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Target Is Leaning Into Food And Beverage, Giving Emerging Brands A Retail Platform Like Never Before
Food & Drink Target Is Leaning Into Food And Beverage, Giving Emerging Brands A Retail Platform Like Never Before By Andrew Watman ,
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover innovation across the food & beverage landscape. Follow Author Aug 24, 2026, 10:56am EDT Summary Target is aggressively expanding its Food & Beverage sector, becoming a primary grocery destination and top traffic driver, boasting $9 billion in growth since 2019. The retailer is curating a "craveable, cool" assortment, emphasizing trends and actively fostering emerging brands. Target partners with small businesses, offering a vital platform for innovative products across frozen, snacks, refrigerated, breakfast, and beverages. This strategy includes a strong focus on wellness, organic options, and even pioneering low-dose THC drinks. Target's commitment to innovation and trend-setting positions it as a retail leader, driving new discoveries and loyalty among busy families by providing diverse, quality options at accessible price points.
Target is having fun behind the scenes, and it’s noticeable up and down each aisle.
It’s always been a store to browse the aisles and leave with items you didn’t intend to purchase. But as the mass retailer has shifted its grocery business in recent years, you’re now heading to Target for different reasons in the first place, now becoming a place for discovery of food and beverage products–putting more emphasis on its curation.
“We’re focused on carving our own lane–an assortment that’s craveable, cool and feels very much like our distinct point of view on food, not just any assortment of food,” John Conlin, Target Senior Vice President of Food & Beverage Merchandising, tells me. “Target is known as a place for trends and style, and the way that I've approached this next chapter with food is through that same lens, standing tall for new and emerging trends for busy families and building an assortment around that.”
While its Good & Gather private label has been performing strong and consists of some of its highest performing products, Target has been putting a spotlight on its grocery business and providing a growth engine for small food and beverage businesses with an emphasis it previously never has. It’s fueling a rebirth of Target as one of the nation’s leading grocers, not just mass retailers.
According to data shared with me from Target, Food & Beverage is now Target’s top driver of traffic in its stores, with about $9 billion in growth since 2019, and an additional $2 billion of growth expected ahead.
“The ability to be there for busy families more often is core to what Target is trying to bring to retail,” Conlin says. “It drives more trips into the store. It creates more loyalty. And it allows us to introduce guests to new and emerging trends, which is really core to our DNA.”
Target is also working toward increasing the amount of organic produce it carries, aiming now for 30%.
Target introduced more than three thousand new food & beverage products in Q1 of 2026 alone, more than half of those just in the Summer. Snacks, dairy and frozen are its top new growth categories.
These brands are going to have to put in a lot of work to keep shoppers purchasing their products and becoming loyal consumers. It’s possible they won’t all be on the shelf in a year from now. But the opportunity to put in the work to market their items properly is.
“What brands need to scale is to truly understand the guest needs at a high level, and the ability to manage a lot of stores and locations needs to be quite strong,” Conlin says. “Having the most craveable and cool assortment in retail is what we’re pushing into really aggressively right now.”
Below are some of the latest products that have recently launched or are launching soon in Target. What stands out about all of the brands featured below, is that they each have a similar sentiment towards Target: that it has been willing to work closely with each of their respective emerging brands to provide a platform to succeed, which long ago may have been a non-starter for a mass retailer.
Ripi proves that ‘fresh never frozen’ is an obsolete saying. At a time when higher-quality products are being added to frozen sections across retail, Ripi is on track to become the standout pasta product in this category. While ravioli is not new to grocery stores, this premium ravioli takes a new approach to amplifying frozen technology to lock in peak freshness–something no refrigerated stuffed pasta can claim.
“The Target launch gave us a really meaningful national footprint and introduced the brand to shoppers well beyond our original markets,” founder Ian Tecklin tells me. “It validated that consumers are looking for frozen products that combine convenience and value with a genuinely elevated, restaurant-quality experience.”
Ripi recently launched its Basil Pesto flavor in Target, which also carries its Beef Short Rib, Cacio e Pepe and Sweet Potato flavors in all of Target’s major regions across more than 1,000 stores. Each of the unique yet approachable flavors creates an elevated experience to make a convenient dinner, and the dough that coddles each ball of filling tastes as fresh and al dente as homemade.
“Our early conversations with Target quickly shifted to where the frozen pasta category could go over the next five to ten years. It reinforced that we shared the same vision–consumers were looking for something more modern, more premium and more exciting than what had historically been available in the aisle,” Tecklin says. “Target’s support has given Ripi a national platform much earlier in our journey than we could have achieved on our own.”
Nightingale has created the most beloved modern ice cream novelty across America, and its rapid retail expansion continues with Target, as it introduces a new exclusive flavor, S’mores, in partnership with the National Park Foundation in September. With every purc...
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