Inside the C-Suite: What Three Conversations Reveal About Food & Beverage's Next Chapter

Growth Is Back on the Agenda — But It's Not Coming Easily

For several years, the industry's operating posture has been defensive: protect margin, manage inflation, hold the line on cost. That phase is ending. Talma described the industry moving out of “inflation-management mode” into a growth-focused era centered on volume, innovation, and execution.

Goodyear put it more bluntly: Growth is at a premium, and every company is looking for a way to reinvent, expand, or acquire its way there.

Gregg, watching the market from a smaller, faster-growing brand, called himself “probably more bullish” on the overall economic outlook — with the caveat that the headwinds land very differently depending on a company's size, category, and cost structure. Nobody described an easy growth environment. All three described one where growth is available to companies that move. 

Consumers Have Genuinely Changed What They Eat 

This isn't a marketing narrative — it's showing up in category-level numbers. Goodyear, who spent years running the demand generation side of Gerber at Nestlé, pointed to GLP-1 adoption, rising protein focus, and demand for healthier formulations as real drivers of change in eating behavior, not passing. Gerber's baby food business, which at one point held roughly 80% market share during his tenure and was still around 65-68% when he left in 2018, has since fallen into the 50s as consumers shift toward fresh and homemade alternatives. Frozen meals, ultra processed foods and condensed soup are following a similar arc — Goodyear noted he hasn't personally purchased in these categories in years while bone broth, ramen and higher protein options are growing quickly. 

Gregg sees the same pattern from the snacking side: low-carb and no-sugar positioning has proven durable well beyond the keto trend that originally popularized it, and taste still has to hold up alongside the health claim. Talma frames the consumer base as genuinely bifurcated, with one segment trading up for premium, healthier products, and the other remaining tightly budget-constrained. This means a single brand-wide strategy increasingly doesn't work; price-pack architecture has to flex across both segments at once.

Legacy Scale Has Become a Liability, Not an Asset 

The clearest through-line across all three conversations is that speed now beats size. Goodyear can take a product from concept to launch in about four to six months; he estimated the same process takes large legacy manufacturers 12-18 months. That gap shows up directly in the market: Smaller, faster brands are growing while established categories and brands lose relevance. Goodyear noted that many of these smaller brands are becoming acquisition targets simply because they can move faster than the companies that would buy them. Talma is candid that Welch's carries the same structural problem: The cooperative has “historically been slow to innovate” and lacks organizational agility, a legacy of decades of relative market stability that the company is now actively working to unwind.

Gregg described NuTrail's operating discipline in almost tactical terms — using roughly 80% of available information to make a call rather than waiting for 98% certainty, because a retailer opportunity can open and close within 60 days.

None of these executives are describing a nice-to-have. They're describing the actual mechanism by which smaller companies are taking share.

The Shelf Is Moving Online, and Retailers Are Making Suppliers Pay for It 

All three executives, independently, described the same shift where the real battle for distribution is happening. Talma pointed to e-commerce as having fundamentally lowered barriers to entry — new brands now build a following online before they ever need traditional shelf space, which has eroded the channel dominance legacy manufacturers used to count on. Goodyear shared that Summit Hill is in the midst of the retailer side of that shift: Walmart now runs more than 30% of its business through click-to-cart, curbside pickup, and online ordering, and retailers are pushing manufacturers to redirect spend from traditional in-store displays toward Instacart, Ibotta, and Walmart Connect. Gregg described the same dynamic at Target and Safeway, where suppliers are now expected to fund traffic to retailer.com properties rather than physical stores. It's worth noting that this shift toward assortment expansion hasn't been an unambiguous win for retailers either — Gregg pointed out that Costco's granola set grew from 4 to 10 SKUs in a year, and much of that expansion turned out to be cannibalistic rather than incremental. 

Pricing Power Has Quietly Flipped to the Retailer 

Each leader we spoke with is fighting the same battle: Retailers now demand substantiation before they'll accept a price increase, even when the retailer itself captures margin benefit from higher shelf prices on unchanged volume. Goodyear described evaluating every retailer request individually and walking away from those that don't generate an adequate return rather than accepting price increases as automatic pass-throughs of cost inflation. Gregg used almost identical language, saying retailers are “extra sensitive about pricing” out of fear that consumers will trade down. What's striking is how unevenly the underlying cost pressure actually lands: Gregg noted that freight can represent 10% or more of total cost for lower-margin commodity categories like canned vegetables, versus 5% or lower of higher margin brands’ cost structure as a higher-margin branded player — meaning the same freight environment is a make-or-break pricing problem for one company and a rounding error for another. And both Goodyear and Gregg, without prompting from each other, flagged the same specific cause behind rising freight costs: new drivers entering the field as well as immigration-driven truck driver shortages tightening capacity across the supply chain. 

Trust Has Become a Genuine Brand Asset 

Perhaps the most interesting theme came from Talma, who described a measurable erosion of consumer trust in large multinational food companies — he named Unilever, Kraft, Heinz, and Kellogg's specifically — with that trust migrating toward influencers and brands that can credibly claim transparency or mission alignment.

Welch's is leaning directly into this: Its cooperative ownership structure, built around 550 grower-member families, and its vertical integration in grape production function as both a genuine margin hedge against commodity volatility and a trust asset at a moment when “big food” credibility is under real pressure.