Scarcity and Materiality: Benchmarking Resource Productivity in Food and Beverage

As we enter an era of increasing resource scarcity, consumer product companies focused on food and beverage face increasing challenges in producing their often-longstanding branded products. The combination of dwindling traditional resource access, increasing consumer awareness and activism, and changing environmental regulations make critical product inputs like water, materials, energy, packaging, and transport undergo ever greater scrutiny, with corresponding impact to the bottom line. To protect sales and margins for established products, companies seek ways to increase their resource productivity and ensure resource security by controlling total input cost variability. Thus, the search for resource productivity is really one of materiality: Which input variables are desirable and feasible to control for optimized economic impact? In this report, we demonstrate a need for detailed benchmarking and analysis that identifies superior strategies to manage risk, enables innovative technologies, and improves individual operations.