bigger role in people’s lives. Along with establishing a stronger emotional connection with your consumer, you also can build loyalty and long-term demand that’s rooted in more than basic nutrition benefits.
As wellness remains a core consumer priority, any one-size-fits-all marketing approach is obsolete. Your ability to connect with your consumer depends on understanding what wellness truly means to your target audience.
Why Knowing Your Audience Is Essential
One of the core challenges for your brand comes down to recognizing that “wellness” isn’t one thing. It varies dramatically across individual needs, cultural backgrounds, economic circumstances, and personal priorities.
For someone shopping at a high-end natural grocery store, wellness might mean organic certification and superfood ingredients. For someone living in a food desert with budget constraints, wellness could mean finding affordable frozen produce that delivers essential nutrients with longer shelf life.
Your food brand’s wellness positioning starts with deep audience insights. What motivates their food choices? Where does your product naturally fit into their lifestyle? What are their aspirations?
Beyond Nutrition Labels: Applying Wellness to Brand Storytelling
Fundamentally, wellness is about consumer mindset. Health is related to wellness, but is fundamentally rooted in science: These foods and habits are proven to benefit these conditions. Health is often combined with nutrition, which is rooted in the functional or dietary benefits of the food you eat. Wellness is both broader and more ambiguous, and consumers are defining what this term means to them.
For example, from a functional perspective, Quaker Oats has long promoted its benefit to consumers as a way to improve heart health. At the same time, a competing cereal brand can lean into how its product provides energy and fuel for athletes and runners, which also serves a function. As a brand or commodity, you have to make a strategic decision about what purpose or role your product serves when presenting your product.
Trending Topics in Wellness for Brand Positioning
Below, we’ve broken down just a few of many options available for your brand to align with consumer trends in wellness. With the right strategy, you can unlock the right path for your product to establish a lasting connection with its audience.
Functional Foods: Today’s consumers shop with intention. They’re seeking foods that deliver specific benefits beyond basic nutrition, such as energy for athletes, gut health support anti-inflammation and brain-boosting benefits
Women’s Health: Our culture has grown more comfortable talking about women’s unique nutritional needs around hormonal health, perimenopause and menopause. Brands addressing these historically untapped areas can find significant white space.
Whole Food & Minimal Processing: This territory is particularly advantageous for commodity boards,agricultural products and “whole food,” minimal-ingredient brands, such as produce, meat, seafood, nuts, etc.. Clean labels and easily understood ingredients resonate strongly with consumers seeking “real food” solutions.
Mental Wellness Connection: Mental and physical health are no longer seen as separate priorities. Food’s impact on mood, cognition and emotional wellbeing presents new opportunities for your product.
Consider the fundamental truth that physical discomfort directly impacts emotional state—when your body doesn’t feel well, your mood suffers. This intricate connection between what we eat and how we feel opens up powerful new narratives for brands to explore.
Navigating Regulatory Hurdles in Wellness Positioning
One significant challenge, especially for commodity boards, is navigating FDA regulatory limitations on nutrition and health claims—the meaning which is arguably lost on most consumers. But wellness opens up a broader conversation allowing you to connect your product to lifestyle and values connected to health while remaining credible.
The key is messaging grounded in both credibility and creative—good science and good sense. Start with a firm understanding of your product’s nutrition profile, bioactive compounds and/or science-backed benefits demonstrated through human studies.
Then, connect these with a deep understanding of your audience. Let’s say you have clinical studies demonstrating improved gut microbiota and know that your food contains significant amounts of phytochemicals that positively affect the gut microbiome, but your food lacks enough fiber to qualify for a nutrient content claim. And let’s say your audience cares about gut health and you want to zero-in on this as your strategy. Don’t fixate on your food’s lack of fiber claim, tell a compelling, science-based story about what your food does for the gut flora through other compounds and mechanisms in a way that connects emotionally with your audience.
Building a Wellness Platform: From Function to Emotion
Effective wellness positioning creates a bridge between your product’s functional benefits and its emotional connection to your consumer. This isn’t about choosing between scientific merit and lifestyle appeal—it’s about understanding which levers to pull and when.
How deeply you understand your audience determines how effectively you can balance functional and emotional messaging for your product. This means going beyond surface-level demographics to truly comprehend what wellness means to your consumer in their day-to-day lives.
Tapping into the wellness mindset also allows for category expansion by considering other elements of consumer behavior. If you’re targeting fitness-minded consumers, that opens up different opportunities through partnerships with other outlets like outdoor retailers and influencers. Once you understand the opportunity in the wellness space, you can piece together more tactical components that will drive growth.
Moving Forward: Wellness as Your Strategic Platform
The wellness mindset isn’t going anywhere. It represents a fundamental shift in how consumers relate to food. The brands and commodity boards that will thrive are those that understand wellness as a comprehensive platform rather than a marketing trend.
With the right agency partner, you can think about wellness as more than its own thing. Wild Hive considers wellness in the context of your business, its strategic goals and an integrated marketing approach.
Success starts with knowing your audience: What does wellness mean to them? What functional benefits matter most in the context of their lifestyle? What emotional connections can you authentically build?
With these insights, you can expand your brand’s role in consumers’ wellness journeys. And most importantly, you can create the kind of authentic connections that build long-term loyalty beyond any single nutrition or health claim.The wellness conversation is happening with or without you. The question is: Are you positioned to be part of it in a way that resonates? Let’s talk about it.