Welcome to Christmas’s shopping era: social media has reshaped how shoppers discover, plan, and share Christmas, and the supermarket shelf is feeling it. Royal VBF follows this shift closely. Here is what Scandinavian category managers planning the 2026 shelf should know.
From dinner to display
Around 72% of shoppers aged 18 to 27 plan their festive meals from online content, and 88% of TikTok users say they discover new brands on the platform [1]. The Christmas table is more than dinner now. It is a moment composed for two audiences at once: the people sitting at it, and the people scrolling past it.
A meal becomes a post, a pastry becomes a discovery, and a butter dish becomes the centrepiece of the conversation. Aesthetics, once treated as window dressing, now sit at the front of the shelf.
Products worth sharing
Pinterest named butter yellow its colour of 2025. The global #ButterBoard hashtag pulled around 236 million TikTok views and an estimated 950 million on Instagram, while #julefrokost has around 3.8 million TikTok views and #christmastable runs into the hundreds of millions [2].
Behind those numbers is a shift in what a “good” Christmas product looks like. Visual presence is now part of how a product sells: a shape, a silhouette, a colour that travels well on a small screen. Where shoppers used to choose by habit in the dairy aisle, they are increasingly choosing by what they have already seen, saved, and shared.
FOMO on the shelf
Limited editions can move from a viral clip to a sold out shelf in days. Social media creates urgency around products that look distinct and feel seasonal, and the Christmas range has become a live conversation with a shopper who has already done half the work online.
Worth sharing wins on shelf
This is where the shift gets interesting for the supermarket. Consumers are searching for new flavours, shortcuts, and globally inspired dishes, and the gap between what they see online and what they find in store keeps widening. Every gap on the shelf is an opening for ranges that mirror online demand more closely.
For Royal VBF, this is exactly where we sit. We make butter, the most loved category across Scandinavia. And we make it in shapes that already do the social work for the shelf. Sculpted 3D butter is butter that mirrors the trend it sits inside.
For this Christmas, Scandinavian shoppers want their classics back: only better made, better looking, and most of all worth sharing. That is the brief 3D sculpted butter is built for. It is a single ingredient and a Christmas classic, with the shape and shelf presence today’s shoppers expect.
Sources
[1] TikTok Marketing Science and Instagram Trends Report, 2024.
[2] TikTok and Instagram hashtag data: #ButterBoard, #julefrokost, #christmastable, 2024 to 2025; Pinterest Newsroom, ‘2025 Pinterest Palette: butter yellow’, 2024.
