FMCG Procurement: Benchmarks and KPIs for 2026

Procurement teams in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry sit in a tight spot. Cost pressure hasn't eased, while boards are asking for better margins,  AI productivity gains, and audit-ready reporting.

This article translates 403 bUSD of anonymized FMCG procurement benchmarks from 2024Q3–2025Q2 into a short set of KPIs. It focuses on:

• How your numbers compare with FMCG peers

• What this means for cost, resilience, and automation

• Where to focus in 2026

All benchmarks below are split into top, average, and bottom performers across direct and indirect categories.

What does the FMCG procurement landscape look like today?

FMCG spend has stayed elevated through the inflation cycle and remains above the 2022 Q1 baseline on an inflation-adjusted basis across both direct and indirect categories.

Key shifts in the data and in the market:

• FMCG companies have absorbed persistent inflation in raw materials. The Food Price Index peaked in 2022 and has only eased slightly, so input costs have remained elevated.

• Marketing budgets have been climbing, reaching 152% of 2022 levels by 2024.  Brands have invested more in digital ads to maintain market share as consumers shift to private-label and value options.

• Logistics costs have moved in the opposite direction, declining to about 92% of 2022 levels by 2024 as freight rates normalised and companies adopted more localised supply chains to reduce transport costs and improve resilience.

Indirect categories like marketing and logistics now shape the operating model, not just overhead. For a detailed breakdown of indirect spend, see "Spend as % of Revenue Deep Dive: Indirect L2 Categories" in the full State of Spend report.

Takeaway for 2026: Expect elevated input costs, high marketing spend, and more localised supply chains to remain the norm, and design FMCG procurement plans around that baseline.

What does good look like in FMCG procurement benchmarks?

According to the State of Spend 2025 benchmark report, the median FMCG company looks roughly like this:

According to the State of Spend 2025, the median FMCG company looks roughly like this:

• Total spend mix: 55% direct / 45% indirect

• Suppliers per $1B (total): ~3,900

• Spend per supplier (total): ~$255K

• Invoices per $1B (total): ~122,000

• Spend per invoice (total): ~$8K

• PO coverage (total): ~67%

• Invoice-to-due (total): ~50 days

Direct Spend – KPI Ranges

(bottom performers → top performers)

• PO coverage: 80% → 99% 

• Suppliers per $1B: 1,100 → 500 

• Spend per supplier: $917K → $2.1M 

• Spend per invoice: $1.9K → $4.7K 

• Invoice-to-due: 36 days → 90 days 

Indirect Spend – KPI Ranges

(bottom performers → top performers)

• PO coverage: 14% → 82% 
• Suppliers per $1B: 13,300 → 4,200 
• Spend per supplier: $75K → $239K 
• Spend per invoice: $4.1K → $8K
• Invoice-to-due: 29 days → 72 days 

How ready is FMCG procurement for AI-native automation?

AI agents are starting to emerge in procurement use cases like contract analysis and invoice validation. But when your data foundation is weak, the signal-to-noise ratio becomes a constraint for any agentic tool.

Key KPIs for AI readiness:

• Indirect PO coverage: 14% bottom performers vs. 82% top performers

  • At 14%, AI assistants see only a small slice of real activity.

  • At 82%, AI has enough structured data to make reliable recommendations.

These metrics describe how much noise an AI agent will encounter and how often it will hallucinate due to incomplete underlying data.

Takeaway for 2026: Gains from AI only materialize when fragmentation decreases and structured data increases. The KPIs signal when the environment is ready and when it isn’t.

How to build supply chain resilience in FMCG procurement?

Regional sourcing, nearshoring, and multi-hub models are now common. They help resilience, but they also increase operational load if the supplier base grows faster than your processes can support.

For companies with revenue under $5B, indirect suppliers per $1B can range from around 2,600 for top performers to more than 13,600 for bottom performers.

At 13,000+ suppliers per $1B, even basic activities like supplier onboarding, performance reviews, and risk checks become hard to scale.

KPIs for resilience

• Indirect spend per supplier: $239K top performers vs. $75K bottom performers

  • Higher spend per supplier → more meaningful relationships and greater negotiation leverage.

• Direct suppliers per $1B: 500 top performers vs. 1,100 top performers

  • Splitting direct supplier volume across twice as many suppliers limits your ability to:

    • Secure allocation priority

    • Negotiate regional backup options

Regionalize networks through nearshoring and multi-sourcing while capping the top three suppliers at under ~40% of category spend, so no single site or region becomes a critical bottleneck.

Takeaway for 2026: Supplier diversification strengthens resilience only when the spend per supplier remains manageable. 

How should procurement respond to demand shifts?

Key FMCG inputs—paper packaging, aluminium, food ingredients—remain exposed to swings driven by demand shifts, trade policy, and regulation.

Benchmark data reveals a striking difference between top and bottom performers in procurement:

Top performers (direct spend)

• 500 suppliers per $1B

• $2.1M spend per supplier

Bottom performers (direct spend)

• 1,100 suppliers per $1B

• $917K spend per supplier

This difference is about negotiating power, not just scale. Top performers:

• Concentrate spend deliberately with fewer suppliers

• Secure stronger pricing and terms

• Improve their ability to hedge volatility

• Build collaborative partnerships for joint innovation

Takeaway for 2026: In categories with high volatility and high leverage, negotiate longer-term agreements that trade off some price flexibility for access to capacity, transparency, and joint cost-management initiatives.

What does packaging and ESG regulation mean for FMCG procurement?

Upcoming regulatory changes—such as EU PPWR—are altering cost structures and compliance expectations.

In regulated categories, PO coverage gaps are particularly visible. For example, in indirect spend (bottom performers → top performers):

• Building (CAPEX): 10% → 100%

• Lab equipment and services (MRO): 17% → 99%

• Legal & compliance (professional services): 0% → 97% 

Combined with invoice-to-due windows as short as 29 days for bottom performers, this makes it hard to reliably complete documentation and compliance checks.

• Automate compliance workflows by embedding required checks into intake, sourcing, and contracting, not just post-award.

• Prioritize regulated / high-impact categories for strategic sourcing, and build EPR fees, labelling costs, waste obligations, and traceability into TCO.

• Use supplier scorecards and clear data requirements to enforce traceability and keep documentation audit-ready.

Takeaway for 2026: Raising PO coverage in compliance-heavy categories dramatically reduces the manual load. The benchmarks show how uneven these structures still are across the industry.

Which KPIs matter most for FMCG procurement performance in 2026?

The State of Spend dataset highlights a set of FMCG procurement KPIs that consistently separate top performers from the rest. These drive cost, process efficiency, resilience, and cash flow.

Purchase Order (PO) coverage

• Top performers (indirect): 82% PO coverage

• Bottom performers (indirect): 14% PO coverage

If you're closer to 14%, you already know the pain points—maverick spend, incomplete data, and limited visibility into what's actually being purchased.

At 82%, you're not just checking a compliance box. You're building the data foundation that makes AI-driven analytics possible and gives you the spend visibility needed to drive strategic decisions.

Supplier consolidation

Your supplier base shows whether you have negotiating leverage or an administrative burden.

Direct spend:

• Top performers: 500 suppliers per $1B | $2.1M spend per supplier

• Bottom performers: 1,100 suppliers per $1B | $917K spend per supplier

Indirect spend:

• Top performers: 4,200 suppliers per $1B | $239K spend per supplier

• Bottom performers: 13,300 suppliers per $1B | $75K spend per supplier

If you're managing 1,100+ suppliers per billion in direct spend, you know the challenge: you're spread too thin to negotiate effectively or collaborate on specification improvements.

Top performers concentrate their spend deliberately, giving them the leverage to:

• Drive meaningful price negotiations

• Build strategic partnerships that weather volatility

• Co-develop solutions with key suppliers

The gap is even wider in indirect spend. Ask yourself: are you managing suppliers, or are they managing you?

Invoice Volume and Efficiency

Your team feels this one daily:

• Top performers: 87,000 invoices per $1B | $8K per invoice

• Bottom performers: 307,000 invoices per $1B | $4.1K per invoice

If you're processing 300,000+ invoices per billion, you're drowning in transactional work. Fewer, higher-value invoices aren't just easier to process. They signal consolidated, catalog-driven purchasing, freeing your team to focus on strategy rather than exception handling.

Consider what your team could accomplish if invoice processing weren't consuming most of their bandwidth.

Invoice-to-Due and Due-to-Pay

Two metrics here matter for different reasons: invoice-to-due shows your processing efficiency, while due-to-pay reveals your working capital discipline.

Indirect spend:

• Top performers: 72 days invoice-to-due | 1.3 days early payment

• Bottom performers: 29 days invoice-to-due | 6.5 days late payment

The business case is compelling: improving from the bottom to the top quartile in invoice-to-due timing for indirect spend delivers approximately $94K in working capital improvement per $1M of spend. At scale, that's board-level impact.

Longer processing windows give you and your finance partners room to:

• Conduct proper three-way matching without firefighting

• Optimize payment terms for cash flow

• Maintain supplier relationships while maximizing working capital

Category spend as % of revenue

This is where procurement's strategic impact becomes visible to the C-suite:

• Marketing: 3.1% (top) vs. 6.8% (bottom)

• Logistics: 3.1% (top) vs. 5.3% (bottom)

You know what a two-point difference means at your revenue scale? It's millions in margin impact.

But it's also about strategic flexibility. Are you operating with structural cost levels that give you room to invest in innovation, or are you constantly in cost-cutting mode?

These ratios shape whether you're seen as a strategic partner or a cost center.

Conclusions for 2026

As you iterate your 2026 procurement strategy, ask yourself:

• Where do we stand on PO coverage, supplier consolidation, invoice efficiency, and category spend?

• Are our numbers closer to the top quartile or the bottom quartile?

• What structural changes would move us meaningfully toward top-quartile performance?

If your numbers sit closer to the bottom quartile than the top, what would it take to close that gap?

The organizations outperforming you haven't done it with bigger budgets or better tools. They've chosen which metrics matter and built their procurement around them.

A practical next step is to benchmark your own KPIs against FMCG peers in the State of Spend report.

The full report provides the category-level industry benchmarks needed to see where focused changes in structure, process, or systems could unlock the next step in value.