Cheerios is the most trusted food or beverage brand in the U.S., and the only food brand in a bigger top 10 list of brands, according to Morning Consult’s "Most Trusted Brands" report. The food industry in general is up there, too, second among all the industry categories in the report.
Cheerios scored 53.42, ranking it sixth, behind such brands as (in order) Band-Aid, UPS, Amazon, Lysol and Kleenex. The General Mills brand was ahead of Visa, Dove, Weather Channel and FedEx. Morning Consult did not explain what scale the numbers related to.
Food overall and on a global scale scored a rating of 32.05; only retail & e-commerce (35.73) scored higher.
Within the food category, the top brands were:
- Cheerios (53.42)
- Kellogg’s (51.90)
- Campbell’s (51.63)
- Oreo (50.34)
- M&M’s (49.42)
- Heinz (49.39)
- Lipton (48.78)
- Ritz (48.75)
- Lay’s (48.73)
- Pillsbury (48.61)
It's no surprise that all brands on the above list have been around for many years, some of them 100 years old.
The report noted that Gen Z is proving to be the least trusting cohort. That generation of young adults, the oldest of which are just becoming purchasing factors, “is less likely than the general population to say they trust every brand on our … list to do what is right,” the report said. “Some of this trust will be built up over time — remember, Gen Zers are young consumers. They need additional touchpoints with these brands to continue to build trust.”
Morning Consult is a U.S.-based business intelligence company. The data was collected March 3-April 3 of this year. In the U.S., representative samples of 799 to 8,434 U.S. adults were gathered with an unweighted margin of error of up to +/-3 percentage points. The group asks “How much do you trust this brand to do what is right?” Brand rankings were determined by finding net trust, or the share of respondents who said they trust each brand to do the right thing “a lot” and “some” minus the share who said “not much” and “not at all.”
