The Future of CPG Sales: Why the Brokerage Model Is Breaking

The modern CPG brokerage was built to do one thing brilliantly — move enormous volumes of established product through a consolidating retail system.

It works. Advantage Solutions, the category's largest player, works with more than 4,000 brands across roughly 85,000 retail locations by its own account. That is a genuine achievement of scale, and for a national manufacturer with proven velocity, that scale is exactly what you want.

But scale has a cost, and the cost lands on the smallest brands. To serve thousands of brands, the economics have to be thin. Trade reporting — including coverage from Food Trade News — has noted that large manufacturers sometimes pay national brokers commissions around 1% or less. A business running on those margins cannot, by definition, give a single unproven brand focused attention. It survives on the size of the portfolio, not the success of any one product in it.

“A commission-only brokerage needs hundreds or thousands of brands in the catalog to stay profitable on thin margins — betting that a few break out. For an established brand, that's fine. For an emerging brand, it means buying into a system where you were never the priority. The model isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed — and that design wasn't built for you.”

This is the structural reality. As retail itself consolidates and there are fewer buyers to serve, the pressure on broker economics only intensifies. The squeeze pushes brokers toward bigger clients and bigger portfolios — and further from the emerging brands that need real help.

The brokerage model isn't collapsing. It's being out-evolved. Three forces are driving the shift.

The relationship-only broker is aging out. Many brokers are former retail buyers who built careers on relationships and now pitch products through spreadsheets and printed catalogs. The relationships are real. But a spreadsheet handed to another buyer is not a launch. It's not trade show representation, not a content program, not an email or social campaign, and not a way for a buyer to connect directly with a brand's story. A new generation of brands expects all of that — and the relationship-only broker doesn't provide it.

Software promised to replace the broker — and didn't. Platforms like RangeMe and ECRM, and newer AI tools, gave founders access to buyer data and discovery. Useful. But access is not execution. A founder with a database and a login still has to do the research, the positioning, the content, the outreach, and the close. The 'empty dashboard' replaced the broker's introduction with a different kind of nothing.

Vertical integration is filling the gap between them. Between the overloaded broker and the empty tool, a third model is emerging: operator-led teams that run the entire go-to-market motion — research, branding and content, outreach, trade shows, pipeline — and use technology to do it deeply for a small, carefully chosen set of brands. The brand pays a modest fee, but the partner's success is tied to actual sales, not catalog size.

Here's the part the industry tends to get wrong, and we'll say it plainly because we've lived it.

The lesson of the broker era is not 'never use a broker.' We launched our own brand into Walmart through a broker who was proactive, set up the buyer meeting, and earned every dollar. A broker with a genuine relationship to the exact buyer you need is still valuable. That hasn't changed.

The real lesson is narrower and more useful: an introduction is one component of a launch, not the whole thing. The future of CPG sales belongs to whoever can deliver the other components — demand, content, positioning, buyer connection, and a tracked pipeline — at the depth a young brand actually needs.

That's not a broker problem or a software problem. It's an integration problem. And it's why the model is shifting toward partners who run sales and marketing as one engine. You can see how we think about that integrated approach in our breakdown of vertical integration versus the traditional broker model.

The brokerage model isn't dying. It's specializing — moving toward the large, established brands its economics were always built to serve.

For emerging brands, that leaves a clear choice. Don't ask 'should I get a broker or buy a tool.' Ask 'who will run my entire go-to-market motion, treat my brand as a priority, and tie their success to my sales.'

That question is the future of CPG sales. The brands that answer it deliberately will be the ones still on the shelf in three years.

If you're building toward retail and want a partner who runs the whole engine — not an introduction, not a dashboard — book a discovery call. We built our playbook launching our own brand first, and we'll tell you honestly what your product needs next.