The 2023 Sustainable Market Share Index™ shows that CPG products with sustainable attributes experienced the highest single-year dollar market share gains compared to private label and traditional brands.
According to the 2023 Sustainable Market Share Index™, an annual research initiative from the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business (CSB), the market share of consumer packaged goods (CPG) products claiming sustainable attributes on their packaging has increased to 18.5% from 17.3% the previous year, the largest percentage increase in the past five years.
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Other key findings include:
– Excluding private label (store brand) purchases, the market share of sustainable products is 21.5%. The share of sustainable and private label products is steadily increasing at the expense of conventional products.
– Market share of sustainable products has increased by 4.8 percentage points since 2015
– Products marketed as sustainable grew at a five-year CAGR of 9.9% compared to 6.4% for traditional products.
During this inflationary period, traditional brands lost share to strong year-over-year growth in private labels (0.4 ppt) and sustainable products (1.2 ppt).
– Sustainable products accounted for nearly one-third of overall CPG growth, despite accounting for less than one-fifth of market share.
“Our annual survey clearly demonstrates that sustainable products will thrive regardless of inflation and continue to have an opportunity to compete for market share amid the rise of store brands,” said Randy Kronthal Sacco, a senior research associate at New York University’s Stern Center for Sustainable Business (CSB), who leads the research initiative. “It’s encouraging to see that consumer demand is driving the creation and embedding of sustainability. 2023 marks the largest single-year increase in sustainable market share since we began our annual analysis, driven primarily by the incorporation of sustainable attributes into new product innovations and established brands adopting sustainability into their legacy products.”
Access the full reportThis includes an updated demographic analysis of sustainable consumers and a breakdown of market share by category. Kronthal-Sacco, a senior research fellow at NYU Stern CSB, presented the research at NYU Stern CSB’s annual Practice Forum.
The Sustainable Market Share Index analyzes purchasing data provided by Circana to calculate the percentage of CPG products marketed as sustainable versus those marketed conventionally. It reviews 36 CPG categories (excluding alcohol and tobacco) that represent approximately 40% of total U.S. sales. The index was first created using data from 2013 to 2018 and is updated annually.
Previous reports have covered additional research variables such as price premiums across sustainable products and by category, new product development, availability, and e-commerce.
