The middle of the supermarket shelf is dying, and RBC Capital Markets thinks consumer goods companies need to stop pretending otherwise.
In a research note published under its Imagine framework, the bank's consumer and retail team argues that the K-shaped economy, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, is not a cyclical blip but a structural condition that will only intensify through the end of the decade.
The implication for the companies that fill the world's shopping baskets is this: product portfolios need to look like barbells, not ladders, with growth accruing at the extremes and virtually nothing left in the middle.
The forces driving this are mutually reinforcing. Uneven access to AI is making some workers dramatically more productive while leaving others further behind. Wealth is compounding across generations, with the top 0.1% of US households owning more stock than the bottom 50% combined.
Healthcare breakthroughs from gene therapy to GLP-1 drugs are extending the healthspan of those who can afford them, while life expectancy in the poorest US counties lags the richest by seven years. Educational polarisation is locking in these advantages from childhood.
RBC's analyst Nik Modi argues that premium consumers will increasingly live within closed ecosystems of subscriptions, concierge services and auto-replenishment, while value-constrained consumers will gravitate towards concentrates, sachets and shared infrastructure.
The sachet, long a fixture of emerging market retail in India and sub-Saharan Africa, may be coming to developed markets too.
To illustrate the point, the note offers a series of speculative product concepts that read like dispatches from a near future that is already partly here.
At the premium end: Fairlife, the Coca-Cola-owned filtered milk brand, could become a longevity platform with glucose-stabilising and cognitive-support additives, priced at $6 to $8 a bottle.
Estée Lauder's La Mer could offer personalised skincare formulated from epigenetic markers, at $500 to $2,000 per product.
Brown-Forman could develop a nootropic non-alcoholic whiskey targeting ageing baby boomers who have given up alcohol but not the ritual of an evening drink.
At the value end: Colgate could sell dissolvable toothpaste strips for less than $0.10 through school programmes and kiosks in India, Nigeria and Indonesia.
Campbell's could launch shelf-stable, self-heating nutrition blocks with 20 grams of protein at $1.50. PepsiCo could bring Gatorade powder sachets, already standard in emerging markets, to cost-conscious consumers in the US.
The most immediately actionable idea, RBC suggests, is Hershey selling "mood chocolate" infused with L-theanine, magnesium and adaptogens, essentially packaging emotional regulation as a snack bar for consumers whose baseline stress levels are structurally elevated and unlikely to recede.
The note also flags a threat that should worry every legacy consumer goods company.
Amazon and Temu, with their algorithmic and logistics advantages, are uniquely positioned to serve both ends of the barbell simultaneously, threatening to disintermediate brands that lack the data infrastructure and pricing flexibility to compete across a permanently bifurcated consumer landscape.
The underlying message is simple: the average consumer no longer exists, and companies still building portfolios for one are building for nobody.