Food manufacturers are being urged to treat supply chain resilience as a commercial necessity rather than a contingency plan, after new research found that many chief executives are prepared to pay materially more to secure continuity.
According to Proxima’s Global Supply Chain Resilience Outlook, which surveyed more than 500 CEOs at companies with annual revenues above $500 million across the UK, US, Australia, Singapore and Germany, 51% said their businesses could not opera...
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te for more than three weeks without disruption if hit by a major supply chain shock. Almost three quarters, or 72%, said they would accept an increase of more than 10% in third-party supplier costs to strengthen resilience.
The food sector stands out as especially exposed. Proxima said manufacturers face a combination of volatile weather patterns, regulatory demands and tightly timed production cycles, all while operating with lean inventories, continuous output and cold chain logistics that leave limited room for manoeuvre when something goes wrong.
Jordan Kear-Nash, principal consultant at Proxima, said the findings showed leaders were moving away from a purely defensive view of resilience and were instead treating it as an investment. In the food industry, he said, that is translating into dual sourcing, extra stocks of critical ingredients, closer supplier relationships and joint spending on equipment or capacity designed to protect production during disruption.
He also pointed to regulation as a growing pressure point. Sustainability requirements, he said, are adding to the strain on procurement teams as food companies contend with rules linked to deforestation, packaging, emissions and traceability while also considering diversification and alternative supply models.
Beyond sourcing, the report highlights the importance of operational durability. That includes better real-time visibility over inventory, built-in supplier redundancy and contingency plans that are regularly tested rather than merely written down.
The broader concern is that disruption is no longer being treated as an occasional shock. The World Economic Forum said in January that global value chains have entered an era of structural volatility, with nearly three in four business leaders now seeing resilience as a growth driver. It said tariff changes between major economies shifted more than $400 billion in trade flows in 2025 alone, while shipping route disruptions pushed container costs 40% higher year on year.
The food system is increasingly caught in that same logic. A separate World Economic Forum article in May argued that companies need to diversify sourcing, invest in data and technology, deepen supplier partnerships and support policies that make supply chains more robust.
Taken together, the message from the latest research is clear: in food manufacturing, resilience is becoming a baseline requirement for staying in business, not an optional extra.
Source: Noah Wire Services
