The most innovative companies in consumer and household goods of 2025

The gadgets produced by this year’s most innovative companies in consumer and household goods are, in their small way, revolutionizing every room in the house. From standout kitchen devices and boundary-pushing wellness products to a more humane mousetrap, this year’s list offers something for every moment of the day.

Starting at the front door, there’s Level, the leader in smart locks, which finally upgraded its “invisible” system to sync with smart home hubs like Apple Home and Google Home via a low-tech radio connection.

For the kitchen, there’s Walmart, which debuted Bettergoods, its first new private label in 20 years with a lineup of 300 quality products, not just cheap knockoffs. Science—the startup incubator behind Dollar Shave Club and Liquid Death—launched Final Boss Sour, a “healthy” candy brand that gamifies sour gummies. Pour-over fiends were treated to brews from a first-of-its-kind coffee maker, xBloom. (Recyclable pods come with whole beans that are ground fresh for each cup, while a scannable code loads brewing instructions to yield coffee as a professional barista would prepare it.) Aerflo debuted the first-ever travel carbonator: For $0.49 a bottle, its handy bottle turns any water into bubbly on the go or from the home countertop.

For the bathroom, Suri has, in just two years, succeeded in creating a sustainable electric toothbrush brand that commands brand loyalty. In the living room, Looking Glass—known for its retail holographic displays—released a 6-inch version for everyday consumers that transforms photos, Polaroids, even notebook sketches into stunning 3-D projections. For garages and dark corners, Goodnature, the world’s only B Corp-certified pest control company, saw soaring sales of its humane, toxin-free smart traps.

And outside the home, Gob introduced the first-ever mycelium earplugs, already endorsed by Billie Eilish, as a sustainable, high-performance alternative to the 40 billion foam plugs thrown out annually. Overdrive Defense, meanwhile, ventured into a more controversial space with its fentanyl and drink-spike test kits. Designed in bright colors with flourishes like the “rock on” emoji hands, they aim to make a real dent in America’s drug overdose crisis.

1. Walmart

For creating a hit private food label that’s high-quality and low-priced

In 2024, Walmart introduced Bettergoods as its first private food brand in 20 years. It became the fastest-growing private label in the category. Bettergoods is a line of 300 items including snacks, beverages, dairy, pasta, soups, and chocolate—all intended to reimagine grocery store-branded products as items that offer chef-driven, clean-label, often quirky bespoke goods at affordable prices, such as guacamole-flavored tortilla chips, vegan mozzarella, hot honey for less than three bucks, and bronze-cut Italian pasta for $1.97.

In many ways, 2024 was private labels’ year. Half of retailers said they expected them to be the #1 driver of growth. These in-house lines also gave supermarket chains a way to compete with Trader Joe’s, the leader by a mile for private labels. While other retailers, such as Target, saw slower growth, Walmart’s efforts snagged a level of positive critical reception that’s generally not showered on its other house brands, such as Great Value. (One prominent food publication in December said that Bettergoods had the “absolute best” Greek yogurt available.) Call it a paradigm shift if the industry’s largest player is looking to transform the image of store-brand goods from cheap knockoffs to quality products worth seeking out in their own right.

2. Suri

For making electric toothbrush design sparkle

Suri offers one product: a sustainable electric toothbrush that, in 2024, finally achieved a level of pop recognition unheard of in a category where many consumers couldn’t tell you what brand they’re using. At least a dozen media outlets chose the Red Dot award-winning brush to be the year’s top pick. Clocking in at half the size of regular electric toothbrushes, it was designed by dentists, is waterproof, and needs recharging less than once per month. The brush head is made from castor oil and starch, and Suri will recycle it for free when it’s time for you to get a new one. There’s even an optional UV case that Suri says can kill up to 99.9% of bacteria.

Focusing its full energy on thoughtfully designing one single product, available in five color options, helped Suri to break past $30 million in sales within two years. Co-founders Gyve Safavi and Mark Rushmore believe that the key realization was that really no toothbrush maker prior to theirs had inspired any sense of brand loyalty—consumers simply bought one from the pharmacy or, worse, took the free one from their dentist.

3. Level

For making tiny, powerful home lock technology wi-fi compatable

Hard door keys are becoming yesterday’s technology. Level’s “invisible” design remains the market’s most discrete smart lock—so understatedly high-tech that it looks totally analog (no keypad or fingerprint scanner) and requires only a screwdriver to install. Until 2024, Level avoided wi-fi entirely so as not to affect the device’s yearlong battery life. Connectivity relied on Level’s standalone “bridge” that had to plug into a wall within 20 feet of the lock.

Level finally dispensed with the bridge late last year by activating a feature—one dormant for two years, to the annoyance of online technophiles—that can sync its locks with Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, and other smart home hubs. It uses a low-tech radio connection (a protocol called Thread) that requires very minimal power, yet allows owners to access their locks through those hubs, via encrypted channels that double as a security firewall. The setup is considered an aesthetic improvement as well, since the Level Connect wi-fi bridge can disappear, a plus for a brand centered around making the least obtrusive, most elegant and secure home locks.

4. Overdrive Defense

For empowering partygoers to test for fentanyl before they indulge

The founders of acne patch maker Starface and emergency contraception brand Julie Care created Overdrive Defense in the hopes of getting society to take harm reduction and drug safety more seriously. In the fall of 2024, they unveiled two products: Fentanyl Test Kits and Drink Spike Defense, which tests for the three most common drink-spiking drugs.

The drink tests can detect the presence of roofies, ketamine, or GHB in minutes. Fentanyl kits, developed with trusted drug-testing lab WHPM, come as a five-pack for $13 and are sensitive enough to detect as few as 15 nanograms of the substance in a milliliter sample size (roughly the same as finding a human cell in a 1/5 teaspoon of powder). Both can be purchased at CVS locations nationwide or ordered for delivery from GoPuff.

Asserting that test kits resembling a “sterile medical brand” are unlikely to be used, and therefore ineffective in making a dent in America’s fentanyl overdose problem, Overdrive has stuck things like the “rock on” emoji hands on the opposite end of its electric-orange test spoons. The safest way to do hard drugs is to not do them all, but the company contends that this approach alienates individuals who partake regardless, and, in turn, represent a group ignored by many mainstream health companies. Overdrive says it is donating 1% of profits to harm-reduction programs, and has also launched billboard education campaigns in states where lawmakers have voted to criminalize the sale of fentanyl tests on the grounds they facilitate drug use.

5. Gob

For designing regenerative foam earplugs

Most earplugs for concerts are still the throwaway kind, and they’re usually petroleum-based and contain a known human carcinogen. Gob makes the first single-use pair from mycelium, the rootlike structure of fungus, rethinking hearing protection from the ground up. After their use, Gob’s earplugs biodegrade fully back into nutrients that feed the soil, wherever they’re left. And during use, their specially formatted mycelium foam dampens sound more evenly than traditional PVC, which has the downside of muffling certain frequencies more than others.

This year, Gob’s USDA-certified, toxin- and microplastics-free earplugs became the wearable of choice for several performers who fill stadiums and, according to the brand, have collaborated directly with experts in material science. Billie Eilish is now partnering with the company and wore Gob earplugs on her most recent tour, as did the Lumineers.

Annually, some 40 billion foam earplugs are produced around the world. Gob asserts that by replacing even a portion of them with its regenerative mycelium alternative, the carbon savings could reach hundreds of million pounds of CO2e per year.

6. Goodnature

For building a better mousetrap

The only B Corp-certified pest control company, Goodnature was started by a couple of New Zealander design students with a goal of helping biodiversity to thrive, rather than eliminating household pests with chemical pesticides. It produces biodegradable, smartphone-connected traps that are more humane and have quickly established a global reputation with consumers, companies, and governments. Its award-winning flagship product, a mousetrap equipped with the first infrared no-touch sensor, delivers a swift, clean kill by discharging a CO2 canister into an enclosed space and afterwards resets itself.

Last year, Goodnature launched its newest battery-powered trap that can manage 100 uses per charge at U.S. retailers like Walmart, Ace Hardware, and Amazon. Toxin-free lures come in scents like PB&J, hazelnut, and “meat lovers,” depending on what animal the user needs to attract. Toward the end of 2024, manufacturing began at a production facility in Wellington. The company says that its pest-free footprint worldwide grew by an area the size of Paris.

The brand teases that it’s 24 months away from large-scale trials of what it calls its “moonshot,” a biodegradable trap that can be deployed, tens of thousands at a time, in hard-to-reach landscapes, displacing the need for arial toxin drops.

7. xBloom

For engineering a coffee machine with the knowledge of a barista

Perfecting a café-caliber pour over is usually a job best left to a well-trained barista. Over the past decade, though, countertop coffeemakers have been outfitted with all sorts of fancy features that help home brewers come pretty close. But all lack a seemingly critical feature: the professional themselves. Now, respected coffee equipment maker xBloom has introduced the Studio to address that.

Joining the growing field of all-in-one home coffeemakers last April, the Studio packs a high-end burr grinder, scale, and pour-over arm dripper, as others do, into a snazzy integrated unit retailing for $499. But the impressive aspect is how xBloom is partnering with the industry’s top roasteries—Black & White Coffee, Proud Mary, Sey, Onyx, Counter Culture, Sightglass—to deliver the coffee beans in what it dubs “xPods.”

Made from recyclable kraft paper, the pods are single-serving canisters of not ground coffee, but a handful of fresh beans. They double as the machine’s brewing cones, have filters already inside, and include a recipe tap card that, when touched against the machine, dials in that specific coffee so it brews exactly how the roastery itself would have prepared it—ideal grind size, perfect water temperature, exacting brew speed. Think of it as like the machine being possessed by a new coffee pro each time, the expert who also sourced and roasted that day’s coffee beans.

8. Science

For incubating gonzo brands including gamified sour candy

In 2024, Science bequeathed another madcap brand to the world, on the heels of other retail hits it had incubated (including billion-dollar brands Liquid Death and Dollar Shave Club). This one was Final Boss Sour, a line of video game-themed gummy snacks.

Science says that its reason for disrupting gummies revolved around the category’s options marketing the shape they take (bears? worms? strips?), not their flavor intensity. With Final Boss Sour, Science took route two, adding a 16-bit video game nostalgia element, built on the idea that the consumer decides which “boss” to face: 1 for the least sour gummies, and 3 for the most mouth-puckering. Allegedly a 4 is in the works.

Meanwhile, the founders point out that the product itself isn’t even candy. It is, in fact, very quietly healthful, made by mixing pure dried fruit (one of three berry types and mango pieces) with intense sour flavoring, no added sugars or artificial flavors. After Final Boss Sour was brought to market, the Science team spent 2024 taunting consumers with villains like Arachnothorn, Jawslicer, and the unknown “Final Boss,” who for now is a storm cloud and question mark. Their work hyping the brand on TikTok and YouTube, with the help of co-founder and viral video maker London Lazerson, drove more than 275 million impressions so far on social media in a matter of months and collecting some $3 million in seed funding.

9. Aerflo

For taking carbonation to go

Sparkling water is (still) having its moment, but for all the customization at fizz fanatics’ fingertips, it took until 2024 before anyone created a portable bottle that carbonates water on the fly with the press of a button. This first-ever travel carbonator—the Aerflo Aer1 System—launched in August for under a hundred bucks, works on countertops too, and even screws onto a standard-mouth Hydro Flask, converting it into a makeshift bubble-maker. CO2 capsule replacement is circular; consumers ship their empty canisters back to Aerflo’s facility in New Jersey, postage paid, and Aerflo inspects, cleans, and refills them.

The math works out to roughly $0.49 per bottle, making Aerflo less expensive than most other bottled sparkling waters. The device is handier than such soda makers as SodaStream and Aarke but equally customizable, Aerflo says. All this is done at near-zero waste, since in addition to refillable canisters, the other single-use materials are either recyclable or biodegradable. The company raised $10 million around the Aer1’s release, and the carbonator is now sold direct to consumer, by outdoor retailers like Huckberry and Uncrate, and even on fashion sites like Editorialist and Goop.

10. Looking Glass

For bringing holograms home

Looking Glass has been pioneering 3D imaging since its team of holographic hackers first occupied a Brooklyn storefront in 2014. Over the past decade, it has pivoted from volumetric printing to 3-dimensional LED cubes to holographic displays: Loro Piano implemented the technology to let customers see how clothes fit without the hassle of changing into them, while Cartier is letting people try on earrings and watches without physically being inside stores.

But a successful Kickstarter this past year marked the brand’s biggest pivot yet, into into home use. The Looking Glass Go, a 6-inch display that retails for $300, instantly transforms photos and artwork—iPhone pics snapped at a party, old Polaroids, computer drawings, even notebook sketches—into “memories” that can be viewed physically as 3D projections. A detachable “frame” can be added to give it the semblance of staring at a classic wood-framed photo sitting on a bookshelf. As a bonus, users can talk to ChatGPT-powered 3D characters if they so desire—gimmicky, but probably a sign of what’s to come, and one that doesn’t require purchasing a $3,500 pair of augmented reality goggles.

Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more.