Packaging Trends 2024-2025 for the American Food & Beverage Sector

What colors, materials, and textures will influence food and beverage packaging in America?

Packaging is an essential element for creating successful Food and Beverage products in the United States. It increasingly plays a crucial role in influencing American consumers' purchasing decisions.

In a competitive market like the U.S., packaging is the only communication tool producers have to convince consumers to choose their food or beverage products. Therefore, companies should be aware of industry trends and create solutions that meet the practical and aesthetic needs of their target audience. In the following article, we highlight the three main Food and Beverage packaging trends for the United States in 2024 and beyond.

1) Futuristic Food Packaging

In America, artificial intelligence is promoting new forms of packaging design that embrace creativity and imagination. This will translate into unique aesthetics such as:

• Futuristic and fluid shapes;
• Ethereal, ombré, and spray effects;
• Highly saturated and bright tones;
• Tactile textures or materials that stimulate other senses;
• Reflective materials;
• Graphic or structural representation of duality (symmetric patterns, modular designs, transformable packaging).

In the United States, this trend will see the rise of more sophisticated, engineered, and hyper-personalized Food & Beverage products that reduce waste and enhance innovation.

The colors of the futuristic packaging trend are hyper-bright and associated with warm neutral tones to express the connection between digital and human.

2) Soil-Inspired Food Packaging

On the shelves of American supermarkets, grocery stores, and delis, products with aesthetics inspired by earth surfaces will spread, aligning with themes of sustainability and environmental resource conservation. Among the most popular packaging in the USA will be zero-waste ones made from plant-based materials and those with bio-philic 2.0 designs, moving away from clean green aesthetics to murky colors, raw textures, intense pigments, and bioluminescent effects.

The typical palette of Food and Beverage packaging inspired by this trend combines natural tones of earth, flora, and minerals with electric tones inspired by biotechnological innovations aimed at reducing waste.

3) Creative Packaging

This trend promotes the creation of creative packaging, already quite common in America. This originality will emerge in many ways: out-of-the-box packaging, spread of "DIY" (Do It Yourself) and "DIYW" (Do It Your Way) solutions, radical recycling where everything is suitable for reuse (even wine packaging), reinvention of basic products like salt or breakfast cereals through material, color, or packaging construction.

From an aesthetic point of view, a large number of Food and Beverage companies will remix past/retro eras and subcultures in contemporary ways. This is a packaging trend that celebrates creative freedom and self-expression but not creative excess, as design for its own sake will cease to appeal to American consumers if it is not also useful.

The color palette that best represents this trend uses medium tones contrasted with bolder shades.

Packaging as a strategic tool for selling food and beverage products in the United States – ExportUSA can help you develop your brand for the U.S. market

Overall, the demand for cost-effective, functional, and aesthetically appealing packaging will drive design and material trends. The evolving needs and behaviors of American consumers will push food brands selling in the United States to create packaging with the same level of care they dedicate to the ingredient selection of their products.

ExportUSA can step in to simplify your entry into the American market: from ensuring FDA compliance for food and beverage ingredients to developing a brand aligned with current trends and designing compelling packaging.