The food industry has a customer problem. Not a shortage of them, but a miscounting of them.
Consumer packaged goods companies have long organized their marketing around a specific window: adults aged 18 to 49. Once a consumer ages past that bracket, the industry’s attention resets. New cohort, same window, fresh cycle. It’s a documented structural tendency in CPG. It’s not formal policy, but it shows up consistently in media buying, product development priorities, and shelf strategy.
The logic was sound for most of the 20th century, when the 18–49 population was large, growing, and reliably dominant. That logic is now wrong.
Adults 50 and older account for 53.5% of total U.S. food spending, according to the 2023 Consumer Expenditure Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The demographic the industry structurally deprioritizes at 49 controls the majority of the food budget — more than the entire under-50 population combined. They lead 71 million U.S. households, against 61 million headed by adults under 50. Their median earnings are higher. Their debt is lower. They are, by most measurable indicators, the most financially stable food consumers in the country.
And the gap is only going to widen.
Commodity Bread · Demographics
The food industry is marketing to the wrong half of the population.
Two charts. One inversion.
Share of total U.S. food spending by age, 2023
← CPG marketing cutoff at 49
50+ = 53.5% of food spending. The demographic the industry stops targeting at 49 controls the majority of the food budget.
Adults 65+ as share of U.S. population — actual & projected
1 in 5 Americans will be 65+ by 2030. The share has more than doubled since 1950 and keeps climbing.
The mismatch: The food industry’s marketing playbook resets to ages 18–49 the moment a consumer ages out — a documented structural tendency in CPG reflected consistently in media buying and product development priorities. Meanwhile, the 50+ demographic already controls 53.5% of food spending and is the only age group growing rapidly as a share of the population. Their preferred protein is fish. The industry’s answer is largely surimi in a peel-and-eat stick.
Food spending shares: Calculated from BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey 2023 (published September 2024), average food expenditure by age × consumer units per age group. Under-25 anchor ($5,953 × 6,041K CUs) cited directly in BLS CE Getting Started Guide. 65+ population share: U.S. Census Bureau decennial census data (1950–2020); projections from Census Bureau P25-1144 and Population Reference Bureau Fact Sheet: Aging in the United States (2024). 2023 figure: America’s Health Rankings. CPG marketing age cutoff: Nielsen/BoomAgers research cited in IFT Food Technology (December 2012). Seafood preference: Euromonitor Voice of the Consumer: Health and Nutrition Survey, February 2025, n=4,849.
So the demographic math is settled, but the industry response is not. The 18–49 window made sense when that cohort was the demographic engine. It no longer is. The engine has shifted, and the industry is still pointed the wrong way.
