What companies have the top supply chains in the food and consumer packaged goods sector?

Well as usual, the analysts at Kantar Retail once again have tried to answer that question here late 2015, picking up the work in the annual PoweRankings report that was started many years ago by Cannondale Associates, which Kantar later acquired.

The full report covers a number of company performance measures for both consumer goods manufacturers and retailers, including such areas as brand power, marketing programs, sales teams, overall business fundamentals, and more. Supply chain management is one of the categories included in the survey.

The rankings for this year, as always, were developed through the interesting methodology of asking retailers to rate manufacturers on each of these categories, and manufacturers to rank retailers on a similar set of attributes. Most major CPG companies and retailers participate, with some 400 respondents in total across both groups.

Both manufacturers and retailers are from the consumer packaged goods, food and beverage areas. That means manufacturers in such categories as apparel/soft goods, electronics, hard goods, etc. are not included. Similarly, the participating retailers are drawn exclusively from sectors such as mass merchandise, traditional grocery, warehouse clubs, and drug store chains that focus on consumer packaged goods sales, and does not for example include department stores or most specialty retail areas. For the last couple of years, however, Amazon.com has been included in the retail group.

The scores represent the percentage of respondents that place a given manufacturer or retailer as having one of the top three supply chains in the industry.

This week, we will look at the consumer packaged goods results. Next week, we will publish the retail list.

After a long run alone at the top of the manufacturing list, Procter & Gamble lost the number 1 position in 2013 to General Mills, though just barely.

General Mills stayed on top again in 2014, though the two companies ended in a virtual tie, each with scores of 25.2% (General Mills must have won on style points or something) from the retailers.

And General Mills did it again in the 2015 rankings, with a score of 23.3%, just besting P&G's 23.0% score. It is interesting to note though that less than one on four retailer respondents placed either the topp ranked General Mills or P&G supply chain as one of their top three.

Pepsico moved up from the number six spot to third place this year, just ahead of rival Coca-Cola, which jumped from eighth place in 2014 to fourth place this year. Both PepsiCo and Coke tacked on about 6 percentage points to their scores from 2014.

The rest of the top 10 for this year's survey are shown in the graphic below.

Top CPG Supply Chains for 2015

Source: Kantar Retail

While there was some movement within the top 10, just one change overall - Mondelez moved into the number 10 spot, displacing Campbell Soup.

(Supply Chain Trends and Issues Article - Continued Below)