The makers of many products you may have at home, like Quaker oatmeal, Nespresso coffee or Pampers diapers, reported earnings this week that reflected concerns about new tariffs. Businessweek’s Deena Shanker writes today about how shoppers might react. Plus: A different kind of cola war is brewing, and an investigation shows how the FDA failed to rein in the opioid public-health crisis. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

Pour one out for the brands.

I’m personally loyal to just a few: Hellman’s mayonnaise, Café Bustelo coffee, Safe Catch tuna and Tide Free & Gentle laundry detergent. Beyond that? Pretty flexible. I buy what’s cheap, what’s healthy-ish or even just what’s weird and new.

All of this makes me Big Brands’ worst kind of shopper: a “brand switcher.” Sixty percent of my fellow millennials fall into this category, and that number climbs even higher, to 64%, for members of Generation Z, according to a recent global survey by consulting firm EY.

There are a lot of reasons we switch brands, and unsurprisingly price a big one. With grocery bills at the top of mind for just about everyone, I’ve got bad news for many supermarket brands: They’re the most vulnerable to being abandoned for cheaper alternatives, according to EY. While 30% of respondents said that, regardless of price increases, they’d stick with their brand for tobacco, and 24% for personal care products, the numbers dropped to their lowest levels for snacks and confectionery (17%), processed food (19%) and home and household-care products (19%).

A grocery store in Chicago. Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images

And boy, are the brands feeling the pain. Over the past five years, companies have been hit with the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chain shocks, runaway inflation and shifting consumer preferences—all of which drove shoppers to new products, whether it was lower price private label or even, sometimes, higher price premium versions.

“People are less and less brand loyal,” says Rob Holston, EY global and Americas consumer products sector leader, who notes that the explosion of products bombarding shoppers in the past 20 years “has just diluted brand loyalty.”

Right when things were starting to settle down in the consumer economy, President Donald Trump started a trade war, which has raised prices and cooled consumer demand. Costs for commodities such as cocoa and coffee are also high. Unsurprisingly, in earnings this week, Nestlé and Unilever said they’re already raising prices and could go further if tariffs force it. Procter & Gamble said tariff-related price hikes were coming for its products, too. PepsiCo, which has been losing sales volume quarter after quarter, seems to be resisting that step, leaning instead into changing package sizes but not offering big discounts and promotions. These are companies to watch in case even more once-loyal consumers drift away to cheaper pastures.

Holston says he’s still optimistic for the big guys. He wants to see them use digital channels to send “more tailored and personalized” messages to consumers versus the “big, splashy ads” of mass promotion. Plus, he wants them to lean into innovation to keep customers coming back for more. But that’s another challenge. “It's like 18, 24 months just to do a flavor variant,” for a product that’s already on shelves, he says, “which is too long.”

As for me, I’ll stick with my mayo and my coffee and my super-low-mercury tuna, however expensive they get. But my dishwashing soap? I’ll take the cheapest option on the shelf.

Related: US Consumer Sentiment Slides While Inflation Expectations Jump

More from Deena Shanker: In her latest Extra Salt column, Deena writes about an emerging soft-drink category—known variously as “modern soda” at Walmart, “next gen beverage” at Albertsons and “enhanced soda” at Target—that might pose another threat to well-known brands. Keep reading: Healthy Sodas Like Poppi, Olipop Are Drawing PepsiCo’s and Coca-Cola’s Attention

Photographer: Patricia Lopez Ramos for Bloomberg Businessweek; Prop stylist: Kelly Silva

In Brief

• China’s government is considering suspending its 125% tariff on some US imports.
• Apple aims to import most of the iPhones it sells in the US from India by the end of next year.
• London’s luxury housing market is getting a taste of New York’s cutthroat real estate culture.

How the FDA Broke Its Own Rules

Photo Illustration: Joan Wong; Photos: AP Photo, DEA, Getty Images (2)

On a sunny May afternoon 14 years ago, a group of doctors from across the country gathered in a windowless conference room at the US Food and Drug Administration’s main campus in White Oak, Maryland, with an urgent message: Prescription opioids were not just addictive, they were also ineffective in treating chronic pain.

The physicians, all pain and addiction experts, told Janet Woodcock, then director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), that pharmaceutical companies had lied when they claimed opioids harmed only abusers seeking to get high. The drugs could be valuable tools for relieving acute, short-term pain, the doctors allowed. But they accused the FDA of acting rashly, starting with the 1995 approval of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin label, which helped expand opioid use to millions of new patients, including people with long-term conditions such as arthritis and back pain.

The 2011 meeting came as an epidemic was gathering force. Doctors were issuing 254 million prescriptions of FDA-approved opioids a year, enough to medicate every adult in the US around the clock for a month.

Had the agency adhered to federal regulations and its own guidelines and laws at the outset, the physician experts said, drug companies would never have been allowed to promote the high-dose opioids and their extended-release delivery systems for anything but end-of-life care. They demanded a public meeting to put the FDA on the spot. Without a change in opioid labeling that excluded use for chronic pain, they said, curbing the epidemic would be impossible.

“Our sense was that the FDA and the medical community had been duped by pharma,” says Andrew Kolodny, one of the addiction specialists at the meeting and a lead spokesman for the group. “We believed if an unbiased advisory committee were brought in, the agency would change course.”

But the following year, in a public hearing at the National Institutes of Health, FDA officials defended their opioid policy by pointing to antidepressants that had been approved without long-term data, relying instead on extrapolation and inferred benefits. In that case, as far as they could tell, the net effect had been positive.

That’s just the start of Sam Hornblower’s story, which emerged from transcripts of government meetings and calls between pharmaceutical executives and the agency, and from dozens of interviews with scientists, physicians, regulatory lawyers, industry managers, current and former FDA officials, and other key government figures. Keep reading: ‘More a Cheerleader Than a Regulator’: The FDA’s Untold Role in the Opioid Epidemic

Cashing Out

Alwaleed Is Back

Like Businessweek Daily? Check out these newsletters:

• Markets Daily has what’s happening in stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities right now
• Supply Lines follows the trade wars, tariff threats and logistics shocks that are upending business and spreading volatility
• FOIA Files goes behind the scenes with Jason Leopold to uncover documents that have never been seen before
• Working Capital analyzes trends in leadership, management and the art of career building
• Bloomberg Pursuits is your weekly guide to the best in travel, eating, drinking, fashion, driving and living well

Explore all Bloomberg newsletters.