The Top 17 Snack Trends of 2025

Toddler food mirrors adult values

The modern baby food aisle looks less like canned mush and more like a curated wellness section.

Brands like Little Bellies are reshaping expectations for what babies and toddlers eat—driven by a generation of millennial parents who came of age reading ingredient labels and questioning legacy brands. Where once convenience reigned, now the focus is on transparency, developmental design, and clean ingredients.

Little Bellies, founded by two Australian dads, is a case in point. They publish heavy metal testing results for U.S. products—a quiet but powerful response to growing distrust in mainstream baby food. Their snacks evolve with motor milestones, shifting in shape and texture to support self-feeding. Even the mess is intentional: the brand encourages food play as a form of sensory development, reframing a scattered highchair tray as a learning tool, not a cleanup chore.

It’s not just about what’s in the food, but what the food is for. Parents now expect baby snacks to multitask—to nourish, to teach, to align with their broader parenting values. And they’re sharing it all online. The “what I feed my toddler” genre has become a performance space for clean labels, compostable packaging, and cute, camera-ready finger foods.

This isn’t just a trend about baby food. It’s about control, trust, and the extension of adult wellness culture into the earliest stages of life.

Parents push FDA dye bans

American parents helped start the dye-free food movement. The FDA just made it federal policy. In April 2025, U.S. regulators announced a plan to phase out petroleum-based synthetic dyes—like Red 40 and Yellow 5—by the end of next year. The move brings U.S. standards closer to Europe’s, where many of the same dyes require warning labels or are outright banned. For American consumers, the contrast has been hard to ignore. Parents, in particular, have long raised concerns over links between food dyes and hyperactivity, even as those same ingredients remained legal in children’s snacks and cereals. Now, the industry is catching up. PepsiCo says it will eliminate artificial dyes from all U.S. food products by the end of 2025, and over 60% of its portfolio has already made the switch. Natural colorants—beet juice, spirulina, annatto—are stepping in, powered by improved shelf stability and consumer trust. The tradeoff? Colors are often duller. Costs are sometimes higher. But in the eyes of today’s label readers, fewer additives mean more credibility. This shift doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It mirrors a broader cultural movement toward ingredient transparency—one that spans grocery aisles and skincare shelves alike. Just as current beauty trends revolve around “clean,” “free-from,” and “non-toxic,” food is following suit. The logic is simple: if it’s not essential, it shouldn’t be there. What started as parental anxiety has evolved into regulatory action. And in doing so, it’s reshaping not just what we feed kids—but what we consider acceptable, edible, and trustworthy.

Muscle-building snacks surge

Protein powder has been growing in popularity for years, and while it's a good way to add protein to shakes and smoothies, it's not very compatible with preexisting meal habits. Now, high-protein options like carnivore sticks, one of the latest meat snack trends, and even high-protein desserts, have become fast-growing snack and nutrition trends.

Snacking adapts to phone life

As screen time grows, and consumers increasingly watch with a phone in hand (one 2019 survey put the share of TV watchers who do this at 55%), there's a battle for the last hand, and healthy snacking options are aiming to win it by becoming one-hand-eating friendly.

Rather than a traditional meal that could require a fork, knife, and plate, TV-focused snackers are increasingly seeking out hand-held snacks, inspired in part by TikTok snack trends that highlight portability and ease. A snack for gaming, a snack for texting, or a snack for watching TV. Food companies noticed and started pushing to create snacks that are utensil-free and clean-up-free.

Booze moves to gummy form

DIY alcohol gummies have been a party hack for decades: hosts say taking drinks out of the equation is an easy way to avoid spills and makes them more comfortable leaving expensive furniture uncovered.

The downside? They take 24 hours to prep.

Now, pre-made alcohol gummies are emerging as one of the top alcohol trends. A product that makes a consumer more likely to host parties and to use that product at the parties has a natural built-in viral loop.

Any time a snack is convenient to eat but inconvenient to prepare, there's an opportunity for a brand to offer a pre-packaged version.

Meals blur into better snacks

Snacking is on the rise as the line between snacks and meals is blurring—a shift that’s giving rise to better-for-you snack trends, as consumers look for options that feel more like real meals and less like junk food. Research shows that consumers are eating more meals at non-standard times and that snacks now account for over half the times younger generations eat. It’s a function of a more fragmented day that's less likely to be bookended by a context-setting commute.