--- title: "CPG Growth is Shifting to Restaurants, Convenience, and Delivery" url: https://burnaze.com/article/2e303b29-3422-45d2-8663-e24a21235c69 source: "QSR Magazine" original_url: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/story/cpg-growth-is-shifting-to-restaurants-convenience-and-delivery/ author: "Ben Coley" category: "Restaurants" industry: "Restaurants" published: 2026-07-01T11:38:00.000Z modified: 2026-10-31T13:17:28.317Z image: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/fastfoodrestaurant-2.jpg --- # CPG Growth is Shifting to Restaurants, Convenience, and Delivery **TL;DR:** Consumer packaged goods brands are targeting high-growth away-from-home channels such as quick-service restaurants, convenience stores, and delivery platforms to offset slowing retail shelf expansion. Away-from-Home (AFH) environments offer higher incrementality, stronger price realization, and deeper brand engagement compared to retail. *By Ben Coley, originally published in QSR Magazine on 2026-07-01. [Read the original](https://www.qsrmagazine.com/story/cpg-growth-is-shifting-to-restaurants-convenience-and-delivery/).* ## Key facts - AFH contributes 10-20% of volume with 1.5-2x higher price realization - Growth depends on designing offerings around specific occasions - Commercial decisions must evolve to contextual pricing and behavior-driven investment ## Story CPG growth is becoming harder to find in the places companies have historically relied on. Retail remains the center of gravity, but it is increasingly optimized. Pricing is normalizing, promotions are less productive, and shelf expansion offers limited upside. For many categories, the growth model is structurally constrained. At the same time, a growing share of consumption is shifting outside the home—across restaurants, QSRs, convenience formats, and delivery platforms. This Away-from-Home (AFH) environment represents a fundamentally different way consumers discover, choose, and consume products. This creates a structural shift, where growth will be through expansion of the system itself. AFH sits at the center of that shift, not as another channel, but as a distinct demand environment with different economics, decision levers, and growth potential. ## Afh demand growth **AFH Expands Demand and Improves its Quality** Retail is designed to capture demand, while AFH is designed to create it. In retail, purchases are planned, consumption is constrained by at-home inventory, and price comparisons are immediate. In AFH, consumption is driven by occasion, immediacy, and context. Decisions are made in the moment, and experience often outweighs price. This is especially evident in the food & beverage sector. A beverage in a grocery store competes on price per unit, while the same beverage in a QSR, stadium, or delivery app competes on convenience, experience, and relevance. This difference shows up in the economics. AFH environments typically generate higher incrementality, stronger price realization, and deeper brand engagement. Across categories, AFH contributes roughly 10–20 percent of volume while delivering 1.5–2x higher price realization than retail. Even a modest shift of two to three points toward AFH can disproportionately impact growth and margins. AFH does not just expand demand; it improves its quality. **Winning AFH Requires an Ecosystem Mindset** ## Winning afh strategies AFH cannot be won in isolation. How it is positioned relative to other channels, along with cost to serve and investment, determines its effectiveness. Unlike retail, where control is concentrated, AFH operates through an ecosystem: - QSRs and restaurants. - Foodservice distributors. - Convenience and on-the-go formats. - Delivery platforms and aggregators. Each shapes availability, visibility, pricing, and conversion. Growth depends on how effectively companies: - Design offerings around specific occasions. - Ensure availability through distributor networks - Shape execution through incentives - Enable data sharing across partners - Embed products into meals and bundles - Influence basket composition on delivery platforms The unit of competition is no longer the SKU; it is the occasion delivered through an ecosystem. Assortment must reflect the role of each outlet, its demographic, and its economics. What works in one environment may not translate to another. Operating across this ecosystem shifts focus from isolated optimization to coordinated execution. **Commercial Decisions Must Evolve** ## Evolving commercial decisions The shift to AFH changes not just where growth happens, but how decisions are made. Traditional RGM is built for retail, where pricing and promotions can be optimized around stable patterns. AFH introduces a more dynamic reality. Pricing becomes contextual, varying by location, time, and occasion. Price architecture shifts toward immediate consumption formats aligned with willingness to pay. Mix is shaped at the point of consumption through attachment, upsell, and conversion. Trade spend also behaves differently. Promotions do not generate the same lift as retail. Growth is less promotion-driven and more behavior-driven, with investment shifting toward placement, bundling, visibility, and loyalty mechanisms. At the same time, competition moves closer to the consumer. In retail, success is driven by shelf presence. In AFH, success is determined at the moment of choice. Availability remains necessary, but it is no longer sufficient. Conversion drives performance. **What Holds AFH Back and How to Unlock It** ## Unlocking afh potential If AFH offers incremental demand and superior margins, why hasn’t it scaled faster? Constraints span strategy, economics, execution, and data. AFH often lacks clear ownership, sitting between retail, foodservice, and emerging channels, leading to fragmented accountability and incremental investment. Economics create friction. Entry often requires upfront investments such as placement fees, contracts, and sometimes equipment, without immediate returns. Visibility into incrementality and true margins is often limited. Trade spend is committed upfront, with execution controlled by operators, making it difficult to link spend to outcomes. In many cases, this creates a pay-to-play dynamic. Execution depends on multiple partners, creating variability in availability, visibility, and pricing. Distribution models and format proliferation add complexity. Data adds another layer. Compared to retail, visibility is limited while demand is more dynamic — driven by time, weather, and traffic. Organizations often slow decisions in response, even though speed is required. **Where to Start Without Boiling the Ocean** Addressing these constraints does not require full transformation. It requires focused actions that build confidence and scale. - Start by prioritizing a few high-impact occasions where incrementality and willingness to pay are highest, such as on-the-go, meal-based, and leisure occasions. Define clear objectives, including incremental volume, price realization, and attachment. - Begin execution within a defined ecosystem by working with a limited set of QSR partners, distributors, and platforms—aligning on pricing, formats, bundling, and execution while tracking outlet-level performance. - Test contextual pricing in targeted environments to understand elasticity, bundle effectiveness, and premiumization potential. - Define investment on AFH terms, not retail benchmarks. Upfront commitments and operator-driven execution require clear guardrails on spend, returns, and payback. - Simplify the AFH portfolio by focusing on fewer SKUs to maintain discipline and enable measurement. - Use proxy signals such as weather, time of day, and traffic patterns to inform decisions. The goal is not perfect visibility, but faster, adaptive decision-making. - Finally, establish clear ownership. A single accountable team should translate insights into action, monitor outcomes, and scale what works while defining the brand’s role within AFH. **Conclusion** Growth in CPG is no longer constrained by a lack of insight. It is constrained by the boundaries of the system. AFH expands those boundaries by introducing new consumption moments, enabling higher price realization, and creating stronger brand interactions. Capturing this opportunity requires a shift from channel thinking to ecosystem thinking, from static optimization to context-driven execution, and from availability to conversion. The companies that make this shift will not only grow faster; they will improve the quality, resilience, and scalability of their growth. Ultimately, advantage will go to those who consistently translate commercial decisions into measurable financial outcomes—turning data into EBITDA, at scale. ***Venky Ramesh** is the Chief Client Officer and Group P&L Head for Consumer Ecosystem at LatentView Analytics. **Sunny Yurasek** is the Sr. Director, Head of Advanced Analytics & RGM at Wells Enterprises, an independent operating company of the Ferrero Group.* ## Entities - QSR (sector) - QSR Magazine (publication) - Ben Coley (person) - retail expansion (topic) - quick service restaurants (topic) - delivery platforms (topic) - consumer packaged goods (topic) - CPG (company) - away-from-home channels (topic) --- Originally reported by Ben Coley, QSR Magazine (https://www.qsrmagazine.com/story/cpg-growth-is-shifting-to-restaurants-convenience-and-delivery/). Summarized by Burnaze (https://burnaze.com/article/2e303b29-3422-45d2-8663-e24a21235c69).