A rare Monday Substack, but I was excited to get out my first video!

I just closed out our first consumer insights report for 2026 and I wanted to walked through the results above.

(Full disclosure before we get started: I run WeStock. I have a horse in this race. That being said the data and the implications below are platform-neutral and they hold up for any rebate platform you use as long as the paid media strategy is aligned. I want you to be successful no matter who you use.

Some highlights here:

70% of shoppers who try a brand for free will repurchase at least half of them.

The “deal shoppers don’t convert” objection your CFO keeps raising is wrong when the targeting is right.

Free trial isn’t a discount strategy that degrades the brand, it’s an acquisition channel with a 70% top-of-funnel-to-repeat rate, which most paid media channels would kill for.

Early adopters over-index for conventional grocery, not natural.

The default retail launch playbook for emerging brands says: launch in Sprouts and Whole Foods first, prove velocity, expand to conventional. The shopper data says the trial-hungry early adopter is already in conventional grocers.

They’re going to natural for the discovery, but they’re using their rebates and trying new brands in conventional.

If you’re a founder defending a “Sprouts first” launch on the basis that “that’s where our shopper is,” the survey says your shopper is also at Kroger and Albertsons.

$1 and $2 rebates waste paid media on first-time trial.

Over half of respondents said the smallest discount that would get them to try a new brand was a free item or a BOGO.

The trade marketer who runs a $1 rebate against paid media targeting a cold audience is paying ad dollars to bring a shopper to an offer that doesn’t move them. The $1 evergreen offer in your link tree is a different product, it works for warm shoppers who already know the brand and is a great way to win back those shoppers, not converst new shoppers.

The offer staircase is proven, in order: Free → BOGO → evergreen $1–$2.

Free for the cold trial campaign.

BOGO once you have the lookalike audience built.

Evergreen $1–$2 for the win-back and first-party data capture on your social channels.

The deeper question this consumer report raises:

If 70% of free-trial shoppers repurchase at least half the brands they try, the constraint isn’t the discount.

It’s whether your product and your shopper are aligned in the first place.

A brand with bad product-shopper fit can’t out-discount its way to repeat. A brand with great product-shopper fit doesn’t need a $1 evergreen, it needs to lower the trial barrier as far as possible the first time, and then stand on its product.

That’s the hard part. Discounting is the easy lever, but if your waonderign why it isn’t working, you have to look at your targeting and product-shopper fit.

The walkthrough goes through the rest of the data: where they shop, what they care about (taste > nutrition, every time), how diet preferences actually segment, and the three components that drives the trial engine, discount + brand + sampling.