A bottle of green liquid, designed to spare you the indignity of soaking your pans overnight, created more new value for its category than anything else on the shelf last year.
Fairy Skip the Soak topped the Worldpanel by Numerator product innovation rankings for 2025 in Great Britain, scoring highest for category incrementality and manufacturer incrementality across every tracked new launch. It beat some heavyweight brands and talented newcomers in ice cream, crisps, cola, deodorant, and toothpaste. Let’s pause on that for a moment.
We spend a great deal of time celebrating novelty. Limited editions. Flavour mash-ups. Collaborations that generate social impressions but not nearly enough basket entries. The rankings tell a (very) different story. The products that created the most incremental value in 2025 clearly solved problems in the eyes of shoppers. Fairy lets you skip a washing step. Sensodyne Clinical Repair goes beyond masking tooth and gum sensitivity. Cif Infinite Clean promises to keep cleaning for 72 hours after you’ve wiped things down. Ariel The Big One simplifies laundry by reducing the need for double-dosing or pre-treatment for those with large washing machines, a growing trend. These are propositions with a verb in them. They do something. And shoppers, it turns out, will pay a premium for doing something.
Big brand houses win big
There are no true challenger brands in the top five. Fuel 10k sits at number nine and represents the closest thing to a disruptor on the list, though it still sits inside Premier Foods, one of the largest food manufacturers in the United Kingdom. The rest are clearly well-known big brand houses.
While newcomers and start-ups still break through, it is the big brand houses that keep showing the value of insight-led innovation shaped around existing behaviours or strong enough to create new ones. Yet their scale can also obscure a weakness.
Yes, they have the distribution infrastructure, retailer relationships, and the investment to land a launch across thousands of stores simultaneously. And yes, the playbook works best for those who already have the machinery to run it. These things are underlying truths faced by smaller brands. However, the big, branded houses are consistently proving it takes more than the executional playbook to win at innovation. They have invested in understanding the deeper behaviours and ambitions of shoppers to find new growth. They have also understood the larger product universe through deep, insight-led innovation lenses.
Measuring what matters
Worldpanel’s analysis of 400 launches over three years keeps arriving at this distinction. Scale tells you how much activity a launch generated. Incrementality tells you whether that activity created something new or enhanced what already existed. A brand can look triumphant in one metric and merely busy in the other.
Cannibalisation rises predictably with brand size. Manufacturers holding over 30% of their competitive set see close to 59% of launch sales drawn from their own portfolio. This shouldn’t be thought of as failure. We think of it as “gravity”. Knowing the difference matters.
Pepsi Treats, another big brand hitter, deserves particular attention. It landed at number two for both category and manufacturer incrementality, in a drinks market that has lost 3.8 billion hot and soft drink occasions since 2019. The average household now buys 33 drink brands, down from 40. Occasions are fewer, and repertoires are tighter. The implication is clear: creating new value in that environment is harder than it was three years ago. Pepsi managed it, and the “how” is instructive: Pepsi Treats stretches the cola segment into a more indulgent flavour space. It also carries a disruptive pack design that seemingly demands attention, and very likely drives significant visibility in store, a factor that has a key bearing on gaining new buyers.
Reach and reach again, and again, and…
Recruitment is the undisputed engine of FMCG innovation. The behavioural evidence continues to emphatically show that launches grow because more households buy them, not because existing buyers stock up more often. Penetration drives scale. Repeat follows broad recruitment rather than preceding it. A launch that cannot reach beyond its early adopters will stay small regardless of loyalty. The top products in the rankings all demonstrate this. How? They found more baskets, faster.
The pricing pattern is consistent, too. The most incremental launches carry a meaningful premium, typically 50 to 80% above the category norm, delivered through smaller pack sizes that keep the entry price sensible without being so small as to reduce the basket spend. Shoppers can try without committing. The premium signals that the product is worth something different. Timid pricing, where the new product sits just above or at parity, makes it harder for shoppers to read the point of difference. But here’s the rub: when they cannot read the difference, trade-down becomes structurally easier.
The lesson from 2025 is simple. Shoppers change routine when the benefit is clear, and categories grow when that change brings new value. A washing-up liquid managed both. Will yours?
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