Supply chain leaders are no longer optimizing for a stable environment. They're building organizations that can adapt to constant change.
That was one of the clearest themes to emerge from C.H. Robinson's recent Logistics Forum: Shelf-to-table Supply Chains, where supply chain leaders from across food & beverage, foodservice, and retail gathered to discuss the forces reshaping their businesses.
While each segment faces distinct pressures, the reality is that many are navigating the same underlying realities: economic uncertainty, evolving consumer behavior, increasing operational complexity, and faster technology adoption.
With these pressures in mind, we are seeing four shifts in how retail, food & beverage, and foodservice shippers are building their supply chains.
1. Speed of change in consumer behavior is reshaping supply chain operations
Many of the strongest conversations at the forum were not about transportation alone. They were about how quickly changing consumer preferences are forcing companies to rethink supply chain decisions.
Consumers continue to prioritize value, but they are also making more intentional decisions about how and where they spend and weighing brand loyalty. Health and wellness trends are influencing purchasing patterns. E-commerce remains a meaningful growth driver. Foodservice is capturing a larger share of the consumer wallet. Emerging trends like GLP-1 adoption (Circana report 28% of U.S. households have someone using a GLP-1) and moving away from food dyes are creating new demand signals across food categories.
These shifts may appear consumer-focused on the surface, but their impact reaches deep into supply chain operations. Inventory positioning, replenishment strategies, transportation networks, and fulfillment models all depend on understanding where demand is heading, not where it has been. Organizations that can translate demand signals into operational decisions will be better positioned to improve service levels while controlling costs.
Our customers aren't just tracking consumer trends. They're looking for ways to connect those demand signals directly to inventory, sourcing, and transportation decisions.
So how can supply chain leaders act on these trends? Review your most important demand signals against current inventory and fulfillment decisions to determine where consumer shifts may require changes in replenishment cadence, forward inventory placement, or service expectations.
2. Better end-to-end optimization, not more capacity, is the biggest opportunity
One of the most compelling discussions at the forum centered on a potentially provocative question: Are companies spending too much time solving for transportation capacity when bigger gains may come from better optimization across the full supply chain?
Carrier capacity remains a critical consideration, but many organizations are finding that upstream decisions often determine downstream performance. Forecast accuracy, supplier performance, purchase order management, inventory placement, and network design can have as much or more impact on cost and service outcomes than transportation execution alone.
This idea surfaced repeatedly across discussions about supply chain engineering, network optimization, redistribution, item-level visibility, and procurement planning. The common thread was clear: when companies align decisions across functions, they can improve inventory productivity, transportation efficiency, and customer service at the same time.
We see this across our Managed Solutions customer portfolio. Route guide depth, a measure of transportation execution performance, reached its highest level since 2022 as capacity tightened in July, highlighting why organizations that align functional decisions are often better positioned to manage service and cost simultaneously.
In other words, the next wave of supply chain performance may come less from finding additional capacity and more from coordinating existing resources more effectively.
So where can supply chain leaders drive additional optimization? Bring procurement, supply planning, inventory, and transportation teams together around one priority lane, product category, or customer segment to identify potentially disconnected decisions that are creating avoidable cost or service friction.
3. Resilience is becoming a competitive advantage
For years, supply chains were designed primarily around efficiency, but that sole objective isn’t enough anymore. Today, many leaders are instead balancing efficiency with resilience.
Trade policy shifts, evolving tariff structures, customs complexity, sourcing changes, and geopolitical uncertainty are all creating new planning challenges. At the same time, companies are diversifying sourcing strategies beyond traditional manufacturing hubs, creating more complex transportation and inventory networks that must be managed with greater intentionality.
The takeaway isn't that companies should abandon cost optimization. It's that the lowest-cost network is not always the most resilient network.
The organizations creating the greatest competitive advantage are finding ways to build optionality into sourcing, transportation, and inventory decisions. As cross-border and global supply chains become more complex, we're helping customers identify opportunities to improve resiliency through transportation network design, consolidation strategies, and sourcing flexibility that can improve reliability while still controlling costs.
So what should supply chain leaders do? Stress test your network against a few likely disruption scenarios, then identify where adding a secondary sourcing option, flexible transportation plan, or inventory buffer could protect service without unnecessarily increasing cost.
4. AI has moved beyond insights and into action
Artificial intelligence was a major topic throughout the event, but the conversation has evolved significantly from where it was just a few years ago. Leaders are no longer asking whether AI can generate insights. They are asking how AI can improve execution by helping teams make faster, more confident decisions.
Discussions focused on practical applications including service-risk forecasting, procurement timing decisions, exception management, inventory optimization, network design, and continuous performance improvement. The emphasis was on using technology to identify opportunities earlier, recommend the next best action, and support stronger execution across day-to-day workflows.
The most exciting aspect isn't automation alone. It's the ability to create a continuous cycle of learning and improvement across the supply chain.
Organizations that successfully combine technology, data, and human expertise will be positioned to respond faster to disruption, uncover new efficiencies, and make smarter decisions at scale, but only if those insights are connected to clear owners, workflows, and actions.
As our Chief Technology Officer, Mike Neill puts it, “AI can feel limitless when you look across the challenges and opportunities inside organizations. But limitless can quickly become unfocused. Real ROI comes from moving forward boldly with discipline.”
So what can supply chain leaders do to move from insight to action? Choose one proven use case where better prediction could improve execution, such as exception management, procurement timing, or service-risk forecasting, and define the data, decision owner, and workflow needed to move from insight to action.
The big opportunity ahead
Perhaps the most important takeaway from the forum is that retail, food & beverage, and foodservice supply chains won’t simply have larger networks or more resources in the years ahead. The ones that can adapt the fastest, connect decisions across functions, and turn complexity into strategic advantage will lead the way.
These organizations are increasingly solving for very similar challenges. They are competing for the same consumer. Navigating many of the same economic pressures. Managing similar transportation and inventory complexities. Investing in many of the same technologies to improve visibility, agility, and performance.
In today's environment, resilience, end-to-end optimization, and agility are no longer operational priorities. They're business priorities. By layering AI insights across these priorities, supply chain leaders can turn plans into execution.
