After years of pricing-driven revenue growth, CPG organizations are entering a new phase. Consumers are more cautious, actively trading down, and fundamentally redefining what “value” means to them. Retailers are already responding: Walmart’s BetterGoods launch, the rapid premiumization of store-brand portfolios, and the ongoing channel migration toward value, club, and online formats are not blips. They are structural signals of a market in transition.
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For much of the past three to five years, CPG topline growth was powered primarily by price increases rather than genuine volume gains. According to Bain, three-quarters of global RSV growth in 2023 came from price increases and in developed markets like the U.S. and Europe, that figure was closer to 95%. That playbook is running out of road. Continuing to raise prices is increasingly risky as shoppers trade down within categories, retailers prioritize their own margin through private label, and volume losses that were once absorbed quietly begin to show up as real share erosion.
The implication is clear: the next era of growth must be volume-led. It requires a deep understanding of evolving consumer behavior, a more disciplined approach to where and how to compete, and critically, a fundamentally different operating model for how RGM is organized, resourced, and run.
Understand and Respond to Evolving Shopper and Channel Dynamics
The starting point is understanding your target customer, how their needs and behaviors have shifted, and how they continue to evolve. According to McKinsey’s November 2024 research, over 80% of U.S. consumers now rate private-brand food products as equal to or better than national brands in quality, and nearly 90% believe private brands offer similar or better value. NIQ data shows that half of global consumers say they are buying more private label products than ever before. Store brands now account for more than 20% of total CPG value sales globally, with a 1.4 percentage point gain in 2024 alone. This is not a recession-driven anomaly – it reflects a durable shift in how consumers evaluate the price-quality tradeoff.
At the same time, where consumers shop is shifting as meaningfully as what they buy. Value and e-commerce channels are driving 35% of food and beverage volume growth, according to Circana, with e-commerce now accounting for 10% of total CPG dollar sales. The casual, habitual fill-in trip to a mid-tier grocery banner is being replaced by more intentional behavior: stock-up runs at club, value-seeking at discount, and convenience or discovery online.
Retailers are not waiting to see how this plays out. Major banners have aggressively expanded their store-brand portfolios and are no longer limiting private label to entry-level price points. Walmart’s BetterGoods launch, the chain’s largest private brand food introduction in 20 years, and Target’s Dealworthy line each grew sales volume by over 200% in their first year. The premiumization of store-brand tiers is a direct challenge to the branded mid-tier, the segment that many CPG portfolios most depend on.
For CPG organizations, winning in this environment requires making explicit choices. Which shopper missions are we best positioned to win, and which are we willing to cede? Where does our brand have the permission and price-value proposition to hold share and where are we vulnerable? The answer shapes both portfolio architecture and channel investment strategy.
Implication: PPA and channel investment strategy must be rebuilt around shopper mission and channel-level price-value dynamics, not historical trade relationships.
Shift from Price-Led to Volume-Led Growth
The growth equation has flipped. The goal is no longer to raise prices and defend volume. It is to maintain average price realization while growing volume and expanding market share. That is a fundamentally different optimization problem, and it requires fundamentally different tools and thinking.
According to NIQ, from 2021 to 2023 inflation drove CPG value sales up 13% while volume sales declined 6%. Circana data shows CPG volumes fell 2% in 2022 and 1.2% in 2023, and by 2024 dollar sales growth had hit a three-year low of 2.5%. NIQ reports that 87% of American consumers changed how they shop to manage expenses. Among them, 82% are actively seeking lower prices and 66% have switched brands. And the executive response has been decisive: Deloitte found that 8 in 10 CPG executives planned price increases in 2023; by 2024, only 2% said price would be their primary growth lever. The industry has internalized the diagnosis. The question is whether the operating model has caught up.
Executing volume-led growth profitably requires getting three things right. Mix management means understanding the margin implications of volume shifting across pack sizes, tiers, and formats and making proactive portfolio decisions rather than reacting to where volume lands. Channel strategy means modeling the true profitability of competing in value and e-commerce channels, including cannibalization risk, rather than assuming the volume is incremental. And PPA can no longer run on an annual cycle when consumer price sensitivity is shifting quarterly, price, pack, and assortment decisions need to be driven by live elasticity signals, not last year’s averages.
These three dimensions are also deeply connected. Channel mix shifts alter the effective price realization of the portfolio. Pack architecture decisions drive where volume lands across retail partners. Promotional mechanics in one channel set price expectations in another. Volume-led RGM only works when channel strategy, mix management, and PPA are designed together – not optimized in separate workstreams and reconciled after the fact.
Implication: Volume-led RGM requires redefined KPIs – volume growth by channel, price realization rate, mix contribution – and the cross-functional processes to manage against them in close to real time.
Build a Flexible RGM Function to Execute at Enterprise Scale
Understanding what needs to change is the easy part. The harder question is whether your organization is actually built to execute it. For most CPG companies, the honest answer is no and the gap is not primarily a strategy problem. It is an operating model problem.
The legacy RGM model was designed for a simpler era: stable pricing architecture, annual planning cycles, and a relatively predictable relationship between price and volume. What most organizations have built reflects that era – fragmented tools that don’t talk to each other, planning processes that run on a lag, and RGM teams spending the majority of their time reacting to commercial fires rather than driving proactive strategy. Compounding this, most organizations manage RGM account-by-account with no enterprise view, making locally rational decisions that are collectively incoherent. Pricing that makes sense for Walmart creates channel conflict at Kroger. A promotional deal that looks profitable at the account level cannibalizes full-price volume elsewhere. None of these trade-offs get surfaced because there is no function with the mandate to see the full picture.
Fixing both problems requires getting three things right.
People and capabilities. Modern RGM needs practitioners who can translate data into commercial decisions and operate credibly in customer-facing conversations, not just analysts producing reports. Career paths need to reflect that expanded scope, or the talent migrates to finance and strategy. Equally important is building RGM fluency across sales, marketing, and finance so that strategy doesn’t get handed off and diluted at the point of execution.
Processes. Annual planning cycles need to be supplemented by monthly or quarterly commercial reviews with real decision authority, not reporting exercises. And RGM needs to be wired directly into trade planning, S&OP, and promotional planning. The handoffs between these processes are where value leaks. Closing them requires process redesign, not just better communication. This same discipline needs to extend to enterprise-level decision-making: major pricing actions, promotional investments, and channel expansion decisions should require cross-channel impact modeling before they are made, not after.
Tools, technology, and governance. Most RGM stacks have pricing analytics, promotional planning, and trade spend management running in separate systems with limited integration. The fix is not a wholesale platform replacement. It is identifying the two or three highest-leverage integration points and closing them deliberately. In most organizations, that means connecting elasticity modeling to trade planning. Beyond the tech, organizations need a governance function, a center of excellence or equivalent, with the authority to set pricing guardrails, adjudicate cross-channel trade-offs, and maintain the institutional record of what decisions were made and why. Without it, organizations repeat the same mistakes every time the team turns over.
Implication: RGM operating model and governance are strategic assets, not administrative functions. The organizations that invest in them now will compound the advantage. Those that don’t will keep relearning the same lessons.
Sources: Bain & Company, Consumer Products Report 2024; BCG, “Driving Volume-Led Growth in Consumer Markets”, 2025; NIQ Mid-Year Consumer Outlook: Guide to 2025; NIQ, “What’s Driving the Volume Sales Decline in the US?”; NIQ, “State of the Consumer 2025”; McKinsey & Company, Private Label Brand Score Study, November 2024; Circana / Sally Lyons Wyatt, CPG and Food & Beverage reporting, December 2024 (via Food Navigator); Deloitte, 2024 Consumer Products Industry Outlook; PLMA / Just Food, “Private Label’s Growth Surge,” August 2025; Sevendots, “The Return of Private Labels,” 2025.
