AI Summary
5 min readIn late July 2026, Fernando Fernandez called it Unilever's best quarterly volume performance since 2010. Two weeks earlier, PepsiCo's Ramon LaGuarta admitted the American consumer was worse than his company had anticipated. Two of the biggest names in consumer goods, reporting on the same quarter, describing what sounds like two different planets. Over the past few days, the industry's heavyweights—Unilever, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Danone, Reckitt, L'Oréal, Mondelez, and more—published their Q2 numbers. Read side by side, they answer one question that matters more than any headline: volume growth is back across the industry, but who is paying for it? The answer differs sharply from company to company, and it will reshape how commercial teams spend their money for the rest of this year.
The Growth Engine Has Switched from Price to Volume
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:05) **Two Divergent Earnings Reports Set the Stage** - Unilever's best volume quarter since 2010 vs. PepsiCo admitting the American consumer is worse than anticipated, posing the central question of who is paying for the industry's volume recovery.
- 2 (00:59) **Pattern #1: The Growth Engine Switches from Price to Volume** - Unilever, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Danone, and Reckitt all reported volume-led growth, proving that after three years of pricing-driven revenue, boards now score growth on its volume content.
- 3 (02:51) **Pattern #2: The Global Consumer Splits in Half** - The American consumer is cracking under fuel price pressure, while emerging markets like India, China, and Brazil are carrying the industry; Europe sits cautiously in between, price-vigilant and promotion-dependent.
- 4 (04:42) **Pattern #3: Price Cuts Alone Do Not Buy Back Volume** - PepsiCo's national experiment in cutting snack prices by up to 15% failed: North American food volume was flat, and the company conceded Americans did not stock up, meaning the price cuts subsidized existing buyers without creating incremental demand.
- 5 (06:54) **Pattern #4: The Funding Mechanism Splits the Industry into Three Tiers** - Input costs are rising again (oil around $120), but almost nobody is pricing for it like 2022; instead, the volume recovery is funded by productivity (Tier 1), brand strength (Tier 2), or at the cost of value (Tier 3).
- 6 (09:21) **Refinement: Pricing Is Not Dead, But Its Role Has Changed** - Unilever, Nestle, and Reckitt expect second-half growth to be led by pricing as commodity costs flow through, but pricing is returning as a selective, cost-justified tool, not the default growth engine.
- 7 (09:47) **Pattern #5 (Part 1): The FIFA World Cup as the Demand Event of the Quarter** - Coca-Cola activated in over 180 markets, generated 60 billion digital impressions, and collected 25 million first-party data records, crediting the campaign for part of its 5% Trademark Coke growth; Unilever linked its personal care acceleration to World Cup activations.
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Show Notes
Q2 results confirm that FMCG's growth engine has shifted from price to volume, with Unilever posting its best volume quarter since 2010 and Coca-Cola growing unit cases five percent. But the funding differs sharply. Most companies finance volume through productivity programmes, Coca-Cola and L'Oréal self-fund through brand strength, while Essity trades value for volume. PepsiCo's failed American price cuts prove that discounts alone do not create demand. With the consumer world split between a squeezed America and buoyant emerging markets, volume quality, not quantity, is the industry's new scoreboard.
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