Amati & Associates

29/08/2026

Why L’Oréal Can Raise Prices and NIVEA Can’t

H1 2026: sales up 5.8% to €23.77 billion, on a record operating margin of 21.3%.

28/08/2026

Pernod Ricard Is Guiding for the Bad Scenario

But Its Own Numbers Say Otherwise

28/08/2026

"Supermarkets, not big food, control what Europe eats."

That's one line from my latest podcast conversation with AJ van Triest

He is a veteran of Unilever and FrieslandCampina.

We spent an hour on why personal health is becoming a board-level risk for F&B companies. Not a compliance topic. A growth topic.

→ Supermarkets produce 60% of the calories consumed in Western Europe, through private label.
→ Chronic disease and metabolic dysfunction account for 70% of healthcare costs.
→ Consumers don't eat ingredients. They eat from a repertoire of five or six memorised recipes, repeated weekly.

That last point changes the maths. A moderately unhealthy product eaten every week does more biological damage over years than an occasional treat ever will.

The three hard truths from AJ's analysis:

1. Consumers are shifting from ingredients to outcomes
They've stopped just checking sugar and fat. Now they want satiety, steady glycemic load, energy, microbiome support.

2. Nutritional science is shifting from safety to impact
Post-war science proved food was safe to eat. Now it has to prove what a weekly repertoire does to long-term health.

3. Regulators and employers are done waiting
Marketing bans, taxes, mandatory health targets. Lost productivity and sick leave forced their hand.

The moves boards need to make:

First: Trade ingredient accountability for impact accountability
→ Ask what happens if your portfolio is eaten in large quantities, at high frequency, for years.

Second: Appoint a Chief Health Officer
→ Someone owns the health agenda at board level. Not buried in R&D.

Third: Build nutrient density into every portfolio call
→ GLP-1 drugs are already reshaping household repertoires. One person on the drug changes what the whole family cooks and orders.

The bottom line:

Health is not an obstacle to growth.
It's the next growth operating system.

The companies that win will make convenient food healthy.
Not the other way round.

Full conversation with AJ van Triest is out now:

https://www.filibertoamati.com/p/health-as-a-board-risk-for-f-and?r=t9yz8

27/08/2026

Carlsberg’s Occasion Hedge

Organic operating profit up 5.9% to DKK 7.45 billion. Leverage down to 3.0x EBITDA. Shares fell 3.3% on the day anyway.

26/08/2026

Coty’s Sell-In Mirage

A $618 million net loss. 25% more free cash flow. That’s not a contradiction, it’s the diagnosis.

24/08/2026

Health as a Board Risk for F&B | AJ van Triest

Episode 91

20/08/2026

8 in 10 FMCG launches fail within two years.

Most of what gets approved is not innovation.

Smaller pack at a higher price per unit? Innovation.
Same product, new packaging? Innovation.
Premium line extension? Innovation.
New flavour variant? Innovation.
A 15% price increase with a reformulation nobody notices? Innovation.

The investor deck calls it a robust pipeline.
The pipeline chart looks very full.
The category does not grow.
The reality is line extensions dressed up for earnings calls.

The 3 signals you are running theatre, not innovation:

1. Your launch rate is high but category share is flat
Launches pile up.
Revenue does not move.
Line extensions cannibalise the core.
The core brand absorbs the launches. Net growth is zero.

2. Your biggest launches are comparable to private label
If a retailer can copy it in six months, it is not innovation.
You are funding their R&D.
Private label does not need the science.
They need the format and the flavour.
If you gave them that, you gave them the launch.

3. Your innovation budget is really a marketing budget
Seventy per cent goes to launch support, not product development. The new product is 18 months old at launch.
That means the product is not different enough to sell without support.

The 3 tests for real innovation:

First: Check whether it expands the category or just moves share around.
→ A genuine new occasion or consumer brings incremental revenue.
→ A line extension moves share around. It does not grow the pool.

Second: Test whether private label can replicate it within six months.
→ If a retailer can copy it that fast, it is a marketing idea.
→ Not a product innovation.
→ Real product advantage sits in formulation, process, or a protected occasion.
→ Not in simple format or flavour.

Third: Audit where the budget actually goes.
→ Seventy per cent on launch support signals the product cannot sell itself.
→ Real innovation reduces dependence on launch spending over time. It does not increase it.

The hard truth:

Your innovation rate is a vanity metric.
Category share movement is the truth.
Incremental demand is the only KPI.

Most FMCG companies are not running real innovation.
They are running a line extension machine and calling it a pipeline. The pipeline protects internal teams. It does not protect the category position.

If you are running innovation for an FMCG brand or advising one:
the question is not how many launches are in the plan.
It is how many of them a retailer could not copy in six months.

18/08/2026

We just released a white paper on why FMCG strategy dies at ex*****on.

It is free. No sales call attached.

The research: confidential interviews with senior executives across spirits, dairy, food, consumer health, beverages and household products. Coded line by line, then reduced to a single unifying finding.

→ Twenty-two initial categories, collapsed to nine forces.
→ Every sector represented. Every force showed up in more than one.
→ One line came back again and again: "I have executed Year 1 five, six, seven, eight times in a row."

Most leadership teams ask whether their strategy is right.
Wrong question.

The better question is what is actually stopping it from running.

What is inside the white paper:

1. Nine gravitational forces
Structural and commercial, each one described in full, not just named: priority diffusion, handoff degradation, system self-perpetuation, incentive misalignment, governance instability, portfolio overload, RTM misfit, accountability diffusion and cultural cynicism.

2. Nine escape velocity conditions
What the organisations that actually execute do differently, drawn from the positive cases in the research.

3. A nine-question diagnostic
Score your own leadership team, one question per force, then compare results.

4. An intervention playbook
Specific actions mapped to each force. Not theory. Things to run on Monday.

First, read it alone before your next planning meeting.
→ Fifteen minutes. No workshop required to get value from it.

Second: Score it with your leadership team.
→ Each person answers independently, then compare them.
→ The gap between scores is usually the real finding.

Third: Pick one force and start there.
→ Whichever question scored 4 or 5. Not all nine at once.

The reality of the street:

Nobody executes a five-year plan by accident.
The organisations that do it on purpose first measured what was stopping them.

Free to download: https://www.amati-associates.com/download/

17/08/2026

Nobody Wants Your Product. They Want to Not Think About a Problem.

The best FMCG brands succeed by making a need disappear, not by satisfying it loudly.

14/08/2026

Suntory Cancelled a Maturation Facility.

That Is the Real Guidance.