A Ascensão da Big Food

“Get big or get out” was the mantra behind agricultural consolidation fifty years ago. Has it become the only way to thrive in Food & Beverage?

A culture of consumerism

Maximalism has been a part of food production in the United States since the post-war agribusiness boom of the 1970s, shepherded by Earl Butz, secretary of the USDA under Nixon. Butz dissolved the supply management policies of the New Deal that were designed to curb production surpluses and raise commodity prices. He encouraged farmers to utilize every part of their acreage to maximize corn, soybean, and grain crops. His prioritization on high output and monocrops set the stage for further industrialization of livestock along with crop farming.

However, even before Butz exhorted farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow,” the culture in the United States was primed to embrace mass production and consumerism, in food and beyond. Prior to the turn of the century, members of the lower- and middle-class prized thrift and frugality over consumption. Many families grew their own crops, prepared meals from scratch, and relied on canning for long-term storage. Free time was the most sought-after luxury, rather than items, and the items that were desirable were so because of their utility. But production began to outstrip population growth: between 1860 and 1920, the population tripled, but production expanded by a factor of twelve. The new goal was profit, accompanied by shifts in advertising to help entice people to buy.

Along with industrialization, World Wars I and II brought widespread changes. Feeding troops and an increasingly urban population required more shelf-stable foods. Advances in factory assembly lines increased output, while new refrigerated railcars and trucks allowed perishable goods to be moved across the country. As more people left rural farms for industrial city jobs with less space to grow food and less time to prepare it, they became more reliant on commercially produced food.

Post-war, large-scale production became more of the norm, and the mass adoption of radio and television brought potent advertising to consumers across the nation, deliberately encouraging trend-chasing and frivolous consumerism. The American people enjoyed a wide variety of products at their fingertips. Ready-to-eat processed food marketed as time saving advancements filled grocery store shelves and pantries. The food business was booming, and companies were growing. All it would take to turn the new culture of consumerism toward corporate expansion and consolidation would be a few changes to antitrust laws.

A battle of bigger giants

The rise of global food conglomerates depended not only on mass consumerism but also regulatory change. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, a new school of financial thought formed among a group of scholars associated with the University of Chicago: the “Chicago School,” which advocated for a shift in antitrust policies which would benefit big business and ease the way for mergers. The Chicago School championed antitrust policies that focused on protecting consumers, not smaller businesses. If a merger wouldn’t result in price hikes for the consumer, they argued, it should be allowed.

This laissez-faire attitude toward corporate consolidation lowered the barriers toward mergers, and large companies with cash to burn decided it was time to start expanding their portfolios. In the mid-1980s, tobacco giant Philip Morris smashed into the food market by buying first General Foods and then Kraft, Inc. in one of the largest non-oil acquisitions ever, instantly becoming the second-largest food company in the world and kicking off a wave of large-scale mergers and acquisitions. Soon, only a handful of massive companies captured most of the market. As one marketing professor put it in 1985, the food and beverage industry was becoming “a battle of bigger giants.”

There are plenty of reasons why companies would leap at the chance to grow through acquisitions, particularly when permissive financial regulations encourage leveraged buyouts. In these deals, most of a company’s purchase price is financed through debt tied to a company’s expected future financial performance, allowing firms to expand quickly with limited upfront capital.

Once acquired, brands are incorporated into the larger supply chain, benefiting from purchasing ingredients in bulk, sharing manufacturing facilities, and utilizing established distribution systems. Parent companies enjoy a larger, more diverse portfolio and market expansion while smaller brands gain advertising and production resources. Large corporations can weather economic volatility that would sink smaller companies. Savings on production costs can be handed down to customers or reinvested to help the business expand further.

But with consolidation comes homogenization and diminished competition. Smaller brands that haven’t been bought up can’t compete with a company that has Coca-Cola or Unilever money to throw around. Much of the competition we see in the market today is illusory. Although grocery shelves are stocked with hundreds of options, only a handful of large companies control market share. For example, 73% of the breakfast cereals on the market are owned by just three corporations. PepsiCo owns five of the most popular dip brands available, cornering a massive 88% of the market. Even canned tuna is dominated by just a few names: in 2021, Dongwon Industries owned 45% of the market.

Having a few heavyweights dominate the market is good for production, but it can be hard for a smaller company to eke out a slice for themselves when among giants, and those giants themselves can’t react as quickly to shifts in consumer trends as the small fry. With such a concentrated market, acquisitions are the fastest path to growth with agility.

When buzz becomes buyout

It can be hard to strike while the iron is hot when it comes to the newest, biggest trends. Research and development can take anywhere from six months for a variation on a product to as long as three years for a novel, new item. And even after spending significant time and resources developing and testing a new product, there is no guarantee it will succeed. Market research firm Nielsen estimates that 85% of new consumer packaged goods in the marketplace fail. Mergers and acquisitions also help here: when a new trend hits that seems to have staying power, corporations can simply buy into them. Big companies get to hop on the newest hot consumer trend, small brands get to punch way above their weight for production and distribution, and consumers get more access to the brands and products they love.

Social media seems to have a new food obsession every other week, but food companies have to be strategic when it comes hopping on a trend: you need something both popular and enduring, a viral trend with millions of influencers all plugging the same product or ingredient, or a megatrend that’s grown to the point of transforming food production or even shifting the global economy.

Like, for example, the enduring trend of consumers seeking healthier, functional foods. Functional beverages—drinks formulated with specific ingredients to provide health benefits—is a fast-growing market segment, projected to reach $231 billion by 2033. To take advantage of the trend, PepsiCo acquired the prebiotic soda brand Poppi in early 2025 for $1.95 billion. PepsiCo, along with Coca-Cola, already dominates the soft drink industry, but with rising better-for-you brands like OLIPOP and Coca-Cola’s rival prebiotic soda Simply Pop—launched under Coca-Cola’s well-known juice label, Simply—PepsiCo opted to buy its way into the trend, rather than develop their own product line.

“When a new trend hits… corporations can simply buy into them. Big
companies get to hop on the newest hot consumer trend, small brands get to punch way above their weight… and consumers get more access to the brands
and products they love.”

Acquisitions aren’t always the answer when it comes to surfing a new trend, if it happens to already align with your core expertise. Sometimes expansion is the better growth strategy, as it was for Daisy Brand. Perhaps best known for their ubiquitous sour cream, Daisy began making cottage cheese in 2006. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal asked what turned out to be a prescient question: could cottage cheese ever be cool?

Ten years later, according to TikTok, the answer is a resounding yes. All over the platform, influencers were dropping recipes taking advantage of cottage cheese’s nutritional properties: high in protein, low in sugar, full of calcium and essential vitamins. For health-minded consumers, cottage cheese opened the door to creamy sauces, foods, and desserts they could enjoy guilt-free. With demand for one of their core products higher than ever, Daisy Brand expanded their facility to keep up with social media-driven demand.

Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see why a company might want to jump on an especially massive trend. Hot honey, once a niche condiment, grew 157% year-over-year in 2025 thanks to viral social media recipes, and grocery shelves are now crowded with competing brands. Similarly, Dubai chocolate, a novelty pistachio-filled confection originally produced by a handful of small-scale UAE companies grew a whopping 1,234% last year. As demand grew, big brands like Lindt and Russell Stover introduced their own variations, scaling production to reach a larger audience. When a trend like these comes around, industry players need to be able to react quickly to capitalize on them with expansion or acquisition, along with scalable supply chains that allow a rapid rollout to get trendy products to consumers fast.

Boutique bigness

But getting their products to market is only half the battle. Once stocked on store shelves, consumers need to be enticed to buy them, and that’s where being big loses some of its advantages. “Big” might give consumers an impression of stability, but it can damage the feeling of authentic, personal connection. People like a little poetry even when it comes to their tinned fish and dried pasta; there’s marketing magic in the words “small-batch” and “family-owned” and “artisanal.” What’s a multi-billion-dollar corporation to do?

Some companies will leverage their own history. Mars Inc. is a family-owned company, the legacy of Franklin Clarence Mars, who learned how to hand-dip chocolates as a child and began selling candies at the age of 19. Being family-owned gives Mars a different perspective, their website argues, one that builds across generations and looks to the future. A hundred and twenty years after Franklin started peddling molasses chips, Mars has $45 billion in annual sales and is the 4th largest privately held company in the United States, while the Mars family was recently listed as one of the wealthiest families in the world, with an estimated worth of $133.8 billion.

Marketing is another effective strategy, suggesting smallness even when a company is backed by millions of dollars in venture capital or corporate resources. Whimsical packaging, storytelling, a folksy brand voice, and even typography are all tools that companies can use to mimic smaller boutique brands. But often, if a company is looking for a small craft label and the innovation and credibility that comes with it, they simply buy one.

Hershey is another candy giant, known as one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world: far from a boutique local chocolatier. Despite being almost synonymous with chocolate, in recent years Hershey has quietly begun expanding into the salty snacks segment. In 2025, they acquired snacks manufacturer LesserEvil, best known for their bags of air-popped popcorn. With a website touting “clean, simple flavors” and independent manufacturing at their original Danbury, CT headquarters, it would be difficult to tell that this quirky snack producer is backed by a $45 billion company.

The strategy of breaking into the craft space by acquiring craft companies is maybe best illustrated by the wave of acquisitions that swallowed up microbreweries across the United States in the 2010s. Craft breweries began springing up in the 1960s and 70s, when American homebrewers started trying to emulate the tastes of Old World beers. Helmed by passionate, skilled professionals, these microbreweries brought a level of artistry and individualism previously found more in the high-level wine and distilled liquor industries. Unlike the homogenized lagers and light ales flooding the market, craft beer has a premium quality to it, boasting complex flavor profiles, seasonal offerings, and a ring of authenticity that appealed to a whole growing audience. More and more, beer drinkers were choosing craft brews over mass-produced offerings.

The solution was a simple one: the big breweries would buy out the smaller ones and continue to produce their beers under the same labels and brands—just with the resources of a multinational corporation behind them. The 2010s were a dizzying time to be a craft brewery. In 2015, there were at least 24 craft beer acquisitions, with AB InBev snapping up three breweries in only five days.

The strategy doesn’t always work. Craft beer recipes might taste different once they’re being made in larger plants and in larger quantities, and scaled-up production and distribution makes it more difficult to offer the seasonal, varied line-up of beers that are a trademark of many small microbreweries. Consumer backlash is another concern. Consumers–especially those hoping to support smaller, independent brands–may react negatively when they find their favorite product is now made by a much larger company, particularly if they feel their values don’t align.

“Whimsical packaging, storytelling, a folksy brand voice, and even typography are all tools that companies can use to mimic smaller boutique brands. But often, if a company is looking for a small craft label and the innovation and credibility that comes with it, they simply buy one.”

Scale as strategy

“Get big or get out” has been the defining factor in food manufacturing for the last half century, bolstered by a culture of consumerism, regulations, and an ever more crowded market. For small companies, the goal is often to sell to the larger ones. For large companies, the goal is still to plant fencerow to fencerow, expanding portfolios and capturing as much market share as possible.

Scale can be extremely powerful, lowering costs, shielding from market volatility, and capturing market share. But scale must be balanced with consumer demands and market needs. Industry leaders must strategically balance size while catering to consumers who value authenticity, transparency, and brands that feel personal. Acquisitions remain a powerful tool, focusing more on delivering innovation rather than simply larger scale. The industry will continue to be dominated by giants, but they are always in motion, acquiring and growing and divesting and spinning off as necessary to ride the changing tides of consumer demand.

For the last fifty years, almost every aspect of food production in the United States has ballooned in size. Bigger companies acquire small ones; established brands build enormous new facilities; sweeping trends shift the consumer landscape. Sheer size brings with it stability and economic benefits, while small companies struggle to thrive in a crowded market. In food and beverage, it seems, bigger is indeed better.