Mr. Pibb was the fastest growing brand of the year: report

Sometimes all you need is a come back.

In late 2025, Coca-Cola rolled out a new-and-improved Mr. Pibb with more caffeine and a new look, and in less than a year, the 54-year-old brand has nabbed the top spot on Morning Consult’s annual Fastest Growing Brands report.

The ranking is determined by share of purchase consideration among the 2,801 brands that Morning Consult analyzed with online surveys throughout a three-month period comparing results from this year to last year. DoorDash took the top spot in 2025; the WNBA scored that spot in 2024.

“Mr. Pibb was not just the fastest growing brand of 2026 for us; it also was one of the most trusted brands on our Most Trusted Brands report,” Bobby Blanchard, senior director of audience development for Morning Consult, told us, adding that Mr. Pibb’s broad appeal across demographics is “remarkable.”

Mr. Pibb scored the top spot with an 11.2 percentage-point increase this year. The brand is also representative of a broader trend in the report where older brands made new inroads with audiences. “A lot of the brands that grew were brands that consumers already had some familiarity with,” Blanchard said, noting that “they were brands that you find in the grocery store, household goods, household items.”

Much of the remaining top 10 could be someone’s grocery list: Jimmy Dean scored the No. 2 spot, Snickers was No. 3, and Energizer was No. 5, while Sweet Baby Ray’s came in at No. 7 and Listerine at No. 9. Other household-name brands commonly found in grocery stores in the top 25 include Febreze, Marie Callender’s, McCormick, Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Duracell, Hershey’s, Life Savers, Stouffer’s, and Knorr.

Value shopper: All that said, though, 2026 was a tough year for brand growth, with only 14% of brands seeing purchase consideration growth in 2026, according to Morning Consult. That’s a big change from last year’s list, which had 94% of brands growing from the year prior.

Just 40 of the 1,101 brands that Morning Consult has continuously tracked over the last five years saw growth every year during that time period, with NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock and fintech company Chime seeing “the largest jumps during this window,” according to the report.

Many brands may not be seeing growth in purchase consideration this year due to difficult market conditions hurting consumer spending power.

“Consumer sentiment is down,” Blanchard said. “Consumers are saying they’re worse off now than they were a year ago…The universe of brands that we can consider kind of shrinks because we have less money to play with.”

That is having a clear impact on Gen X.

• Gen X cut their spending the most of any generation, with a 5.9% cut;
• Sentiment saw the largest decline among Gen Xers, down 13 points;
• And bargain brands were where the growth was for Gen X, with dollar stores and warehouse clubs on the rise.

Gen X may be the generation cutting back the most, as they’re likely dealing with multiple “pressure points,” Blanchard said, with children headed to college and aging parents.

Exception to the rule: While many of the brands on the list are familiar household names, one of the newer brands in the top 10 is not. Drive-thru coffee chain 7 Brew, which was founded in 2017, ranked No. 6, on the list, up 3.7 percentage points overall, with significant growth among younger consumers—up 6.7 percentage points with Gen Z, according to the report.

“They are a relatively newer brand…they’ve had a lot of expansion recently, and that has paid forward in terms of consideration rising right now,” Blanchard said. “But 7 Brew is also one of those brands that’s kind of like—caffeine, that’s kind of an essential, right? If you’re going to work, you need to grab coffee on the way to work, and 7 Brew is a good way to do it.”