Choosing the Right CPG Innovation Consultant for Food and Beverage Success

From emerging to multi-national billion-dollar CPG brands, we've seen one problem that tends to persist for everyone: Excess scales with growth and innovation. The more products you launch, the greater the likelihood that some products won’t move. A founder at a leading challenger brand - 7 years into his journey - told us this was the first year they'd had to really deal with aging inventory. He said it almost sheepishly, like they'd done something wrong. But it’s part of the gig: you add SKUs, chase new accounts, and bet on flavors that don't all land. This is the right equation for revenue growth, but it also nets excess. The giants deal with the same thing, and our friends at Lactalis are a good example. When their Heritage Dairy business unit acquired parts of the cheese business from Kraft Heinz, one of the projects that came with the split was re-coding their entire catalog - new GTINs on every product, rolled out category by category over a two-year period.  Every time a category switched over, the old-coded product became obsolete. That's thousands of cases of perishable products that had to move fast before the dating ran out and lost all value.  They minimized financial losses, though, because they saw it coming and built for it.  We worked with them as trusted advisors to triple their off-price buyer network and put a closeouts process in place before the volume hit. If you've got growth and innovation on the horizon, that's exactly when to plan for the excess. 

By Charlie Derra, Category and Shopper Marketing Consultant at Curious Puffin, an FMCG Category Management Consultancy Great innovation doesn’t just come from a strong idea, it comes from shaping that idea to work in the real world. In the UK, 75–80% of (more…) The post The Role of Category in New Product Development (NPD) appeared first on KamCity.

Coca-Cola shrank innovation to 90 days. 🚀 I came across this on a website, and it highlights a shift many product leaders in CPG and retail should pay attention to. 👇 Coca-Cola is using real-time consumer behavioral data to speed up product development, shorten innovation cycles, and improve personalization. The big change is clear. It is moving away from static research models and building a continuous, data-driven feedback loop instead. 🔄 Why does this matter? Because consumer preferences do not wait. Flavor choices change. Consumption patterns change. Market trends change. Companies that still depend only on traditional research often react too late. ⏳ Coca-Cola’s strategic goal is simple and powerful: 1️⃣ Identify emerging flavor preferences 2️⃣ Track consumption patterns 3️⃣ Spot market trends in real time 4️⃣ Stay ahead through faster decisions At the center of this strategy is a feedback ecosystem. Every consumer interaction becomes a data point for future product development. That changes data from a reporting layer into a growth engine. 📊 One of the biggest enablers is Coca-Cola Freestyle. Millions of daily beverage selections create a continuous stream of consumer intelligence. This gives the company a direct view into what consumers want. 🥤 The next layer is connected and modular equipment. These dispensing systems do more than serve beverages. They continuously gather and analyze information. This improves the consumer experience and also supports operational efficiency. ⚙️ Recent deployments highlighted at the National Restaurant Association Show focused on: ✅ Increased flexibility and deployment options ✅ Space-efficient modular designs ✅ Enhanced personalization ✅ Broader choice at the point of purchase The most striking part is the impact on innovation cycles. 👀 Coca-Cola has reduced product development timelines from approximately 18 months to as little as 90 days from concept to commercialization. ⏱️ That is a major operating shift. 💥 This is no longer a reactive business model. It is a responsive one. Data is helping shape future offerings earlier, faster, and with more confidence. The lesson for product, data, and transformation leaders is hard to ignore: competitive advantage now comes from the ability to listen faster, learn faster, and innovate faster. 📈 In the beverage industry, and increasingly across retail and CPG, the companies that turn consumer interactions into actionable intelligence will be in a stronger position to meet changing consumer needs. 🌍 If you are building products, platforms, or data systems, this is the benchmark. Faster feedback loops create faster decisions. Faster decisions create faster innovation. 🔥 Follow for more 🔔 #CocaCola #CPG #ProductInnovation #RetailInnovation #AI #DataStrategy #DigitalTransformation #SupplyChain #GenerativeAI #ProductManagement

The FMCG growth algo is broken It used to steadily deliver +2% vol/ +2% pricing. Over the last 5 years, it delivered +6% pricing/ +0.6% volume. Over the last 2 years, volume has been negative for more than half of the top 60 FMCG companies & pricing is slowing down That is what we call de-consumption. FMCG brands need to try much harder to win & retain consumers That's what Zero-Based Growth®, the method behind +500bps average growth acceleration, is built to solve It used to require a full FF&A engagement. Now, with the ZBG® Sprint, every brand team can run it → https://lnkd.in/euRV3jhD What is Zero-Based Growth® and the ZBG® Sprint, explained in 30 seconds? → Zero-Based Growth® is granular down to the individual lever, consumer-back not assumption-back, and built to make markets, not just take share. It focuses on the 10% of actions that drive 80% of the growth potential, engineered for incremental category growth rather than a bigger slice of a shrinking one. The ZBG® Sprint productizes it → ZBG® Sprint is a consulting approach, not a course. Step-by-step phases that force decisions, guided by FF&A for 12 months. Your team acts at every step → Tested on 50+ engagements since 2017, across every category, developed and emerging markets. Created by FF&A: a pure-play FMCG strategy consulting firm with a 100% client repeat rate and 70% of the world's top 20 FMCG companies as clients → Built for the whole brand team. Marketing, insights, trade marketing, finance… One licence covers 5 users → Management-ready outputs. 40+ frameworks, turnkey PowerPoint decks, and management memos. If your plan review is 8 weeks out, you walk in with no-regret moves already running and a level of granularity most management teams have never seen → Built to run alongside the day job. Six chapters, ~6 hours of video material Three ways to execute ZBG®. Upgrade any time, only pay the difference * Coaching: your team runs the method, guided by FF&A in group coaching calls. Best for capable brand teams that want to sharpen their brand plans with a tested and proven approach * Light Consulting: adds 1:1 calls with the FF&A team and FF&A's bespoke hypotheses on your top growth levers. Best for capable brand teams with complex problems that will benefit from personal coaching and external perspective * Full Engagement: FF&A executes the research protocols themselves. Best for brand teams in a high-value-at-stake situation that will benefit from rapid, end-to-end resolution Try the ZBG® Sprint risk-free for 14 days. If you're not satisfied, full refund, no questions asked Exciting times Learn more → https://lnkd.in/ewyJj5Ke 

Every CPG operator has a product they should have killed six months ago. They know it intellectually. They cannot do it emotionally. The product does not care whether you keep it. The spreadsheet does not care. The retailer who is about to cut it in the next reset does not care. The only entity that cares is you, and caring is what got you into this. Here is what that emotional attachment actually costs at scale. Product complexity drains US food and beverage manufacturers $50 billion in gross profit annually (McKinsey). The Pareto reality: 20% of SKUs drive 80% of revenue. At Nestlé, one-third of 100,000 SKUs generates just 1% of revenue. For a $25 million CPG brand with 40 SKUs, the bottom 8 products generate less than 5% of total revenue while consuming 15-25% of operational complexity. For operators, four forces compound it: identity attachment (the leadership team remembers the development process), social commitment (the product is in the investor deck), the grit confusion (discipline looks identical to stubbornness from the inside), and the planogram clock (the retailer will cut it in the next reset anyway, and hand the facing to a competitor). Operators should consider Andy Grove's debiasing test: "If the board brought in a new CEO, what would they do?" Nestlé cut 20% of product variations and reported significantly improved service levels. Unilever is targeting 20%+ SKU reductions. P&G divested 100+ brands to focus on 65 core businesses, then grew faster with higher margins. They do not call it failure. They call it discipline. A $25 million brand that kills 8 underperformers and redeploys $1 million in carrying costs to its top performers is not retreating. It is concentrating. https://lnkd.in/ekau7xBC

Portfolio pruning is a future demand forecast. Most teams don't know they're making one. Between 2015 and 2017, Diageo ran a £500m productivity programme. They rationalised the portfolio. Focused on global giants: Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Guinness. Deprioritised the slow-movers. → The logic was sound: premiumisation, focus, margin improvement. → Low- and no-alcohol was too small to warrant investment. → By 2021, the moderation category had exploded. Guinness 0.0 launched late and hit severe supply constraints. "Demand is way beyond what we expected." By 2023, Diageo had built a dedicated Breakthrough Innovation team to fill the gaps they pruned away in 2015. Backwards-looking data. Forward-facing consequences. The 4 demand signals portfolio pruning consistently misses: 1. K-shaped demand migration Premium and value are splitting. The middle is hollowing out. Pruning mid-tier brands looks efficient. But mid-tier consumers are migrating, not disappearing. You are exiting demand, not eliminating it. 2. Functional category blurrification Collagen bars compete with creams and supplements. Beverages with Adaptogens compete with pharmaceuticals. Your real competitor is not in your category, probably never was. Prune by category logic and you miss the competitive set entirely. 3. Beverage occasion collision Hydration, sports drinks, and RTDs are fighting for the same occasions. RTDs are taking share from cocktails. "Category" is not the unit of competition anymore. Occasions are. 4. The indulgence wallet Snacks, cosmetics, and affordable luxuries all compete for the same discretionary spend. A "non-core" snack brand may be your only position in the indulgence space. Prune it, and that position is gone. The 3 moves that actually work: First: Map demand spaces before you map performance. → Where is occasion growth going? Not where has it been. → Diageo's Breakthrough Innovation team exists because they skipped this in 2015. Second: Separate brand performance from space trajectory. → A slow-moving brand in a fast-growing demand space is a different decision from one in a declining category. → Past sales mask future optionality. Third: Price the cost of re-entry before you exit. → Guinness 0.0 supply constraints were the bill for a 2015 decision. → Costly re-entry or permanent competitive gap. Both are the consequence of pruning without forward demand data. The hard truth: Pruning by past performance optimises for yesterday's demand map. The spaces most at risk are too small to defend today but too expensive to re-enter tomorrow. If you're running a portfolio rationalisation, the question is not which brands are underperforming. It is the demand spaces you are willing to vacate permanently. Agree or Disagree? Let me know in the comments! ___________ I help FMCG brands fix growth. 28 years. 30+ markets. No filler. Follow me for more FMCG Intelligence. Save this post and thank me later!

I keep seeing this narrative on LinkedIn that grocery is a crowded ocean, brands are just renting shelf space, and you should get out while you can. understand the appeal of that perspective. But after more than 20 years in CPG, I've seen the opposite happen far more often. A brand gets discovered on a college campus or in an airline snack program, and six months later a regional grocery buyer is asking why it isn't on the shelf yet. A consumer tries a product for the first time in a hotel minibar or office breakroom, enjoys it, and then goes looking for it at their neighborhood grocery store. That is not retail losing to foodservice. That is foodservice doing what it has always done best, creating trial, building awareness, and generating demand that retail is well positioned to capture. The relationship works in the other direction, too. Brands with established retail distribution often use that credibility to open doors in foodservice. At the end of the day, buyers in both channels tend to ask the same question before they say yes: "Where else is this selling?" The brands building lasting businesses are not choosing one channel over the other. They are using foodservice to create trial and retail to scale, or using retail to establish credibility and foodservice to expand reach. Each channel strengthens the other when used strategically. Rather than debating which channel is better, maybe the better question is this: How can retail and foodservice work together to accelerate your brand's growth? I'm curious what others are seeing. Have your retail placements helped drive foodservice opportunities, or has foodservice created demand that translated into retail success?

CPG is a 🔥 burning platform 🔥 . Structural change is imminent. Here are the ☠️ DOOM SIGNALS ☠️ !! • Nestle’s net profit falls 31.4% !!! ⅓ of profit lost in 6 months, 16,000 ppl laid off AND the fire sale of Blue Bottle Coffee. Eeeeep. The incumbent CPG model > build brands, charge premiums, harvest margin is producing losses at scale. • Challenger brands captured 39% of incremental CPG category growth. In 16 of 18 CPG categories measured on Amazon, challenger brands are taking share from incumbents. A cohort of 120 insurgent brands drove 39% of incremental growth while large CPG posted low-single-digit revenue increases and 3% stock performance against 16% for the broader market. The structural shift is underway!! • General Mills full-year net loss $87.6M on $18.4B revenue. In FY2025, General Mills earned $4.12 per share. In FY2026, it lost $87.6 million — a swing of over $2 billion — driven by $2.95 billion in asset impairments and a 5.4% revenue decline. The company has announced $3 billion in cumulative cost savings and is divesting yogurt, Brazil, and other units. When a company with $18 billion in revenue cannot cover the book value of its own brands, the brands have been structurally devalued. • Diageo appoints 'Drastic Dave' and immediately begins restructuring New CEO Dave Lewis — brought in specifically because he executed Tesco's turnaround — cut 150 roles in his first weeks and issued cost-reduction targets across the executive committee. When a board appoints a turnaround operator to run a consumer goods business, the diagnosis is already made. Diageo's spirits volumes have been under pressure for six consecutive quarters. The premium alcohol trade-up that drove a decade of growth is reversing. • Kantar at CAGNY 2026: "This is not a return to a normal cycle. This is a structural reset." The most important signal is not a company result but an industry-wide diagnostic from the firm that measures CPG market share globally. Kantar's overriding message from the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference: Affordability is now a design principle, not a promotional tactic. The consumer is not coming back. Brand switching and private label adoption are structural forces. The CPG industry is not normalising after inflation. It is reconfiguring permanently around a consumer who has decided that most incumbent brand premiums are not worth paying Told ya so 😘 ❤️🔥 #cpg #consumergoods #fmcg #privatelabel #innovation #supplychain

Buyers participating in ECRM's upcoming Foodservice Sessions should be on the lookout for Tatyana Jones, a former CPG executive at giants like Mars and GSK, who leveraged her "Big Food" expertise to launch DEFI Snacks into retail in a BIG way! 🍫✨ Since launching just last year, DEFI (Delicious Energizing Fitness Indulgence).has taken the functional food market by storm. To date, the brand has already garnered these wins: 🏆 3x RangeMe Top Brand in Food & Beverage 🌟 Winner of the Nourishing Change Conference Emerging Brands Competition 🛒 Landed products on the shelves of 500 Kroger stores and secured a deal with Hy-Vee, Inc.! How did Tatyana navigate the gritty realities of startup operations and secure such quick retail wins without compromising on clean ingredients or taste? Read her inspiring story and insights in our latest blog post: https://lnkd.in/gag9T4su #foodservice #entrepreneur #cpg #retail #ecrmrangeme Sarah Davidson Tyler B. Amanda Tomsik Ashley Muniak Kurt R.

🚀 Great products don't build great brands. Great marketing does. In today's competitive food & beverage industry, brands need more than creative ideas—they need a strategic marketing partner who understands how to build brands that win at retail and connect with consumers. That's why I'm excited to highlight Alli Meyer, a seasoned CPG marketing strategist with 15+ years of experience helping brands grow across food, beverage, and wine & spirits. Throughout her career, Alli has helped build and grow brands at companies including Smithfield Foods, Applegate Farms, and Winebow (KRIS Wines & Zardetto Prosecco), developing the strategies that turn ambitious ideas into measurable growth. Where she truly excels is with emerging and challenger brands—companies looking to scale, launch new products, strengthen their positioning, or compete against larger players. Her expertise includes: Brand Strategy & Positioning Consumer Insights & Market Research Innovation & Product Launches Annual Marketing Planning Retail & Shopper Marketing Cross-Functional Leadership Growth Strategy for Food & Beverage Brands If you're building a food or beverage brand and need a marketing leader who combines strategic thinking with hands-on execution, Alli is someone you should know. 🔗 Connect with Alli Meyer on LinkedIn or learn more at https://lnkd.in/gbkz8C-8 Allison (Alli) Meyer #FoodAndBeverage #CPG #BrandStrategy #MarketingStrategy #ConsumerInsights #FoodMarketing #BeverageMarketing #BrandGrowth #ProductInnovation #RetailMarketing #EmergingBrands #CPGMarketing #FoodIndustry #StartupBrands #BusinessGrowth