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It’s Monday morning and you’re walking into a contract renewal meeting with your primary corrugated packaging supplier. You know what’s coming. They’ve been hinting at a price increase for weeks, blaming the usual suspect: “unprecedented volatility” in the recycled fiber market.
On the other side of the office, your colleague in ingredients procurement faces a similar challenge regarding vegetable oils. You both report to the same finance director but your data lives in different silos. While you rely on spreadsheets to track packaging costs, they use market reports to monitor key ingredient prices—both critical commodities. However, neither of you has a unified view of how these cost drivers actually move in real-time.
For food and beverages (F&B) manufacturing teams, this fragmentation is more than just an annoyance—it’s a profitability leak. When you can’t see the whole picture, you’re negotiating with one hand tied behind your back.
It’s time to change the narrative. It’s time to stop accepting “market volatility” as a blanket excuse for price hikes and start using data to demand transparency.
In many food and beverage companies, packaging and ingredients are treated as entirely separate worlds. The team buying cardboard boxes rarely compares notes with the team buying animal fats or grain, even though both are commodities driven by similar macroeconomic forces—energy prices, logistics costs and global demand.
This disconnect creates a massive blind spot.
Fastmarkets’ price data and insights are here to help procurement teams in the food and beverage sector navigate the complexities of sourcing materials with confidence. Speak to our team to learn more about our tailored solutions.
Imagine you’re launching a new line of sustainable snack bars. You’ve locked in a great price for the oats and vegetable oils, but the cost of the cartonboard for the packaging just spiked. Because your packaging data is isolated from your ingredient cost analysis, you don’t realize the project is underwater until it’s too late to redesign the pack format.
Fastmarkets bridges this gap. We don’t just track one slice of the market; we provide a holistic view that integrates cross-commodity data. Whether it’s the price of the aluminum in your can or the barley inside it, you get a single source of truth. This allows you to accurately model total product costs and spot risks before they eat into your margins.
Let’s return to your discussion with the corrugated supplier. They’re asking for a 12% price increase. Their justification? “OCC (Old Corrugated Containers) prices are up.”
Without independent data relevant to food and beverage procurement, you have two choices: accept the increase or push back based on instinct. Neither is a good position to be in.
This is the “black box” problem. Suppliers often bundle energy, labor, logistics and raw material costs into one opaque unit price. When one input cost rises, it may raise the total price disproportionately. For example, our data shows the national average for US OCC only increased by $1 per short ton in January.
While a supplier might point to this as justification for a broad price hike, this figure alone doesn’t capture the full picture of premiums, regional variations, or inventory levels, which our reporting indicates are “healthy” to “heavy” at major mills.
Fastmarkets acts as your decoder ring, tracking the specific price movements of the raw materials that make up your packaging.
For example, if you’re buying folding cartons, we provide detailed insights into the exact market price trends for the grade of paperboard you use—separate from conversion costs.
The scenario: Your supplier claims that rising pulp costs justify a 10% price hike on your paperboard cartons.
The Fastmarkets reality check: You check your dashboard and see that bleached softwood kraft (BSK) prices have actually stabilized. In mid-January, US NBSK spot prices held steady at $700-730 per tonne—significantly lower than last year’s $835-875 range. Meanwhile, SBSK prices actually dropped slightly. The data proves there is no upward pressure on costs.
The result: You enter negotiations armed with facts. By pointing out that raw material prices are stable or declining, you reject the 10% hike and negotiate a modest 2% adjustment for logistics instead. You save your company thousands and because the data is indisputable, you walk away with the upper hand. This is the power of data-driven insights.
Discover more data-driven insights to empower your negotiations on our food and beverage insights page. Learn how our tailored price data can help your business.
Many food and beverage procurement teams rely on “cost plus” models. You take last year’s price and add inflation. It’s easy, but it’s lazy and it usually results in overpaying.
The gold standard is “should cost” modeling. This is where you build the price of your packaging from the ground up, component by component. To do this, you need granular, reliable data for every layer of the cost stack.
Fastmarkets provides the building blocks for these models. We give you:
With this data, you can build a model that tells you exactly what a corrugated box should cost in today’s market. If your supplier’s quote is higher, you can ask specifically why their conversion costs are above the market benchmark. This shifts the conversation from a power struggle to a collaborative problem-solving session.
In the food and beverage world, speed is everything. A delay in securing your packaging can mean missing a seasonal launch. But rushing often means overpaying. The biggest enemy of efficient procurement is surprise. You budget for the year assuming stable prices and then a geopolitical event sends energy costs soaring, dragging packaging prices up with them. Suddenly, your quarterly forecast is obsolete.
Fastmarkets doesn’t just tell you what prices are today; we help you understand where they are going. Our forecasting tools use historical data, proprietary price data and expert market analysis to predict future price trends for key commodities.
This same strategic foresight applies to your raw ingredients. Let’s look at wheat.
Practical application: You’re a procurement manager for a large bakery, planning your flour purchasing for the next year. You need a steady supply of 12.5% protein wheat.
According to Fastmarkets’ assessments, Russian wheat prices have been unusually stable, trading within a narrow $5/tonne range for months. On the surface, this appears to be a safe market.
But our on-the-ground intelligence tells a different story. We reported that while Russia’s 2025/26 crop was one of its largest, logistical challenges are mounting. The highest-yielding crops are now in central regions, far from the usual southern export hubs, adding complexity and cost. On top of that, freight rates for smaller vessels in the Black Sea have spiked due to disruptions.
Armed with this insight, you see the risk beneath the calm surface. The stable FOB price doesn’t reflect the growing logistical pressures and freight costs that could cause delivered prices to jump unexpectedly.
Instead of waiting for the market to turn, you take action. You use this intelligence to adjust your procurement strategy, exploring long-term contracts with suppliers who have diversified sourcing or better logistical networks. While your competitors are caught off guard by sudden hikes in their landed costs, you’ve already secured your supply at a predictable price.
That is the difference between reactive buying and strategic sourcing.
Ready to stay ahead of market surprises? Explore our short to long-term forecasting and analysis, tailored for the food and beverage industry, and turn strategic insights into smarter sourcing decisions. Learn more.
Every food and beverage manufacturer faces increasing pressure to meet sustainability targets, particularly around the use of recycled content in packaging. For procurement teams, balancing these goals against escalating costs is a constant challenge. Sustainable materials, such as recycled aluminium or paperboard, often come with a “green premium.” But how can you ensure this premium reflects true market conditions?
Suppliers understand the significance of ESG compliance and the growing demand for recycled materials. In some cases, they may inflate prices, leveraging tight market conditions for materials like aluminium scrap or recycled paperboard. Fastmarkets provides transparency in these opaque markets by rigorously tracking prices for both recycled and virgin materials, equipping procurement teams with the data they need to negotiate effectively.
Real-world example:Suppose your company is transitioning to beverage cans with a higher percentage of recycled aluminium. Your supplier quotes an aluminium can sheet price that feels excessive, citing limited availability of scrap. Fastmarkets’ recent data shows aluminium scrap prices in Europe, such as floated frag scrap, recently increased to €1,900-2,000 per tonne, up 2.63% week-on-week. This reflects constrained scrap availability ahead of Spring 2026 EU export restrictions, but also indicates that current supply-side pressures, not increased demand, are driving these prices. With this data, you can challenge inflated supplier quotes, armed with independent insights showing current market trends and regional variations. This enables you to renegotiate a fairer rate, ensuring your sustainability goals remain financially viable while maintaining budgetary control.
In the high-volume, low-margin world of food and beverage manufacturing, there’s no room for guesswork. Every fraction of a cost per unit can add up to significant profits over time.
Suppliers respect buyers who know the market. When you use Fastmarkets, you stop being a passive recipient of price lists and become an active participant in the market. You gain the ability to:
Don’t let fragmented data dictate your margins. Unlock procurement efficiency and take control of your supplier relationships with the right intelligence.
Ready to see how Fastmarkets data can transform your food and beverage procurement? Visit our dedicated hub page to start using market-reflective procurement intelligence to your advantage.
Learn how to monitor packaging prices using cost and price indices and understand the underlying cost drivers, from material cost to labor, energy and more. Examples include cartonboard, liquid container and paper bag.