A new UK retailer survey scored FMCG suppliers on 38 different competencies — everything from supply chain reliability to ecommerce strategy. The results expose a pattern that shows up in FMCG businesses everywhere, not just the UK: the suppliers rated best at keeping product moving are rated worst at building where growth comes from next. If you run an FMCG brand and you're wondering why trade support, growth slots, or category conversations with your retail partners feel harder than they used to, this is almost certainly why.

The Advantage Group's 2026 survey polled nearly 2,100 people across 11 of the UK's biggest grocery retailers, scoring suppliers on 38 competencies grouped into six areas: organisation and people, category and consumer marketing, trade and shopper marketing, supply chain and customer service, private label, and ecommerce (The Grocer).

The overall supplier performance score was 33 out of 100 — down from 34 the year before, and only marginally ahead of 28 two years earlier. FMCG suppliers, as a group, are treading water.

The average hides the real story, though. Private label technical expertise scored 55, the single highest mark in the entire survey. Supply chain reliability scored 48. Organisation and people scored 43. Suppliers are, in other words, genuinely excellent at the operational core of the business — making the product, getting it there on time, running a capable team.

Ecommerce vision scored 10 out of 100. The lowest competency score in the whole study, by a wide margin. Trade investment scored 12. Trade and shopper marketing scored 17.

The conventional wisdom in FMCG has always been that operational reliability is the price of entry, and growth comes from wherever the marketing budget happens to land. This data says something sharper: most suppliers have nailed the price of entry and have no credible plan for what comes after it. Retailers can see the gap clearly — and retailers are the ones deciding who gets the trial listings, the growth slots, and the trade investment next year.

Here's the framework I use with FMCG clients to close this exact gap. Every hour and every dollar your business spends falls into one of two buckets.

Bucket 1 — Keep-the-Lights-On. Fulfilment, product quality, compliance, replenishment, account admin. Necessary. Non-negotiable. Also, on its own, not a growth strategy.

Bucket 2 — Build-Tomorrow. Ecommerce capability, retail media, trade investment strategy, category innovation genuinely aligned with where your retail partners are trying to take their business.

The audit itself takes under an hour:

1. Pull your last 90 days of marketing and operational spend, plus your own calendar.

2. Tag every line item Bucket 1 or Bucket 2. Be honest — "always-on" social posts and routine account maintenance are Bucket 1, however creative they feel.

3. Calculate the ratio. In my experience coaching FMCG owners, most run 90/10 toward Bucket 1 and are genuinely surprised when they see the number written down.

4. Pick the single lowest-scoring Bucket 2 area for your business specifically, name it, and put one concrete action against it in this week's diary — not "improve ecommerce," but "audit our top three SKUs' product pages on our two biggest retailer sites by Friday."

5. Bring that Bucket 2 agenda into your next category review. Retailers reward suppliers who show up with a growth plan, not just a delivery record.

This is exactly the discipline built into the Simple-Growth System™: separate the business you're running today from the business you're building next, and make sure both get funded budget and protected calendar time — not just whichever one happens to be shouting loudest this week.

"Kevin has some amazing ideas around marketing, things we would have never thought of ourselves. He also helped us through the process of getting into supermarkets. He has gone above and beyond what he needed to!"

— Amy Nixon, Icehouse Coaching Programme

Almost every FMCG owner I meet already senses the imbalance before I show them a single number. So why doesn't it change?

Usually it's because nobody owns Bucket 2. Fulfilment has a manager. Compliance has a deadline. "Build our ecommerce and trade investment strategy" belongs to everyone and no one, which means it loses every week to whatever is genuinely on fire in Bucket 1. Add no accountability structure — no fixed check-in, no one asking "what did you actually do on this?" — and a real strategic priority quietly turns into a permanent someday.

That's the real obstacle, and it's also exactly the gap a structured coaching relationship closes: not new ideas, but a standing weekly discipline that keeps Bucket 2 funded, owned, and reported on, the same way Bucket 1 already is.

1. Run the audit. Tag your last quarter's spend Bucket 1 or Bucket 2 — under an hour, and the ratio alone usually reframes the conversation.

2. Ask your buyer. Directly ask your best retail contact what they'd like to see more of from you strategically, not operationally. Most owners have never asked.

3. Protect one hour a week. Permanently block it for Bucket 2 work only. If it's not on the calendar, it isn't happening.

If you can't say, right now, what percentage of your marketing budget is building tomorrow's growth channel versus maintaining today's, that's the first conversation worth having.

For more on turning an insight like this into a system you run every week, see Simple-Growth's free training or browse the Growth Tips blog.