The Sustainable Share Index, from the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business and Information Resources Incorporated (IRI), highlights the growing popularity of sustainable products.

The Index, which analyzed the purchase of Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPGs) across 36 product categories in the United States between 2013 and 2018, found that sustainability-marketed products grew 5.6 times faster than conventionally-marketed products, accounting for more than half of CPG growth since 2013.

Other key findings include:

  • In more than 90 percent of individual product categories, the growth of sustainability-marketed products outpaced total category growth
  • While sustainability-marketed products are responsible for over half (50.1 percent) of the growth in CPGs since 2013, they represent only 16.6 percent of the CPG market in dollar sales (up from 14.3 percent in 2013)
  • Categories that demand high functionality (such as detergent and toothpaste) do not have a large percentage of sustainable purchases, unlike categories with low functionality demands (e.g. fresh bread, milk and yogurt)

Robert I. Tomei, president, Market and Shopper Intelligence at IRI, said, “The results of this research show that sustainable products play a key role in consumer decision-making and we know this is particularly important to Millennials and Generation Z.”