The era of autopilot shopping is ending. For decades, many CPG categories benefited from something close to cruise control. Shoppers scanned the aisle, reached for familiar brands and moved on. Availability was reliable, prices were relatively stable, and what brands stood for, for better or worse, was already settled.
Common assumptions like these no longer hold, as a series of overlapping disruptions such as pandemic shortages, inflation, health scrutiny, political and cultural polarization and now, renewed pricing pressure, have quietly reshaped how people approach even the most routine grocery decisions. Categories once treated as low-attention, system-1 purchases are starting to demand more thought. Not necessarily because shoppers suddenly want to analyze granola bars or mac and cheese, but because the context around those decisions has changed.
From Habit to Consideration
Trying new brands is only part of the shift; shoppers are also paying closer attention to what they’re choosing. Prices that once faded into the background are now noticed, with 78% paying closer attention to price than they did in the past.
Brands that were implicitly trusted before are now being scrutinized. Even long-familiar brands are being reconsidered as shoppers weigh not just what a product costs or contains, but what it signals to them. Products that once felt interchangeable are starting to carry emotional and symbolic weight in the moment of choice. In fact, our recent research shows that 81% of Americans are now more open to trying new brands or products.
This isn’t the classic “trading down” behavior, as many shoppers still buy premium products. But they are more aware, more evaluative and more emotionally engaged in the process, even when they don’t describe it exactly that way themselves.
Emotional Budgeting Shows up at the Shelf
This is where emotional budgeting starts to matter. For shoppers, financial constraints sit alongside frustration, fatigue and a growing desire for control.
Some products feel worth the splurge, while others feel harder to justify. And those judgments aren’t always rational or consistent across categories or demographics.
What matters here is how people explain their choices. In more conversational research settings (where questions unfold in a natural, chat-like flow rather than a static survey questionnaire), shoppers often explain decisions in real time and rationalize them after the fact. That context reveals emotional permissioning that more structured approaches tend to compress into simple price sensitivity metrics.
Legacy Brands Face a Different Kind of Risk
For large, established CPG brands, this shift poses a deeper challenge than competition alone. Legacy equity can work against brands when old perceptions no longer align with current values, health priorities or expectations around transparency. Familiarity does not guarantee trust, and in some cases it even invites further scrutiny.
Shoppers who once defaulted to known brands are now actively comparing them to newer challengers, not just on ingredients or price but on what the brand represents. Legacy brands aren’t doomed by any means, but habit can no longer be taken for granted as a protective moat.
System-1 Categories are Becoming System-2 Moments
For years, researchers have pointed out a mismatch: we study grocery categories with highly analytical, system-2 tools, even though shoppers experience them as fast, automatic, system-1 decisions. That gap is narrowing as consumer behavior itself changes.
More shoppers are slowing down in the aisle: they are reading, comparing and noticing what they may not have paid attention to previously — and sometimes feeling conflicted about what they choose. Our study showed that 69% of Gen Z pay attention to what consumer brands stand for more than they used to, while only 47% of Boomers said they did the same.
This has implications for everything from packaging and shelf communication to how brands think about claims, tone and messaging hierarchy.
Why Conversational Methods Matter Now
As grocery decisions take on more emotional and cognitive weight, the way brands study those decisions becomes more consequential.
In more traditional research environments, respondents often default to what feels reasonable or defensible. Answers are shaped by the structure of the questionnaire itself, encouraging simplification and post-hoc rationalization. By contrast, conversational research creates space for people to work through decisions as they describe them. When questions unfold in a natural, chat-like flow, shoppers are more likely to surface the uncertainty, frustration and small trade-offs that accompany everyday choices.
That difference matters because it reveals what people buy and also how they make sense of those decisions in context. Those explanations often expose emotional permissioning that more structured approaches tend to collapse into tidy measures like price sensitivity.
For brands trying to understand why routines broke, that nuance can be the difference between reacting to surface-level behavior and addressing the underlying shift.
A Final Thought
From what I see, the bigger risk is waiting for old habits to return. Shoppers haven’t abandoned routine, but they’ve rewritten it, and even everyday choices now carry more thought than they once did. Brands that continue to design for autopilot may miss just how attentive grocery shopping has become.
Jonathan Dore is an EVP of Reach3 Insights, an innovative marketing research consultancy focused on insight gathering through conversational approaches and communities. Dore runs the Reach3 Chicago BU and is responsible for bringing the company’s unique methodologies and advanced technologies to organizations across the consumer goods and services industries.
