What's Shaping Grocery in 2026:
Consumer Demand, Transportation, and Gen AI
With 2026 underway, the prevailing mood across business headlines is cautious optimism, yet many of the same forces that defined 2025 are still very much in play.
From consumer pressures and logistics volatility to executional challenges and growing expectations around GenAI, this series brings together timely perspectives on the factors shaping how food & CPG manufacturers will operate in 2026. Each hour-long session is designed to be practical and conversational, with time built in for discussion, questions, and takeaways you can apply directly to this year’s strategies.
No matter where your team is in planning season, these sessions are designed to help you cut through the noise and get smarter, faster, and more effective.
Guest Speakers:
How Agentic Commerce is Redefining Brand Choice
Lori Stillman | Chief Strategy Officer | Stretch
Lori Stillman from Stretch open the series with a look into how consumer behavior will change and evolve as agentic commerce starts to take hold. Grocery will be the first trip to get turned over to bots since consumers dislike the trip, it is boring, and is repetitive. Brands need to move marketing upstream to the list and not wait for the bot to select their products.
What It Takes for GenAI to Add Value in Day-to-Day Work
Matt Alldian | Founding Partner | Happy Robots
Matt Alldian unpacked how GenAI has the potential to make work faster, easier, and better, and why trust and skill gaps are holding teams back. He argued that real gains come when organizations invest in training and users embrace simple experimentation, and the takeaway was that effectiveness isn’t just about the tools, it’s about giving people the skills and confidence to use it well.
The Executional Advantage of Retail Intelligence
Lee Kallman | Chief Commercial Officer | RDSolutions
Lee Kallman showed how RDSolutions helps manufacturers close the gap between strategy and in-store reality. By combining real-time retail intelligence with field support, teams can more confidently manage pricing updates and competitive promo tracking while resolving tactical issues like phantom inventory, UPC errors, and merchandising breakdowns—protecting critical retailer relationships before small problems become costly ones.
Transportation in 2026: Costs, Capacity, What’s Ahead
Matt Muenster | Chief Economist | Breakthrough
Matt Muenster from Breakthrough Fuel walked through Breakthrough’s 2026 freight market outlook, showing that capacity is gradually tightening due to fleet attrition, regulatory enforcement, and reduced carrier investment. The outlook calls for modest but sustained rate pressure in 2026, and showed some opportunities to build resilience via smart energy strategies and network decisions.
Engaging Discussions Enable Confident Decisions®
When you’re busy with the daily demands of your job, it’s easy to overlook the opportunities that will drive long-term growth. When you become a member of a Drive Wheel peer group, you can identify new strategies, reduce risk, and make confident decisions that will grow your business faster and more strategically.
We host two-day in-person meetings twice a year where leaders discuss their new strategies, innovation plans, and business challenges to get feedback from their peers. Members leave the meeting knowing they have thought about their idea from every angle. Between meetings, we conduct benchmarking studies and weekly news roundups to keep our members informed about changes in the industry.
