Consumer Goods Trends & Challenges 2026–2029: Five Shifts and How to Solve Them

Five market shifts are reshaping how consumer goods companies in Europe reach shoppers between 2026 and 2029 — from AI-mediated discovery and the direct-to-consumer rebalance to circular resale and new EU transparency rules. For each shift below you'll find the problem it creates and how Vaneigens helps solve it with the Salesforce platform.

01 — Shoppers are starting to ask AI assistants for product advice instead of searching a website or browsing a shelf

The problem. 84% of European shoppers now use AI tools daily, and 38% actively use them to research products and decide what to buy — roughly half already ask an AI assistant to compare options before purchasing. For a consumer goods company, this matters regardless of which shop eventually sells the product: if an AI assistant can't find accurate, structured information about a product, the brand may simply not get recommended at all, no matter how good its relationship with retailers is. Yet a survey of European consumer goods leaders found that even as companies increase AI spending, most are still running small pilot projects rather than making AI a working part of how they reach customers.

How Vaneigens helps. Vaneigens can set up Salesforce's customer data platform (Data Cloud) so a company's product and ingredient information is organised and accurate enough for AI tools to find and recommend correctly, wherever the product is actually sold, and build a company-owned AI assistant (using Salesforce's Agentforce) that can answer shopper questions directly on the brand's own website.

Sources: McKinsey & Company, Rewiring Retail in Europe: The AI Imperative; McKinsey & Company, The AI Paradox in Europe's Consumer Industries

02 — Consumer goods companies are rebalancing how much they sell directly to shoppers versus through retail partners

The problem. After years of pushing sales toward their own websites and apps, Nike and Adidas have both been rebuilding their wholesale relationships with retailers, since selling everything directly turned out to be more expensive and harder to scale than expected — while still wanting to keep the benefits of owning a direct relationship with shoppers. Getting this balance wrong in either direction is costly: too much direct selling strains retailer relationships and inflates marketing costs; too little means losing the customer data and margin that come with direct sales.

How Vaneigens helps. Vaneigens can bring a company's own online sales and its wholesale/retail-partner sales into one place using Salesforce's customer data platform (Data Cloud), so decisions about where to invest are based on real numbers instead of guesswork, and build a retail-partner portal (using Salesforce's Experience Cloud) so wholesale partners always work from the same up-to-date product and pricing information as the company's own website.