Why growth in consumer products is shifting

Growth in CP is becoming more granular. Mega and medium-sized brands still drive most category sales, and private label remains steady competition, but smaller brands are gaining momentum.

Most supply chains are still optimizing, not redesigning

Source: EY Insights Analysis; Euromonitor International

Footnote: Analysis covers >6,000 brands across alcoholic beverages, packaged food, beauty and personal care, home care, pet care, and soft drinks. Growth measured as CAGR of retail sales price (RSP); market share reflects each segment share of total RSP sales.

Arrow labels show market share change in percentage points (PP); gain (>0.5 pp), broadly flat (±0.5 pp), loss (<-0.5 pp).

Consumer needs, channels and shopping occasions are becoming more fragmented, meaning CP growth strategies must be more precise about where to play and how to serve. The companies that are better placed to pull ahead will be those that build the capability to serve complexity selectively, move on it quickly and control it economically. They will know which opportunities are worth serving, respond before competitors and maintain economic discipline as they do so.

How supply chain now shapes demand

Supply chain is taking a larger role in delivering the brand promise, increasingly becoming part of how demand is shaped. Availability, product data, fulfillment reliability and substitution risk can shape whether a brand is recommended, substituted or ignored. As a result, portfolio decisions made on volume or gross margin alone are no longer sufficient. Some products may have weak financials but strengthen baskets, loyalty or retailer relevance. Others may appear stable while consuming disproportionate operational effort.

Finding value in supply chain complexity

With the biggest opportunities increasingly emerging in smaller, faster and harder-to-serve demand pools, the complexity and variation that supply chain operating models were designed to remove are now where relevance and value live. Successful companies will be able to distinguish between supply chain complexity that creates value and complexity that destroys it (by consuming capacity, capital and attention).

Putting a price on supply chain complexity — does it add value or cost?

Why supply chain operating models are the constraint

CP companies have more visibility over demand movement, customer pressure, channel variation, portfolio complexity and operational risk – that’s a lot of signals to act on. But turning insight and visibility of the signal into fast, coordinated and economically controlled action requires new ways of working. Too often there is too much rigidity in the system, whether that’s physical (manufacturing is where complexity becomes real), planning (decisions wait too long) or in decision-making (where hand-offs lose growth) to capitalize on the opportunity.

EY research on supply chain maturity shows the majority of companies are on a transformation journey but are focused on improving and optimizing the current model rather than redesigning it.

Supply chain maturity – optimization to redesign

Source: EY Consumer Products Dynamics Research 2026

The longer companies optimize the current system without redesigning how decisions move, the greater the risk that they become highly efficient in the wrong part of the market. What’s really happening is that companies are changing supply chain tools faster than they are changing how the enterprise decides. Successful companies will increase manufacturing flexibility, rethink planning cycles, and connect fragmented decision-making, so they can act on opportunities faster.

AI will prove to be a great enabler, able to read a wider set of signals in real time, improving sensing and decision support. But it does not work in isolation – it cannot resolve unclear ownership, weak governance or slow execution increases. CP companies will need to put solid foundations in place, so more intelligence leads to more value creation. The real risk for companies is less that they underinvest in AI and more that they adopt AI inside an old model.

What leading CP companies are doing differently 

Future advantage will come from knowing which hard-to-serve supply chain complexity creates value, what to simplify and how fast the business can move without losing control. It depends on how effectively organizations balance velocity, precision and economic discipline. Velocity without precision creates inefficiencies, while precision without velocity creates missed growth. Both, without economic discipline, create unprofitable complexity.

Future advantage lies at the intersection of velocity, precision and economic discipline

As supply chains are increasingly recognized for their contribution to brand promise and selection, they’re becoming engines of growth and competitive advantage in their own right. Strength will lie in their ability to connect the end-to-end value chain – from growth strategies, innovation and product development through planning, sourcing, manufacturing, logistics and customer fulfilment – and establish integrated decision-making across the enterprise.