What Retailers Do CPG Companies Think are Best to Do Business With?

Kroger Tops the Annual Rankings from Kantar Retail by Impressive Margin; See the Rest of Top 10 Jan. 5, 2017 SCDigest Editorial Staff Earlier this week, SCDigest summarized the top consumer packaged goods supply chains, as reported by the analysts at Kantar Retail in its annual PoweRankings report. (See Annual Kantar Retail Ranking of the Top Consumer Packaged Goods Supply Chains for 2016.) The full study covers a number of company performance measures for both consumer goods manufacturers and retailers, including such areas as brand power, marketing programs, sales teams, overall business fundamentals, and more. Supply chain management is one of the categories included in the survey. The rankings for this year, as always, were developed through the interesting methodology of asking retailers to rate manufacturers on each of these categories, and manufacturers to rank retailers on a similar set of attributes. Both manufacturers and retailers are from the consumer packaged goods, food and beverage areas. That means manufacturers in such categories as apparel/soft goods, electronics, hard goods, etc. are not included. Similarly, the participating retailers are drawn exclusively from sectors such as mass merchandise, traditional grocery, warehouse clubs, and drug store chains that focus on consumer packaged goods sales, and does not for example include department stores or most specialty retail areas. The scores represent the percentage of respondents that place a given manufacturer or retailer as having one of the top three performances in each rating category. We'll do the top retail supply chains next week, but we also found interesting the chart below, which ranks retailers on which are best to business with overall: Best Retailers to do Business With 2016 Source: Kantar Retail PoweRankings 2016 As can be see, Kroger came out on top by a rather impressive margin, cited as being in the top three in this category by 48.9% of respondents, well ahead of number 2 Walmart (38.3%). "Kroger is extremely collaborative with its vendor partners. They are clear on their needs, and that clarity (and consistency) enables better partnership," one retail respondent noted. "Target is very open to new ideas and concepts. They allow the insights to drive their decisions and do not have layers of barriers of execution, unlike other retailers," said another retailers.