By Will Clarke | Amp Agency
Last week, close to 80,000 conference-goers descended on the Anaheim Convention Center for the 45th edition of Natural Products Expo West. Three days. Over 3,000 brands. 130 countries represented. A $342 billion industry flexing in every aisle. My step count looked like a phone number. My suitcase came dangerously close to incurring an extra fee what with all the samples—including a block of unpasteurized cheddar that I couldn’t say no to. By the time I flew back to Dallas, I had consumed enough functional mushroom products to now legally register as a National Forest.
If you haven’t been, get to the 46th edition knowing that you’ll be a little high on it all in the end. Reminds me of another gathering…
Expo West is the Coachella of natural products—if Coachella headlined gummy vitamins and tallow-fried tortilla chips and asked you to rate both on a scale from one to life-changing.
Here’s what I saw. And more importantly, here’s what I think it means for anyone in the business of building brands.
1. Everyone Will Be Putting Protein in Their Protein
We need to talk about protein. Not because it’s new — it was everywhere last year too — but because of where it showed up this year. Protein in soda. Protein in pretzels. Protein in candy. Protein in ramen. Protein in ice cream. Someone at New Hope reportedly started photographing every protein-branded product on the show floor and had to stop because it was literally every other booth.
The twist? Animal protein staged a comeback. Whey was printed on packaging nearly as often as the word protein itself. Meat sticks had a serious moment, with chicken emerging as the new star — apparently capturing only about 1% of sales in the segment so far. Bone broth showed up in drinks, soups, and standalone formats. Plant-based isn’t going anywhere, but the pendulum swung hard toward animal sources this year.
The brand lesson: When a macro-trend becomes this saturated, the differentiator stops being the claim and becomes the story. Thirty grams of protein per can is a data point. What makes someone reach for yours over the other seventeen options on the shelf? That’s where brand building and storytelling lives.
2. Beef Tallow Is the New Black
Beef tallow — your great-grandmother’s cooking fat — is having its rebrand moment. Tallow-fried potato chips. Tallow tortilla chips. Tallow french fries. Tallow skincare. There were so many tallow chip booths that multiple attendees reported losing count within the first hour of walking the floor.
This isn’t just a health trend. It’s a positioning statement. Brands cooking in tallow are actively distancing themselves from seed oils and leaning into a narrative of traditional, whole-food fats. Something that was considered old-fashioned or even off-putting five years ago is now a premium differentiator. If that doesn’t make you rethink your assumptions about what consumers will embrace, nothing will.
The brand lesson: The most powerful ingredient stories aren’t always about what’s new. Sometimes they’re about what’s old — reclaimed, reframed, and told with conviction.
3. The Natural Power of Simple Ingredients
Dates were everywhere. Candy-coated dates. Chocolate-covered dates. Sour dates (yes, sour date candy is a thing now). Date syrups, date gels, date-sweetened sodas. Brands like Harken Sweets are making date caramel candy bars that reportedly rival a Snickers — no added sugars, plus prebiotics. The date hoopla had me all the prouder of our work on Joolies, a pioneer in the deliciousness of dates universe.
The positioning is smart: all the indulgence cues of candy with the clean-label appeal of whole fruit. Dates are emerging as the most versatile natural sweetener on the market — one that lets brands tell a story about minimal processing, real ingredients, and zero compromise on taste.
The brand lesson: Don’t underestimate the power of a single-ingredient narrative. When a humble ingredient gets elevated with imagination and craft, it can anchor an entire brand platform.
4. Functional Fatigue Is Real
Here’s the most interesting tension at this year’s show: while 52% of beverages now carry some kind of health and wellness claim, a growing number of brands are pushing back. One non-alcoholic beverage founder put it perfectly when he told the Food Institute that his brand’s function is simply that it tastes amazing.
Snack brands followed suit — organic marshmallows, cookie dough gelato bites, low-sugar peanut butter cups. No macronutrient call-outs. No functional stacking. Just delicious things made with clean ingredients.
Meanwhile, a Whole Foods category merchant cautioned that brands tend to overestimate how much knowledge or time consumers have when shopping in-store. You can stack all the benefits you want on a label. If it takes a nutrition degree to decode it, you’ve already lost.
The brand lesson: Not every product needs to be a multivitamin in disguise. Sometimes the most radical move is simplicity. Know when to stack and when to strip back.
5. You Can Actually Taste Nostalgia
One of the more surprising threads: the bright, nostalgic fruit flavors of Japanese and Korean convenience stores — known as konbini — are inspiring a new wave of functional drinks. Lychee, melon, concord grape, soursop. These aren’t random exotic flavors. They tap into a very specific cultural nostalgia rooted in travel, anime culture, and the global rise of Asian food trends.
Korean and Japanese flavor profiles were showing up in sauces, frozen meals, and snacks, too. Global flavors have been “trending” for years, but what’s new is the specificity. We’re past the era of generic “Asian-inspired.” Brands are now anchoring in particular regions, particular traditions, particular taste memories.
The brand lesson: Flavor is a storytelling device. The best brands at Expo West didn’t just borrow global ingredients. They created entire narratives around them.
6. Dry January through December
Non-alcoholic beer quietly surpassed ale in beer sales last year. Let that sink in. Only lager outpaces it now. At Expo West, the category showed up with force — especially canned cocktails and wellness tonics. But the real story is the evolution. We’ve moved past simple mocktails that merely remove the alcohol from traditional drinks. This year, booths were built around adult flavors: bitter, savory, herbal. Drinks designed from the ground up for people who want the ritual, the sophistication, and the social moment — without the hangover.
Celebrity-backed beverage brands continued to proliferate. The line between wellness, culture, and entertainment keeps blurring.
The brand lesson: The sober-curious consumer doesn’t want a watered-down version of drinking culture. They want their own culture. The brands that build that world — rather than just subtract alcohol from the existing one — will own this category.
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