Why growth in food and drink feels harder than it should
Growth hasn’t stopped. Confidence has.
Across food and drink, growth targets remain as ambitious as they have ever been. Boards still expect year-on-year progress. Investors still demand returns. Retailers still want differentiation and innovation. Leadership teams are still held accountable for delivering meaningful, profitable growth.
What has changed is not the ambition. It is the environment in which that ambition is expected to be delivered.
Margins are tighter than they were five years ago, often structurally so rather than temporarily.
Retailers expect more from long term strategic partners.
Consumers are more selective, more value-conscious, and have more choice than ever.
Costs have reset upwards across ingredients, energy, logistics, labour, and compliance.
Organisations themselves are leaner, flatter, and more risk-averse.
And yet, the expectation remains that growth should be consistent, exciting and repeatable.
For many leadership teams, the challenge is not that growth opportunities no longer exist. It is that deciding where to invest, how much to invest, and which bets are worth backing has become significantly harder. Confidence has been eroded by complexity, competing pressures, and a shrinking margin for error.
This is the context in which today’s food and drink growth strategy must operate.
Why the traditional growth playbook is breaking down
For decades, growth in food and drink followed relatively predictable patterns. The playbook was well understood.
Expand distribution.
Extend ranges.
Refresh brands.
Innovate incrementally.
Optimise price, pack architecture, and promotional mechanics.
Those levers have not disappeared. But they no longer deliver growth with the same reliability or scale they once did.
Retailer rationalisation has reduced the physical and commercial space available for experimentation. Listings are harder to secure and easier to lose. Range reviews are more brutal. Newness alone is no longer enough.
Private label has become more sophisticated, faster, and closer to consumer needs. In many categories, it no longer competes purely on price, but on quality, relevance, and pace of innovation.
Challenger brands are exploiting new routes to market, particularly direct-to-consumer and digital ecosystems, allowing them to test, learn, and scale without traditional gatekeepers. This has fundamentally altered the competitive landscape.
Consumers, meanwhile, expect more. More relevance. More meaning. More quality. But they also resent paying materially more for products that feel fundamentally unchanged. Inflation has stretched tolerance thin.
In this environment, incremental renovation NPD rarely moves the needle. Line extensions and flavour variants struggle to justify their existence. But truly differentiated innovation, the kind that creates new value, feels harder than ever to justify internally.
The risk profile looks higher. The payback feels less certain. The internal scrutiny is intense.
This is where many food and drink businesses become stuck.
The hidden cost of uncertainty
When confidence drops, organisations do not stop acting. They simply act differently.
Instead of committing to clear strategic priorities, investment becomes fragmented across too many initiatives. Small bets are placed everywhere in the hope that something sticks.
Innovation teams are asked to deliver short-term returns on long-term work. Projects are accelerated before they are ready, diluted in the process or killed before they have had a chance to prove value.
Insight is commissioned reactively rather than strategically. Research is run to justify decisions already made rather than to shape direction.
Customer demands begin to shape agendas more than business strategy. Teams find themselves responding to requests rather than leading conversations.
Individually, each of these behaviours feels rational. Collectively, they create long-term drag.
Activity increases, but impact declines.
Workloads grow, but confidence shrinks.
Teams become busy, not effective.
Over time, this erodes organisational belief in innovation as a growth lever at all. Innovation becomes something to manage, contain, or defer, rather than something that actively drives the business forward.
Why “more insight” isn’t the answer
When growth feels hard, the instinctive response is often to look for more information.
More consumer research.
More category analysis.
More trend reports.
More data.
Most established food and drink businesses are not insight-poor. They are insight-rich but direction & alignment poor.
Consumer research often sits within insight teams.
Category and shopper understanding lives with commercial
Trend foresight with R&D
Commercial data sat with sales and finance
Production reality with operations & supply chain.
Each dataset is valid. Each tells part of the truth. None, on its own, is enough to confidently guide growth decisions.
Worse still, when these inputs are not integrated and seen as one, they often compete. Different teams draw different conclusions from different sources, each reinforcing their own priorities.
Without integration, insight adds complexity rather than clarity. It increases debate but does not resolve it. Decisions get delayed. Risk aversion grows. Confidence continues to erode.
The problem is not lack of intelligence. It is lack of synthesis & applied creativity.
FMCG growth challenges are structural, not temporary
It is tempting to frame today’s challenges as cyclical. A tough few years. An inflation hangover. Temporary disruption.
But many of the pressures facing food and drink businesses are structural.
Retailer power is unlikely to recede.
Consumer expectations will not simplify.
Cost volatility is now a permanent feature.
Competition will continue to fragment.
This means growth cannot rely on waiting for conditions to improve. It requires a different approach to commercial growth planning. One that recognises complexity, rather than trying to simplify it away.
Driving growth in FMCG today requires clearer choices, stronger alignment, and a more disciplined approach to innovation investment.
Growth requires alignment, not just ambition
The businesses navigating this environment most effectively are those who understand the barriers they need to overcome. Aligned on the best solution & have applied creativity & rigour to achieve it.
They have taken the time to step back from individual initiatives and ask harder questions about direction.
They reconcile insight, foresight, and commercial reality rather than allowing them to operate in silos.
They agree clear priorities and explicit trade-offs, acknowledging that not everything can be pursued at once.
They create a shared direction that the whole business can support, from leadership teams to innovation, commercial, and operational functions.
Alignment reduces friction. It speeds up decision-making. It makes investment decisions easier to advocate for internally and externally.
Growth becomes easier when decisions are aligned, defensible, and clearly linked to long-term value creation.
Why food innovation strategy needs to change
Traditional food innovation strategy has often focused on pipeline volume. More ideas. More launches. More activity.
In today’s environment, volume & churn without direction increases risk rather than reducing it.
What leadership teams increasingly need is not more innovation, but better innovation & more creativity in applying it. Clear answers to questions such as:
What do we actually know?
Where should we be playing and why?
What kind of innovation actually supports our growth ambition?
Which opportunities are worth backing, and which should we walk away from?
How do we balance short-term performance with long-term relevance?
Without this clarity, innovation becomes a cost centre rather than a growth engine.
This is the problem the Future Food Programme was designed to solve
The Future Food Programme was created to address this exact tension. Not by adding more insight, more ideas, or more noise, but by creating alignment.
It is designed to help leadership teams regain confidence in their growth strategy by bringing together all the critical inputs that shape decision-making.
Consumer understanding.
Market & category dynamics.
Trend and foresight intelligence.
Commercial reality.
Organisational capability.
Viewed together, not in isolation.
The outcome is not just a clearer view of the future, but a more confident way of navigating it. A food and drink growth strategy that feels grounded, compelling, and actionable in the real world.
Let’s get started, shall we?
Talk to our team today about your research needs, we’d love to help.