The New Rules of the FMCG game revisited

Research evidence excerpt

Equity Research

10 August 2026

European Consumer Staples

The New Rules of the FMCG game

revisited

Same game, new scores. Six months after launching our 10

Rules of the FMCG Game, we update our EU Food/HPC report

card post H1-26 reporting. LOR and UNA remain a class apart,

but we are seeing progress at NESN, HLN and HENK.

BEI suffers the biggest drop and where we recently moved

UW.

Earlier this year, we published our primer The New Rules of the FMCG Game (link), where we

argued that the old FMCG playbook is broken and unlikely to return to pre-Covid norms.

Consumers, channels and competitive dynamics are evolving faster than ever, requires a

radically different approach. We are seeing increasing differentiation between the leaders

and laggards in the sector which we feel was becoming more visible during H1-26

reporting.

We believe those 10 rules will increasingly define success in modern FMCG and separate

the companies creating sustainable value from those struggling to adapt. The framework

informs our medium term assessment of company attractiveness, although its doesn't

always align to our 12 month view of companies under our coverage.

Six months on, we revisit our framework and reassess how the companies in our coverage

rank against these 10 rules. While the rules themselves remain unchanged, the relative

positioning of companies continues to evolve as management teams adapt their

strategies, priorities and resource allocation to the industry's new realities. In this note,

we update our scorecard, highlight the biggest movers since our previous ranking, and

discuss what those changes mean for our investment recommendations.

LOR and UNA remain a class apart, but we are seeing progress at NESN, HLN and HENK. BEI

suffers the biggest drop and where we recently moved UW. The investor frustration is that

even those companies that 'popped' on Q2 beats such as UNA and LOR haven't see much

follow through which still shows that investor sentiment on the sector remains relatively

cautious. We continue to believe that in time, the structural winners in the sector will

outperform.

The 10 rules are:

Barclays Capital Inc.…