FMCG category value grew 3.4% across Western Europe in 2025. Ask most brand owners and they'll tell you it was a solid year. Ask NielsenIQ what actually drove that growth, and the story changes: innovation — new products, new formats, new flavours — fell 5.8% in unit volume over the same 12 months. The growth was real. It just wasn't coming from anything new. It was coming from price.

If you've launched a product this year and quietly wondered why the boardroom excitement never showed up in the sell-through numbers, this is why. FMCG brands are innovating harder than ever and moving fewer new units than ever. That's not bad luck. It's a symptom, and every SME and mid-market FMCG owner needs to look at it before the next launch goes into production.

Not every category told the same story in 2025. NielsenIQ's analysis found real bright spots: Confectionery and Snacks, Personal Care and Home Care all kept growing on genuine new demand. Food and Beverage — by far the largest category — dragged the overall number down. Shoppers there simply stopped rewarding “new” the way they used to.

NIQ's own language for it is blunt: “good enough is no longer good enough.” A slightly different flavour, a slightly smaller pack, a slightly greener label — none of that reads as innovation to a shopper anymore. It reads as noise. Retailers noticed first. NIQ found private label expanding its own innovation specifically in Non-Alcoholic Beverages, Confectionery and Snacks and Food — the exact categories where branded innovation was weakest — filling the relevance gap brand manufacturers left behind.

This is the real enemy here. Not the economy, not private label, not the consumer. It's what I'd call Innovation Theatre: launching product to look innovative, without doing the harder work of proving anyone actually wants it more than what's already on shelf.

I spent years in rooms at DDB, Ogilvy and Saatchi and Saatchi deciding what got called “innovation” for brands like McDonald's, Nestlé, Unilever and Heineken, and what got killed before it reached shelf. The launches that survived never asked “is it new?” They ran three harder checks first. It's the same structure I now build into the Simple-Growth System™ for the SME and FMCG owners I coach.

1. The Relevance Check. Is this genuinely more relevant to a real, named customer problem — or just different for the sake of being different? If you can't name the specific shopper and the specific reason they'll pay more, it's not relevance, it's decoration.

2. The Cannibalization Check. Is this launch stealing sales from your own existing full-price range, or finding real incremental demand? Run the numbers on your last launch's first 90 days against the product line it sits beside — not just total category sales.

3. The Price Independence Check. Strip out any price increase you've taken this year. Does the unit volume trend still say yes? If the only thing propping up “growth” is the price on the shelf tag, you haven't launched a product. You've relabelled inflation.

Most launches fail all three checks. They get built anyway because someone above the person building it needed “news” for the quarter.

“Kevin, you distilled business, marketing and sales strategy into powerful simple concepts and actions with real life stories of your start-up business and corporate life. You walk the talk with empathy and passion. Feedback has been off the charts.”

— Nikki, MahiTahi / Colab (11 Food and Beverage Companies)

Most FMCG and SME owners I work with already sense, deep down, which of their last three launches were real growth and which were just repackaged price rises. The gap isn't knowledge. It's structure. Three things are usually missing:

This is exactly where a structured advisory relationship earns its place — not as a pitch, but as the missing accountability layer between “we should probably check this” and actually checking it, every single time, before the production line runs.

1. Pull the unit volume — not dollar value — on your last three product launches, net of any price increase taken since.

2. Ask your sales team, honestly: which of your “new” products would still sell at full price, with zero promotion behind it?

3. Run the Real Innovation Test on whatever's next in your pipeline, before it goes into production — not after.

If your last “successful” launch grew revenue but not units, it's worth finding out which of the three checks it would have failed — before your next production run repeats it.