Five Keys to Building a Resilient Food and Beverage Supply Chain in 2026

By Jack Payne, Director of Food and Beverage Solutions Consulting for Aptean and Joe Slater, Business Consultant for Logility, an Aptean Company

From unpredictable weather events to persistent geopolitical tensions, the forces driving up food prices are becoming more frequent and severe.

The pressure on consumers is enormous. 

A 2025 consumer survey conducted in August found that 90% of American adults report being stressed about the price of groceries. More than half of those surveyed view grocery prices as a major source of stress, ranking rising food prices as more stressful than any other financial concern. 

The problem isn’t getting any better. 

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently estimated that overall food prices would rise faster than the historical average, increasing by 3% this year before climbing an additional 2.7% in 2026. 

Food suppliers can’t control every cost consideration. They can control their supply chains, ensuring they can weather future disruptions, optimize costs, and maintain stable pricing for consumers.

However, it won’t be a simple solution. Leaders must build resilience while navigating significant headwinds, including new regulatory compliance, persistent labor shortages, and rapidly shifting consumer demands.

Here are five keys to building a resilient food and beverage supply chain in 2026.

#1 Unify planning with AI-driven demand forecasts

When uncertainty is standard, brands can differentiate themselves with resilient supply chains informed by accurate, market-driven demand plans that can be shared across the entire organization.

For most brands, the problem isn’t a lack of information. It’s access and unification. 

Brands can’t operate from a single source of truth when teams operate in silos and data is stored in outdated tools, like spreadsheets and legacy ERPs. 

AI-powered platforms can automatically generate forecasts with real-time insights, creating a fact-based foundation for sales and operations planning (S&OP). This approach replaces subjective, manual intervention with intelligent automation. 

Equipped with these insights, brands can do more than analyze what happened in the past. They can intelligently anticipate what’s coming in the future. 

#2 Master inventory with intelligent optimization

Inventory is one of the most visible expenses in the supply chain, and its management has a direct impact on customer service, product quality, and waste.

With billions lost every year to waste, this is low-hanging fruit for aligning supply and demand to control costs and increase revenue. 

This will become even more important in the year ahead as producers shift from artificial to natural food dyes. This change, driven by both regulatory changes and consumer demand, may result in a shorter product shelf life.

Whether adjusting to new ingredients or managing shorter product shelf-life, companies can leverage AI to automatically determine the optimal inventory parameters for each SKU-location combination, thereby improving service levels with reduced inventory levels and investment. 

Advanced strategies can also be deployed, such as:

• Holding inventory as semi-finished goods to delay the final processing steps.
• Increasing the use of refrigerated storage, which adds cost but protects product integrity and shelf-life.
• Simulating inventory strategies to analyze the trade-off between inventory investment and desired service levels, especially for products with new ingredients.

With 35% of food and beverage leaders citing inventory optimization as a top use case for Generative AI, it’s clear that technology is central to managing these complexities.

#3 Synchronize manufacturing with real-time demand

Food and beverage brands have a simple supply chain goal. Make the right amount of the right product at the right time to match consumer demand. 

Resilient brands optimize manufacturing planning by leveraging demand, inventory, and replenishment plans to synchronize production and minimize costs while meeting customer service goals.

This demand-based model is particularly crucial for managing production across markets with different regulations, such as those with and without restrictions on artificial dyes. In such cases, manufacturers can schedule longer production runs of dye-free products, followed by consolidated runs of products that still use artificial dyes, helping to maximize revenue where margins may be better. 

#4 Automate S&OP for strategic agility

Food and beverage brands have the capacity to be more agile and responsive than ever before. 

Specifically, advanced analytics and digital twins, virtual models of the entire supply chain, can help food manufacturers model the product lifecycle to identify potential bottlenecks.

Especially as brands update or change their product formulations, digital twins enable continuous optimization by simulating how changes may impact a shorter shelf-life window.

This early identification of misalignments allows decision-makers to determine the optimal time to schedule a seasonal production run, add a sanitation shift, or invest in cold-chain capacity.

#5 Build a proactive and diversified sourcing strategy

To ensure ingredient availability and control costs, companies must proactively build a resilient sourcing strategy. 

This means moving beyond dependency on a single supplier or region. Leaders must actively seek alternative suppliers and partner with multiple suppliers across different regions to maintain volume.

Technology will play an important role here. 

Nearly 40% of food and beverage companies intend to use Gen AI to perform scenario planning and track potential price and supply constraints, which is essential to solving problems before they impact the bottom line.

Resilient supply chains support brands and buyers 

Building resilient supply chains has never been more important for brands and buyers. 

While companies can’t control external pressures like inflation and geopolitical tensions, they can control their supply chains. The stress consumers feel over rising grocery prices is a clear mandate for the industry to evolve, transforming supply chains from a reactive cost center into a proactive engine for stability and growth.

When brands build resilient supply chains, everyone wins. 

For brands, a resilient supply chain protects margins. It ensures business continuity, while consumers enjoy more stable pricing, reliable product availability, and the transparency they increasingly demand, ultimately earning their lasting loyalty.

Jack Payne serves as Director of Food and Beverage Solutions Consulting for Aptean. Jack is a seasoned thought leader in the food and beverage industry with over 30 years of experience helping more than 700 companies select ERP, MRP, and Supply Chain Planning technologies. He is passionate about food safety, traceability, labeling accuracy, and sustainability. In 2024, he authored Appetite for Success, a practical guide to adopting technology for regulatory compliance and business growth. Jack has worked with organizations of all sizes, from startups to global enterprises, and is equally effective on the shop floor and in the boardroom, aligning technology with business goals to drive long-term success.

Joe Slater serves as a Business Consultant for Logility, an Aptean Company. Joe has been with Logility for 10 years and got his start as an implementor of their Inventory and Constrained Supply Planning capabilities working with a variety of clients across a broad range of industries like Food & Beverage, Life Sciences, Retail & Apparel, Consumer Durable Goods, and more.  For the past several years he’s brought that deep domain expertise to the presales team working with prospective and existing clients to understand their business challenges and align them to capability in Logility’s end-to-end digital supply chain planning platform.