Inflation is back. The narrative follows a familiar script: cost-of-living pressure, trading down, price as the only lever left. But the data tells a different story. And a more useful one.
The Diagnosis: Pressure vs Behaviour
Let's start with the story we keep hearing. Or if we're honest, the one we keep telling ourselves.
Consumers are under pressure. Input costs are up. Margins are tighter. Shoppers are trading down. And in that environment, the only levers left are price and promotion. Discount harder, run more deals, compete on the only thing people care about right now.
It's a coherent narrative. It's also incomplete in ways that are costing growers and brands real money.
Here's what it gets wrong: it conflates pressure with behaviour. They are not the same thing. Consumers feeling pressure doesn't mean they act the way we assume they will. We've seen this before. At the height of the plastic packaging debate, consumers were vocal, angry, and apparently resolute. Open their fridge door and what did you find? Fruits and vegetables wrapped in plastic. The stated concern and the actual behaviour were two completely different things.
The same trap applies here. When we assume that financial pressure automatically translates into price-driven behaviour, we stop asking the harder question. And we end up chasing volume movement and calling it demand creation. They are not the same thing. Mistaking one for the other is where strategy starts to unravel.
What the Data Actually Shows
Consumers haven't abandoned fresh
Total fresh produce remains habitual. Core fruit continues to anchor the weekly shop. Lunchboxes still need filling. Kids still need fruit. The health rationale hasn't evaporated under cost-of-living pressure. If anything, it's stronger than ever. Millennial parents read labels, think about what goes in their kids' bodies, and have made fresh fruit a non-negotiable even when budgets are tight. If price were genuinely the problem, we'd expect to see structural category collapse. We don't. What we see is selectivity. Which is a very different problem and a much more interesting one.
Shoppers are being selective, not cheap
Under pressure, consumers don't buy less of everything. They buy fewer things more deliberately. They protect the choices that feel familiar and trusted and they become less forgiving of anything that requires effort, explanation, or risk. This is why you can have two SKUs sitting at similar price points and watch their performance diverge dramatically. It's not the price. It's the clarity, the familiarity, the confidence that one product delivers and the other doesn't quite earn. Stress doesn't make consumers irrational. It makes them more rational, in a very specific way. They default to what they know works.
Being price-right is table stakes, not a strategy
Across most fresh produce categories, the majority of SKUs sit at or near the category average price point, yet only a handful ever deliver real scale. Take the apple category. Pink Lady, Granny Smith dominate volume while most of the category clusters around the same price line. Price alone doesn’t explain the gap.
Then look at the branded varieties — Bravo, Jazz, Envy. They above category average, sometimes meaningfully so. And they’re still alive. Not dominant, but present, with a loyal base willing to pay a premium week after week. If price were the deciding factor, they simply shouldn’t exist. What keeps them viable isn’t a price advantage, it’s a flavour promise, a clear point of difference, and a consumer who actively seeks them out. That’s the real lesson. Premiumisation is possible but only when a product has genuine clarity about what it delivers and who it’s for. Price enables participation. It does not create demand. Facings, placement, and repetition do more heavy lifting than any marginal price move. And a clear, trusted identity does more work still.
Similar price does not produce similar outcomes. Being cheap enough to be in consideration doesn’t make you chosen. What makes you chosen is something else entirely: being clear, being familiar, being the low-risk option in a moment when consumers are actively avoiding risk. Price is a filter. It gets you through the door. It doesn’t close the sale.
Promotion shifts volume. It rarely creates demand.
Deep promotional activity creates spikes. But where does the volume come from? Mostly from other weeks (shoppers stock up and buy less the following fortnight), other SKUs in the same category, or other retailers. The category rarely grows just based on promotion alone. If promotional activity genuinely built demand, categories would look very different. Instead, what heavy promotional reliance often produces is a consumer base trained to wait for the deal, and an underlying demand profile that's weaker than the movement data suggests. Volume is not demand. Movement is not growth.
What Consumers Are Actually Optimising For
Strip away the complexity and a consistent picture emerges. Think about your own behaviour when things get hard, at work, at home, under pressure. We gravitate toward what we're good at. We do the things we've done a thousand times. We simplify.
Consumers are no different. Under financial pressure, the weekly shop doesn't become more adventurous. It becomes more automatic. People reach for what they know works: the variety that never disappoints, the product that fits how their family actually eats, the choice that carries no risk of waste or regret.
Three things consistently drive the decision: confidence (I know this will work), routine (this fits how we eat), and low risk (no surprises). Price is the filter that determines what's in consideration. These are the things that determine what gets chosen.
What Growers and Brands Should Actually Do About It
Before we get to the implications, it's worth naming what makes fresh produce different from the rest of the grocery store. There's no private label version of a Pink Lady. Loose is loose. You can't shrink an apple to manage your margins. The levers that packaged goods companies pull when times get tough simply don't exist here. What that means is there are fewer places to hide. Understanding what actually drives a consumer's hand becomes not a nice-to-have, but the whole game.
Brand matters most under pressure
Tight times reward familiarity. When budgets are under strain and consumers are making deliberate, protective choices, recognisable brands or products with consistent, reliable positioning outperform their less defined competitors. Novelty struggles unless it comes with exceptional clarity about why it deserves the spend.
It's worth acknowledging the reality of the Australian market here: true brands in fresh produce are rare. The category has always let quality do the talking, and for the most part, that quality is genuinely world-class. Not every brand that has tried to establish itself has earned lasting cut-through. This isn't a call to invest in brand campaigns or pour money into marketing infrastructure that the category may or may not really need.
What it is a call for is consistency. Consistent quality, consistent presentation, consistent availability. And where you can, saying so. Reaching consumers directly, through packaging, through grower stories, through the small moments of connection that modern channels make possible, and telling them simply: this is who we are, this is how we grow, and this quality is something you can count on every single time.
Shoppers can't choose what they don't know exists. The growers who find ways to close that gap, without big budgets, without elaborate campaigns, are the ones building something that lasts. That's not a spend problem. It's a lack of understanding of the consumer. And that is entirely within a grower's control to fix.
"Consumers aren't broken. They aren't irrational. They're doing something much more interesting: they're being more deliberate. More intentional. More selective about what earns their trust and their spend." Binary Consulting Group
Not all volume is good volume
Growth that comes from being genuinely chosen, week after week, at full price, without a promotional event to trigger it, is durable. Volume that depends on a promotion is fragile.
That's not to say promotion has no role. Done well, it brings new consumers in, raises penetration, and a meaningful share of them stick. That's legitimate demand creation.
But watch the trend line. If you're running more promotions each year to hold the same volume, something is broken. Consumers are still being persuaded but only by price. And the underlying demand is quietly shrinking, often masked by what's happening to pack size. Smaller packs, same movement, looks fine on a report. It isn't.
Range discipline beats range expansion
When consumers are in a protective, low-risk mindset, creativity in the kitchen is probably the last thing on their minds. The default is predictable: the most recognisable option on the shelf, the safest choice, the no-waste choice, the one they've made a hundred times before.
This is where consumer insight earns its keep. Not in grand strategy documents, but in the small, uncomfortable questions that most suppliers avoid asking. Why did the same promotion that worked so well last year deliver half the volume this year? Are you losing consumers, or just selling less per consumer? Is it a specific state or is it everywhere? What does your offer actually look like through the eyes of someone standing in front of it under pressure, with half an eye on the weekly budget?
A supplier can't control the shelf. But they can control how well they understand the person standing in front of it. That understanding, built from consistent, honest engagement with consumer data, is what separates reactive from strategic. It's what tells you which SKU to back, when to push hard and when to hold, and where the next real opportunity sits before your competitors see it.
The insight isn't the destination. It's the thing that makes every other decision sharper.
The Provocation
If price were the problem, dropping it would fix everything. Category after category would show a clean, direct relationship between promotional depth and lasting demand growth. They don't, because that's not how this works.
Consumers aren't broken. They aren't irrational. They aren't simply fleeing to the cheapest option and waiting for the economy to recover before they engage again. They're doing something much more interesting: they're being more deliberate. More intentional. More selective about what earns their trust and their spend.
The opportunity in that is real. Stop reacting to the pressure. Start designing for how consumers are actually choosing. The producers and brands who make that shift, who compete on confidence and clarity rather than cost alone, are the ones who will be standing when the pressure eventually eases.
And the ones who will have built something genuinely durable in the meantime.
Want to understand what is actually driving your consumers?
We work with fresh produce and FMCG businesses to build a clearer picture of shopper behaviour and turn that understanding into decisions that hold up commercially. If this landed, it is worth a conversation.
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