Europe’s consumer packaged goods industry players must achieve and scale commercial excellence to secure revenue, margin, and market share growth. Top CPG performers outcompete in four best-practice areas. In today’s highly fragmented and rapidly evolving retail environment, consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry companies must scale commercial excellence to outperform their peers,¹ leading their categories in execution and advanced capabilities to grow revenue and market share.

McKinsey’s 2024 Growth Capability Excellence (GCE) Survey shows that top-performing European CPG companies are doing just that, with bold moves grounded in commercial excellence principles and best practices.² McKinsey identified the following four best-practice areas common to the top-performing CPG companies surveyed:

• creating a simplified, focused, and shopper-centric portfolio
• winning in internationalized modern trade
• excelling in outlet execution across channels
• digitalizing route-to-market models in fragmented trade

In this article, we explore how focusing coherent capability-building and deployment programs in these four areas helps build competitive advantage and scale commercial excellence to outperform peers.