What Are Your Most (And Least) Trusted Brands? Take Our Surveys!

How much do you trust the 20 most popular brands of chips, snack foods, cooking ingredients, and condiments? How about the 12 leading fast food chains? Has your opinion of them changed over the past five years? Take the below survey and let us know!

Survey: Do You Trust These Food Brands? 

Survey: Do You Trust These Fast Food Brands? 

Brand loyalty is one of the driving factors of commerce in America. For one reason or another, we get hooked into buying one brand of the same product over any other. For most people in America, ketchup is synonymous with Heinz, even though there are plenty of competitors out there and taste tests have shown that Heinz's ketchup isn't necessarily the best-tasting option.  

But at the same time, in the past five years or so, more and more people have become increasingly conscious of what they put into their bodies, and many are turning away from their formerly favorite snacks and brands in favor of healthier alternatives. This has led to a boom in the healthy snack market — not to mention efforts by mainstream brands to stay with the times by, for example, replacing high-fructose corn syrup with cane sugar.

As a recent Ad Age article put it, "Families once reliably heaped their plates with products such as Stove Top stuffing from Kraft Foods, Hamburger Helper from General Mills and Kellogg cereals, along with similar products from other processed food titans. But now those consumers are increasingly migrating to smaller, upstart brands that are often perceived as healthier and more authentic." Big food companies are increasingly trying to buy authenticity, as is evident in Kellogg's purchase of Kashi, General Mills' purchase of Annie's Organic, and Hormel buying Applegate Farms.

Consumer trust is falling by the wayside, and even as big brands continue to claim that they're healthy, we're simply not believing them as unfailingly as we used to. That's what we mean by trust: Do we buy into their claims uncritically, or do we question them and ask for more proof? Or, in a worst-case scenario for these big companies, are we abandoning them altogether in favor of healthy upstarts?

We rounded up the 20 most popular brands of chips, snack foods, cooking ingredients and condiments; and the 12 leading fast food brands, and want to know how your opinion of them has changed over the past five years, if at all. Take the food brands survey here, and take the fast food survey here, and stay tuned for the results!