How Predictive Procurement Solves Challenges in the Food and Beverage Industry

Food and beverage producers have undergone sweeping changes over the past several decades. Technology innovations have been massive, changing how food is grown, processed, and purchased. There have also been widespread and dramatic changes in how companies work with suppliers, bringing supplier relationship management into sharper focus.

With globalization, raw materials may come from across the globe. The final product may also end up on a container ship bound for another continent.

Then the pandemic reshaped procurement in lasting ways. While 2020 was a turning point, the years since have introduced a more complex and persistent set of challenges. Volatility in global shipping, sustained cost pressure, geopolitical instability, and extreme weather events have continued to disrupt supply continuity and pricing.

These disruptions have exposed the fragility of global supply chains. In response, many companies are re-evaluating their sourcing strategies. A shift toward regionalized supply networks, supplier diversification, and more disciplined procurement execution is becoming essential for resilience.

Looking ahead, what are some of the challenges procurement will face in the food and beverage industry? And how can predictive procurement help address the industry’s most persistent obstacles?

The Rippling Impact of Inflation on Food and Beverage

Many industries have felt the impact of inflation, but the food and beverage industry has been hit particularly hard. While headline inflation has moderated compared to peak levels, input costs across commodities, packaging, and transportation remain volatile and, in many cases, structurally elevated.

Food producers are operating in an environment where price stability is no longer assumed. Instead, procurement teams must continuously respond to shifting cost structures.

What are some of the drivers for this rise in inflation?

A combination of factors, including climate volatility, geopolitical tensions, and evolving trade policies and tariffs, continue to challenge the industry.

Climate Change

Extreme weather events—droughts, floods, storms, and more—have caused global food prices to surge. Variability in crop yields continues to create uncertainty in supply planning, with ripple effects across production and pricing.

What was once considered occasional disruption is now a recurring constraint that procurement teams must actively plan around.

Raw Materials Shortages

Constraints across key raw materials remain a persistent challenge, though they are more localized and less predictable than in prior years. Supply dynamics for commodities like wheat, corn, and edible oils continue to shift due to geopolitical developments, trade policies, and changing growing conditions.

Regions that have historically supplied a significant share of global grain and oilseed exports remain sensitive to disruption, which can quickly tighten supply and impact pricing across markets.

Other challenges reflect problems throughout the supply chain. For example, grocery stores have had ongoing shortages of canned goods. The cause? It’s not the contents but the cans themselves. There’s been a global shortage of aluminum needed to make the cans.

What has changed is not the presence of constraints, but how they appear. Shortages are less likely to be prolonged and widespread, and more likely to emerge suddenly in specific categories—forcing procurement teams to respond quickly and adjust sourcing strategies in real time.

Transportation Challenges

Supply chain issues continue to impact food manufacturers in 2026, but the challenge has shifted from widespread congestion to ongoing cost and routing volatility.

Transportation markets can tighten quickly in response to fuel price swings, geopolitical developments, or regional disruptions, creating sudden changes in cost and availability.

Adding to the transportation challenges have been rising fuel costs and shortages of truck drivers. While capacity has improved compared to peak disruption, pricing and reliability remain inconsistent across lanes and regions.

Transportation has been especially problematic for the food and beverage industry because many raw materials and finished products are perishable. They need to be shipped and delivered quickly.

In this environment, logistics is no longer a downstream consideration. It directly influences sourcing decisions, supplier selection, and overall margin.

Ongoing Labor Shortages

Another issue on this list that many sectors feel is labor constraints. It may sound minor compared to climate change, but this is a big one. Procurement was already feeling the strain of limited resources to meet demand, and the past several years have only increased the complexity of the work.

A big challenge procurement in the food industry face is operating effectively with lean teams. Losing a high-performance team member still means a hit to productivity, a lengthy recruitment process, and onboarding costs.

While hiring conditions have improved in some areas, many organizations continue to run with smaller teams responsible for managing more spend, more suppliers, and more volatile conditions.

The challenge is no longer just headcount. It’s the growing gap between the volume of decisions required and the capacity to execute them consistently.

As often happens during times of uncertainty, companies re-evaluate their approach. And procurement in the food and beverage industry can’t afford to be reactive anymore; they must be proactive. This is where Predictive Procurement comes in.

How Predictive Procurement Helps Teams Prepare for Today’s Challenges

Procurement in the food industry faces many challenges, but what connects them is the need to act earlier, with better information, and with more consistency. Predictive Procurement introduces that capability directly into how sourcing events are designed and executed.

How can Predictive Procurement help?

Prediction Speeds up the Procurement Process

The coming years may present unpredictable challenges, but procurement can be agile in its response. Organizations that adopt Predictive Procurement will be better equipped to meet each of these challenges, and here’s why: many of the issues procurement professionals will face next year boil down to speed.

The company that can move more quickly will secure the contract for the raw materials that are in short supply.
It will nail down the shipping contract before rates go up.
It will source the packaging before inflation further drives up the cost.

Manual processes lack that speed. Even many platforms lack the speed. Advanced, Predictive Procurement platforms like Arkestro are the answer.

In today’s environment, speed must be paired with precision. Predictive Procurement enables teams to enter sourcing events with clear price targets, informed by data and modeled before suppliers respond—allowing procurement to lead rather than react.

Jean-Michel Dos Remedios, VP of Strategic Sourcing at Bel Brands USA, highlights how Arkestro saves them time:

“In the procurement world, time is of the essence. Arkestro’s innovations make us faster and the faster we get, the more we can accomplish, and the more successful we can be.”

Enterprises using the platform have seen improved data quality and dramatic cost savings within days of implementation.

Predictive Procurement Helps Companies Find Local and Diverse Suppliers

Another solution Predictive Procurement offers is helping companies find local and diverse suppliers. Many organizations are continuing to shift toward more regionalized and diversified supply networks to reduce risk and improve supply continuity.

Arkestro can help align more spend with preferred suppliers, including every definition of “preferred,” like ESG, local suppliers, and supplier diversity.

Rather than relying on static supplier strategies, teams can continuously evaluate and engage suppliers based on performance, pricing, and fit.

Predictive Procurement Eases the Talent Shortage

Most businesses have seen how technology revolutionizes the way we do business. Predictive technology can help companies mitigate the talent shortage by influencing more spend with the same effort.

The Arkestro platform is a recommendation engine that learns from your organization’s data (and best supplier selection decisions) to eliminate manual validation, approval, and data-entry steps across the entire procurement cycle.

This allows procurement teams to scale their impact without scaling headcount, focusing time on higher-impact initiatives while maintaining control over more spend.

Predictive Procurement: Improving the Future of Food and Beverage Procurement

Take this example of how Arkestro’s Predictive Procurement platform gives procurement teams the needed speed and resulting competitive edge.

Bel Brands, a multinational cheese producer, implemented the Arkestro platform to manage interactions with its 3,500 suppliers.

After rolling out Arkestro, Bel Brands reported a 20% to 25% increase in sourcing velocity. Quoting happened much quicker, more strategically, and with an increase in team productivity. In addition, Arkestro delivered a 10% savings on the final quote.

The bottom line is that food and beverage companies need to adopt predictive procurement to meet the challenges of today’s environment. Volatility is ongoing and procurement teams that continue to react after the market moves will remain at a disadvantage.

Predictive Procurement allows organizations to shape outcomes earlier, operate with greater consistency, and make better commercial decisions under pressure.

Book a demo to see how predictive procurement powered by machine learning, human behavior science, and game theory will keep your business ahead of the market.