GLP-1 users are changing what goes into their grocery baskets and restaurant orders. The implications reach far beyond smaller portions. Here’s what the research tells food and beverage brands about staying relevant when consumers want less.

A permanent CMO search and interim marketing leadership are not competing solutions. One is designed to find the right long-term leader. The other keeps the business accountable while that search runs.

A strong interim leader should leave more than a clean folder and a status deck. The incoming CMO should inherit clear priorities, decision rights, operating rhythms, commercial context and a system they can understand, challenge and improve.

A vacant marketing leadership seat creates risk long before a replacement is hired. The first 30 days should protect decision ownership, launches, retail commitments, agencies and budget flexibility while the business defines what it actually needs next.

“Marketing isn’t working” is a headline, not a diagnosis. Before cutting spend, determine whether the investment failed — or whether the business failed to convert what the investment created.

Growth-stage CPG brands often outgrow founder-led decision-making before they are ready to build a full executive team. Rich Rodríguez-Mahé argues that the gap is not simply headcount: it is access to senior judgment at the decisions that are hardest to reverse.

“People will eat less” is not a strategy. The useful question for Food & Beverage leaders is where GLP-1 changes the occasion, the portion and the product payoff — and which parts of the portfolio actually need to respond.

The same shopper can pay a premium for one product and choose private label in the next aisle. The useful question for growing CPG brands is not whether consumers are trading up or down. It is where, when and why they believe the premium is worth paying.

The packaging conversation is still obsessed with materials. The bigger shift is that every package now has to work for the product, the plant, the regulator, the retailer, the consumer and the P&L at the same time. Here is how Food & Beverage leaders should think about the decision between now and 2030.

Your first marketing budget is not a media plan. It’s a capital allocation system — and its job is to buy evidence, not reach.

"We tested it" is one of the most dangerous sentences in a brand refresh. A pack can score well in a survey and still fail on shelf. Here's the difference between consumer feedback and consumer insight — and the protocol that protects your next relaunch from becoming a case study.

Growth-stage CPG brands rarely have an activity problem. They have a sequencing problem. When doors, spend, agencies, and headcount start moving faster than the strategy underneath them, growth gets more expensive — not more effective. The answer is not to slow down. It is to build the clarity and operating discipline that make speed compound.

Most growing CPG brands don’t need strategy or execution in isolation. They need senior marketing leadership that can set direction, stay close to the work, and add executional capacity in the right sequence.

More retail doors can grow sales while weakening velocity. Learn why distribution alone doesn’t create demand—and what CPG brands need to scale sustainably.

Most CPG and food & beverage brands don’t have a marketing problem — they have a foundation problem. Here’s what a real marketing foundation looks like: a decision system that clarifies who to prioritize, where to invest, and how to know what’s working.

World Cup 2026 is turning the retail shelf into a live CPG strategy lab. See how Coca-Cola, Budweiser, PepsiCo, Lay’s, Diageo, and Coors Light are using limited-edition packaging, retail media, and seasonal marketing to drive shelf space, trial, and velocity — and what emerging food and beverage brands can learn from their playbook.