According to the Nielsen Breakthrough Report, 49% of all Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) growth in the US was driven by small producers. Around $18 billion in market value has shifted to small and medium producers — roughly half of all US CPG sales. Among the top 100 consumer brands in the US, 90% are losing market share and 68% are losing sales.
The irony of this surge in small producers takes us back exactly a hundred years, to the moment when mass production, fuelled by the industrial revolution, replaced thousands of artisans and entrepreneurs across the West.
To win customers away from those sole traders — with their familiar products and predictable quality — large producers had to personalize their mass-made goods and build loyalty on personal trust. That is when packaging and advertising began to carry smiling faces and slogans alongside factory names and trademarks.
A little over a century later, history has made a U-turn. Sole entrepreneurs are reviving craftsmanship, it has become a mass trend, and the large brands born of the 18th- and 19th-century industrial revolution now find themselves playing defense.
The lesson for incumbents is uncomfortable but clear: scale is no longer a guarantee of relevance. The brands that endure will be the ones that recover the intimacy, trust and craftsmanship that mass production once traded away.
