Regional conflict, shifting supply chains, sticky inflation and high borrowing costs: the pinch is being felt from the factory floor to the family kitchen.


But shoppers aren't simply trading down – they're trading carefully, protecting small luxuries and stretching everyday essentials while making every brand justify its place.

This year's Brand Footprint explores who is winning that argument, market by market.

You wouldn't expect France, Brazil and Central America to have much in common, and yet their reports keep arriving at the same conclusion. Eight in ten growing French  brands added new households last year, as did seven in ten of Brazil's. In Central America, the share of growing brands managing it on recruitment alone climbed from 29% to 45% in a year.
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Persuading existing buyers to come back more often helps, but it is usually a new household arriving that does the heavy lifting.

The brands that climbed fastest this year were the ones a shopper could explain: the lunch that saves a trip to the café, the snack with protein in it, the drink that rescues a tired afternoon, the spray that finally shifts the limescale.

What the Central American data adds is that those jobs cut across the aisles, so brands are increasingly competing for the same household budget and the same occasions rather than the same shelf.

Eight of Portugal's top ten brands are Portuguese and four of Ireland's top five carry Irish heritage, while seven in ten Saudi shoppers say they prefer local names. In Spain, the most chosen brand changes depending on which region you happen to be standing in.

Familiarity clearly counts for something, although it doesn't protect a brand by itself. The heritage names that grew were the ones that tied all that history to something a household needed this week.

Brand Footprint is the annual ranking of the world's most chosen FMCG brands. It is built on Consumer Reach Points (CRPs) – a unique metric measuring how many households buy a brand and how often they choose it. One CRP equals one instance of a shopper choosing a brand, capturing real shopper decisions rather than sales value alone. Published by Worldpanel by Numerator and powered by billions of verified purchases.

A CRP is built from three numbers: how many households there are in a market, what share of them buy the brand over the year, and how often those households choose it. Multiply the three together and you have a brand's real footprint across categories, markets and continents — beverages, food, dairy, health and beauty, and homecare, in 58 markets covering over 85% of global GDP.