Here's what 120 food industry voices said about the value chain. FMI and its research partners engaged with more than 120 wholesalers, CPG manufacturers, independent retailers and technology providers to identify gaps and friction affecting performance enhancements for the wholesale supplier, independent retailer value chain. By: Mark Baum, Chief Collaboration Officer & Senior Vice President, Industry Relations, FMI The report The Whole Picture, What's Next for Wholesalers and Their Retailer and Manufacturer Partners did not start with a framework. It started with a question: What is happening in the product supplier, grocery wholesaler and independent retailer operator supply chain? To answer that question, FMI and its research partners, The Dialogic Group, Oliver Wyman and dunnhumby, spent nine months talking to more than 120 industry executives whose livelihoods depend on the success of the wholesale value chain. Participants included representatives from wholesalers, CPG manufacturers, independent retailers, sales and marketing agencies, and technology providers. The research methodology combined in-depth interviews and structured surveys, designed to surface insights from individual company practices and between trading partners on a multitude of topics, including costs to serve, technology requirements and investments, along with trust and transparency. What came back was candid. Sometimes uncomfortably so. Manufacturers described a wholesale channel where they struggle to see where their investment goes. "It is really hard to measure ROI on our investments with independent operators and wholesalers," one manufacturer said. Several noted that the multiple operating models within wholesale are genuinely confusing, not as a complaint, but adding complexity to business planning. Independent retailers described persistent trust gaps around transparency on trade investments and charges. Nothing catastrophic. Just the kind of low-grade friction that compounds over time. Wholesalers were clear-eyed about their own situation. 81% expect retail mergers and acquisitions to continue. 75% expect operating costs to rise. 92% say they are actively working on end-to-end collaboration - which is an encouraging number, but also a signal of how much ground there is to cover. "The biggest disconnect in the wholesale value chain is a lack of communication. It is not a connected ecosystem." - Technology provider respondent The quote came from a technology provider. It captures something the research confirms across every stakeholder group: the problem is not that people do not know what better looks like. They can describe it clearly. The gap lies in the need for structural change along with shared commitments and investments that enable sustained improvement and growth. The Whole Picture puts those structural requirements into perspective, along with individual benchmarks, stakeholder-specific action roadmaps and a framework built on what the best-performing organizations (in part, inspired by what adjacent wholesale sectors are doing within their supply chains). Download the full report, including findings from every stakeholder group.

Seda Babur and Peter Preisler join Oliver Wyman in UK. 17 July 2026 Consultancy.uk Oliver Wyman has added two senior members to its UK team. Seda Babur and Peter Preisler add close to six decades of experience between them to the strategy consultancy. Bringing more than 20 years of experience to the firm, Seda Babur is a senior transformation leader, with deep expertise in technology enabled transformation in the financial services. She was most recently a partner for transformation and technology with Legal & General - having previously spent two decades at PwC, where she was latterly a partner in the firm's financial services wing. She joins Oliver Wyman as a partner in the insurance and asset management practice. This comes with a focus on technology transformation and AI adoption for clients. Babur commented via a LinkedIn post, "After working more than 20 years advising and leading technology change across the insurance sector, I am super excited to continue working with clients on the topics that matter most: translating technology investments into measurable business value." Peter Preisler meanwhile joins Oliver Wyman as a senior advisor in the firm's insurance and asset management practice. He brings four decades of experience in asset management and has led organisations through multiple market cycles, industry shifts, and changes in investor behaviour. With over three decades of pan-European experience, he has worked in financial services in Luxembourg, Singapore, France and the UK. Most recently, he spent seven years with Oaktree Capital Management, working as head of EMEA capital formation. On his personal LinkedIn profile, Preisler added, "I'm very pleased to announce that I will continue to be involved in the asset management industry. Oliver Wyman is a leading strategy consulting firm... In this role, I will advise asset and wealth managers on growth, distribution, capital formation, and client strategies in general." Part of Marsh, Oliver Wyman is a global management consulting brand. With offices in over 70 cities across 30 countries, its more than 7,000 professionals around the world combine deep industry knowledge with specialised expertise in strategy, operations, risk management, and organization transformation.

Oliver Wyman appoints Jayant Raman as Head of AI Partnerships for Asia Pacific. 09 July 2026 Consultancy.asia Global strategy and management consulting firm Oliver Wyman has appointed Jayant Raman as Head of AI Partnerships for Asia Pacific. A 17-year company member of Oliver Wyman, Jayant Raman has spent his career working with many of the largest banks and institutions on strategy, on transforming cost and performance, and on building new businesses. Over the past years, his work has increasingly focused on artificial intelligence (AI). "Every leadership team now knows AI matters. AI is rewriting what's possible across every function of a large enterprise, and the gap between experimenting with it and running on it is now the defining challenge for most leadership teams. The harder question is where to start, what to ignore, and how to get from a promising pilot to something that genuinely changes how the institution runs. That gap - between intent and impact - is where I spend my time." In his new role, Raman leads the firm's relationships with the frontier AI labs, hyperscalers, and AI partner firms across the region. He will also shape how Oliver Wyman brings AI capabilities to its clients across the region. "My work sits where deep domain experience meets the frontier of what these technologies can do - close enough to the strategy to know what matters, close enough to the build to know what's real." Jayant Raman holds a post graduate diploma in Management from IIM Ahmedabad and a degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Mumbai.