Food & Beverage

Rooted helps food and beverage companies align teams, streamline operations, and improve efficiency across supply chains.

Sector Context

Food and beverage companies have the strategy to shift from price increases to volume growth — what’s missing is the cross-functional coordination to execute it.

Global retail sales for consumer products rose 7.5% year over year in 2024, down from 9.3% growth in 2023, as price increases ran their course and volume growth stayed flat.[1] Insurgent brands kept capturing share from larger manufacturers despite holding a fraction of the market.[1] For mid-market food and beverage companies, the math has changed: the playbook that worked through 2023 — raise prices, protect margin — stopped working, and the organizations built to execute it weren’t designed for volume-driven growth.

Where leaders get stuck

Biggest Challenges We See
in the Food & Beverage Space

Digital transformation that stalls on the floor

Food and beverage companies have invested heavily in demand forecasting, production planning, and data analytics platforms.[2] The technology works. Adoption doesn’t. Legacy organizational structures and siloed departments create implementation bottlenecks that drain budget without changing how decisions actually get made. Eighteen months after go-live, planners are still working from spreadsheets because nobody redesigned the workflow around what the new system could do — and managers who preferred the old way never got addressed.

Post-acquisition integration that runs on two operating systems

Food and beverage M&A activity remains active as manufacturers acquire to fill portfolio gaps or gain scale.[1] The deal logic is usually sound. The integration rarely is. Merging organizational cultures, systems, and decision rights takes longer and costs more than the deal itself — and companies that don’t plan for it end up running two separate operations under one name, with neither team trusting the other’s numbers eighteen months post-close.

HoW Rooted Fits

How Rooted Helps Leaders in the Industry

OCM and BPE address the adoption and integration gaps that keep food and beverage volume strategies from translating into results. OCM identifies the informal change champions who actually move hundreds of people across two legacy organizations, building the peer-to-peer learning networks and feedback loops that drive real adoption — not just a communication plan. BPE redesigns the order-to-delivery and planning processes that were built for a smaller, simpler operation and are now breaking under acquisition-driven scale.

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA)

Food & Beverage

Consumer products companies move fast across channels, markets, and product lines — and coordination gaps show up as missed launches, inconsistent quality, and supply chain failures. ONA maps the informal networks behind product development and channel coordination before those gaps cost revenue.
Cross-channel coordination pattern mapping
Product development team network analysis
Brand and operations communication gap identification
Key knowledge holder identification before transitions

Business Process Engineering (BPE)

Food & Beverage

Manufacturing processes accumulate inefficiency as equipment, suppliers, and workforces change without corresponding process updates. BPE maps actual production workflows, identifies where handoffs create delays, and redesigns operations around how production actually runs today.
Product launch process optimization
Supply chain workflow analysis and redesign
Retail and channel coordination improvement
Quality and compliance process standardization

Organizational Change Management (OCM)

Food & Beverage

Consumer products organizations manage constant change — new channels, new markets, new supply partners, new technologies. OCM ensures those transitions don’t disrupt the operational consistency and brand standards that consumer-facing businesses depend on.
Channel expansion change management
Omnichannel operational adoption strategies
Supply chain transition communication
Brand standard implementation across new markets

Organizational Development & Effectiveness (OD&E)

Food & Beverage

Consumer products growth requires organizational structures that support simultaneous brand management, supply chain coordination, and channel expansion. OD&E designs the team architectures and governance models that let consumer products organizations grow without losing speed or brand coherence.
Growth-oriented organizational design
Cross-functional brand and operations alignment
Channel expansion structure development
Workforce capability building for scaling markets

Common Scenarios

How We’ve Helped Food & Beverage Organizations with their Operations

Sector-Based Scenarios. Tangible Outcomes.

A craft beverage company invested $2 million in demand forecasting and production planning software. Eight months post-launch, system utilization sat below 30% — planners were still working from spreadsheets because the new tool felt too complicated. We ran a process redesign focused on the workflow, not the software: we rebuilt planning processes around what the system could actually do instead of replicating old habits inside new technology, created quick-win use cases that showed immediate value, and removed the managers who were quietly undermining the rollout. Ninety days later, utilization hit 85%, forecast accuracy improved 22%, and inventory carrying costs dropped 15%.

Trends change fast.
Your brand needs to last.

At Rooted, we help consumer brands scale without losing their identity. As markets shift and competition heats up, we guide teams through transformation using strategies that protect what makes you different. We get your story, then we help you grow it.

  1. Bain & Company. “Consumer Products Report 2025: Reclaiming Relevance in the Gen AI Era.” 2024. https://www.bain.com/insights/consumer-products-report-2025-reclaiming-relevance-in-the-gen-ai-era/
  2. Deloitte Insights. “2025 Consumer Products Industry Outlook.” June 2025. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/consumer-products/consumer-products-industry-outlook.html