The Great Garage Sale
If you walk down a supermarket aisle, you see an illusion of variety. In reality, a few massive conglomerates own almost everything. But according to the 2026 Bain report, that era of the “everything store” conglomerate is rapidly disintegrating.
The data reveals a startling statistic: 42% of consumer products executives are currently prepping an asset for sale. Divestitures already make up nearly half of all deal activity. This isn’t just spring cleaning; it is a structural admission of failure. Giant companies like Kraft Heinz and Keurig Dr Pepper are splitting themselves apart because they have realized that “scale” is no longer a safety net - it’s a straitjacket.
The non-obvious insight? The “Parenting Advantage” has evaporated. For decades, big companies claimed they could run any brand better because of their distribution muscle. Now, they are admitting that holding a stagnant coffee brand alongside a booming soda brand just drags both down.
Outsourcing the “Cool” Factor
While the giants are selling off their “zombie” brands, they are frantically buying something else: “Insurgent Brands.” These are the small, hyper-growth players (growing 10x faster than their category) that actually understand Gen Z.
The report shows a massive shift in deal size. In the US, the average deal size has crashed from roughly $900 million (2014–2018) to just $400 million today. Deals under $2 billion now represent 38% of the market.
What does this tell us? R&D is dead. Big Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies have effectively given up on inventing the next big thing internally. They have realized they are too slow and bureaucratic to create a “Poppi” or a “Dr. Squatch”. Instead, they are turning their M&A departments into their new Innovation Labs. They are outsourcing “cool” to startups and then buying them once the risk is gone.
The New Role: Bank and Truck
The future of the CPG giant isn’t a creator of products; it is a platform for distribution. They are becoming banks (providing capital) and logistics companies (providing trucks). The strategy for 2026 is brutally simple: If you can’t invent it, buy it. If you can’t grow it, sell it. The middle ground is gone.
Read the complete report from Bain at - M&A in Consumer Products: Searching for the Parenting Advantage