Revealed: the snacks companies best positioned to weather disruption 

Conagra Brands is the food manufacturer best positioned to take advantage of disruption in the snacks sector, according to GlobalData analysts. 

The US-based firm comes top of the list in a ranking of overall leadership in the areas GlobalData – Just Food’s parent – says matter most for snacks manufacturers. 

These areas describe technological, macroeconomic and industry-specific challenges that companies are facing, as well as the opportunities they create. GlobalData’s research sets out how these issues may create the long-term winners and losers in the snacks industry. 

Conagra, home to snack brands including Angie’s Boomchickapop popcorn, received scores of four in areas including e-commerce, health and wellness, ESG, artificial intelligence and the concept of the ‘future of work’. 

Alice Popple, a consumer analyst at GlobalData, pointed to some of the initiatives rolled out by Conagra that informed GlobalData’s rankings. 

“Conagra Brands excelled in its e-commerce offering during the pandemic, as they invested in online retail to meet the needs of consumers demanding convenience and safety,” she said. “Meanwhile, Conagra is using AI to identify trends and develop new products, in order to produce desirable and market-forward products efficiently and effectively with fewer resources.” 

The scores awarded to companies represent GlobalData analysts’ assessments of the competitiveness of each business regarding a particular theme. They are then weighted based on their importance and used to create the final industry ranking. 

Conagra Brands is followed in GlobalData’s league table by Mexico-based bakery and snacks group Grupo Bimbo, Nestlé and US snacks major Hershey. 

The interactive graphic below allows a comparison of company ratings across the ten themes in question. The higher up a business is on the list, the better positioned it is to weather disruption in the future, while the groups at the bottom are, GlobalData says, more vulnerable to disruptive threats. 

Click on any of the companies to compare them across all the themes in GlobalData’s analysis. 

These scores are based on overall technology, macroeconomic and sector-specific leadership in ten of the key themes that matter most to the food industry and are generated by GlobalData analysts' assessments.

Main image credit: @Boomchickapop / Facebook