Revenue Growth Management Advisory · New Zealand
Most FMCG suppliers leave 15–25% of their promotional ROI on the table.
Northform helps New Zealand FMCG suppliers find it. We work through your pricing, trade investment, portfolio mix and customer economics, then help build the discipline that keeps the gains.
Not sure whether that applies to you? That question is what the first conversation is for.
The context
The margin squeeze is real. There’s a way through it.
Four pressures are working on New Zealand FMCG suppliers at once. Most teams respond by cutting costs or absorbing the loss. Both are choices, and neither is the only one available.
Pressure 01
Cost inflation
Input and freight costs keep moving. Recovering them through price is slower and harder than the increase itself.
Pressure 02
Retailer consolidation
Fewer and larger customers mean tougher negotiations, and less room to be wrong about your terms.
Pressure 03
Shopper price sensitivity
Shoppers are trading down and buying on deal. Every pricing option now comes with a volume question attached.
Pressure 04
Promotional intensity
Depth and frequency stay high while returns fall. Spend goes up and incremental volume does not.
The levers worth working are the ones you control. Pricing, trade investment, portfolio mix and customer terms get decided inside your business rather than by the market, and that is usually where the margin is sitting.
What we do
Where we find margin
Four areas where margin usually sits. What is available in each one depends on your numbers, but this is where we look first.
Conservative pricing and a pack architecture that grew by accident are two of the most common places margin sits unnoticed. Price rises get delayed, then taken in a lump. Pack sizes stop telling a coherent story across channels.
We build pricing architecture on elasticity evidence, shopper price perception and competitive position. That means clear price ladders, deliberate pack roles, and price moves designed to recover cost without giving up volume.
Promotional calendars run on autopilot. Depth, frequency and timing get repeated because that is what happened last year, and a large share of the spend delivers little or no incremental volume.
We work through your promotional history to separate genuine incremental volume from pantry loading and cannibalisation. Then we build a framework that puts investment behind the events that pay and retires the ones that don’t.
Range reviews usually get run defensively, where the goal is not losing facings. That turns a margin decision into a shelf-space negotiation, and the mix drifts toward whatever sells rather than whatever earns.
We work out where value is actually created across SKUs, packs and channels, so every range change is intentional and argued on margin as well as category size. You go into the review with a proposal of your own.
Terms get negotiated one customer at a time, over years, without a framework tying them together. You end up with inconsistencies you cannot explain in the room, and customer relationships that cost more than they return.
We build transparent trade investment structures tied to customer performance and strategic priority, so you can see profitability by customer, defend the terms you offer, and put investment where it earns its place.
About those ranges. They describe where margin typically sits in FMCG businesses of this profile. They are the size of the prize rather than a promise. What is actually available in your business depends on your data, and finding that out is the first thing we do together.
How we work
From diagnosis to discipline
We don’t hand over a hundred-page deck and disappear. We work alongside your team to find the margin leaks, decide what to do about them, and embed the change so it holds.
Diagnose
We start with your data (scan, promotional history, customer P&Ls) and conversations with the people closest to the trade. Within weeks the biggest opportunities are obvious, and they are rarely the ones people expected.
Decide
You get genuine options with the financials attached: what each one is worth, what it risks, and how the retailer is likely to respond. We make a recommendation and stand behind it.
Embed
Strategy dies in slide decks. We help build the tools, the selling story and the review rhythm so your team keeps making better calls after the engagement ends.
Why Northform
Why FMCG teams choose us
We are not a global consultancy parachuting in with a template. The experience behind Northform was built inside New Zealand FMCG commercial roles, carrying the number.
Deep New Zealand expertise
Twenty-plus years spent in FMCG commercial roles rather than advising on them from a distance. That covers retailer strategy, shopper behaviour, and what survives contact with execution in this market specifically.
Specific, quantified opportunities
We don’t talk about optimisation in the abstract. Every opportunity we surface comes with a number attached and the working behind it, so you know what success looks like before you commit to it.
Grounded in your data
Every recommendation comes out of your scan data, your promotional history and your customer economics. Frameworks are useful for structuring the question. Your numbers answer it.
Built for what you can execute
We have held the P&L and sat in the customer meetings. Advice is built for what you can get agreed, resourced and executed, rather than for what looks clean on a slide.
Insights
Notes from the trade
Practical pieces on the decisions that move margin, written for the people who have to make them.
Your range review is a margin decision in disguise
Most suppliers walk into a range review trying not to lose facings. That turns a margin decision into a shelf-space negotiation, and hands the agenda to the retailer.
Recovering a cost increase without losing the shelf
The list price rise is the most visible way to recover cost, and often the worst. Four other levers usually do more of the work, and all of them are less likely to trigger a range review.
How to find the 15–25% hiding in your promotional history
Most suppliers evaluate promotions on uplift. Uplift is the least useful number in the file, and swapping it for incremental margin is usually where the first real gain comes from.
Start here
Not sure where the margin opportunity sits? That’s a normal place to start.
Most engagements begin with a short, no-cost conversation about what’s happening in your numbers. If we don’t think we can move them, we’ll say so.