The Generation That Trusts an App More Than a Label Thirty percent of Gen Z consumers trust third-party barcode-scanning apps more than product labels. That single data point is the most commercially consequential sentence in snacking right now — it means that decades of packaging investment, advertising scale, and shelf dominance have been disintermediated by a free app on a phone. Legacy snack brands are not losing Gen Z because they taste worse; they are losing because the

Why The Trend Is Emerging: Gen Z Is Developing a Complicated Relationship With the Platform That Shaped Their Culture TikTok has a Gen Z problem that no competitor has yet solved: 65% of Gen Z use it daily while 60% trust it less than before. That gap between habitual use and eroding trust is the defining social media tension of 2026 — and its implications reach well beyond a single platform into how brands, marketers, and creators build audience relationships in a post-trust