Regular readers will know that I like to take the excuse of some downtime over the festive break to put pen to paper and try to predict what the consumer-facing sectors will see over the next 12 months.
2026 promises to be another tumultuous year. Increasingly interventionist governments globally (from tariffs in the US, through to new employment legislation and costs throughout Europe) combined with rapid advances in automation and AI are reshaping operating models, compressing margins and accelerating the pace of change across our consumer sectors. Together with ever increasing consumer expectations, and moderate levels of consumer confidence, businesses will need to stay ahead of change rather than simply respond to it.
So, with this in mind, what does 2026 hold for consumer leadership?
1. The UK becomes an importer of consumer-sector talent
For decades, the UK was one of the world’s great exporters of consumer leadership. With best-in-class training from the world’s strongest talent schools, British CEOs were sought out to run national and global businesses – and were admired for their commercial instincts, comfort with complexity, and grounding in competitive, fast-changing markets.
However, the tide has now turned. Not only are British CEOs less in demand overseas, increasingly, UK consumer businesses are looking abroad for their next wave of senior talent.
Today nearly half of consumer CEOs who have been appointed in the UK from 2020 onwards are not from the UK originally. Indeed, recent CEO appointments in our sectors in the UK have come from The Netherlands, France, Germany and Sweden.
Likewise, markets where British CEOs used to dominate – for example Australia, Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore – are now increasingly led by home-grown CEOs, or by leaders from other countries.
It is perhaps time that the UK consumer sector needs to take a collective, long look in the mirror and ask why we aren’t producing world class CEOs. Have we invested enough in the talent schemes of old that ensured our sector attracted the best and brightest graduates? What can we learn from other markets (and specific companies) whose alumni and diaspora are now starting to take the place where UK leadership once dominated? How is UK leadership equipping itself to stay on top of AI and digital?
2. DE&I slips further down the corporate agenda
Although DE&I will remain central to many consumer business, in some cases the agenda no longer commands the same urgency and visibility that it has done in previous years. A change in sentiment towards the end of 2024 and early 2025 (led by the Trump administration) has meant that many organisations are changing tack by being quieter about their initiatives, merging standalone DE&I roles into broader people and culture functions, and resetting budgets to take investment out of the area. Our research has shown that many leadership teams are moving from high-visibility mobilisation to longer-term embedding, changing priorities towards inclusion, rather than representation.
Businesses will find themselves doubling down on the commercial levers that drive short-term performance. Initiatives like DE&I that are harder to quantify – or that sit outside the core P&L – will inevitably lose airtime and focus.
This is regrettable as our consumer sectors are nowhere near representative of the customers they serve. Indeed, just 12% of Chairs, 10% of CEOs and 21% of CFOs are women and the number of companies with all-white Boards still sits as high as 40%. Without a focus from Boards in continuing to change the dial, progress will stall, which, in the long run, can’t be the desire of any progressive business looking to drive holistic customer performance.
3. Wellness, health and longevity becomes a major theme across all consumer sectors
What began as a set of adjacent categories to the consumer sectors – health, fitness, nutrition, beauty, recovery – is now a broader expectation that consumer brands should help people live and feel better, stay well for longer, and have access to preventative measures.
In grocery, functional foods and targeted nutritional ranges will be more prominent, and in beauty and personal care, science-backed claims will become even more important – with an increasing focus on supplements.
Hospitality players are already reconfiguring experiences around sleep, recovery and performance and expanding their thinking into adjacent service offerings that promote longevity.
This broadened definition of wellness will also reshape how established organisations innovate and prioritise the allocation of capital and resource. If not, they will be disrupted from outside – for example, digital disrupter, Healf, has reportedly passed a £100 million monthly revenue run rate just four years after launching.
Given the global wellness economy – which in November hit a record peak of US$6.8 trillion – is far outpacing GDP growth, this is a value profit-seam to tap into. As demand accelerates, this segment will only keep growing – and consumer businesses will continue to find ways to innovative creatively, to take advantage of the trend.
4. Deep sector expertise returns – in the CEO seat and in the Boardroom
Over recent decades, many organisations favoured generalist leaders who could steer transformation, restructure operations and manage complexity. In 2026, there will be a decisive return to appointing those with deep sector expertise – not only in the CEO role, but across the entire Boardroom.
In premium and luxury for example, Boards are turning toward leaders who have lived the product cycle, understand international channel dynamics and can read customer signals intuitively. In retail, Boards will be looking for leaders with deep retail domain expertise who can bring years of lived experience through different trading cycles to the table.
Likewise, within the NED community, there will be a renewed demand for Directors who have real, lived, sector grounding. These Chairs and NEDs will be better equipped to hold their executives to account and critically – if called-upon – to make the right choice of CEO appointment.
5. Growing positivity in London’s capital markets
After a prolonged period of stagnation – when UK IPO volumes fell to multi-year lows and overall proceeds dropped by more than 25% in 2023 – activity began to pick up in 2024 and early 2025. According to EY, London recorded 18 IPOs in 2024, raising £1.4 billion, and 36 more companies began early-stage preparations in the final quarter of the year. Investors who had stepped back from UK-listed consumer names have started to re-engage, helped by easing inflation, improving real wage growth and early signs of volume recovery across retail and FMCG. The announcement in the Budget of an exemption from the 0.5% stamp duty to any business listing in London for a three-year period should also encourage more engagement.
For example, Princes Group’s decision to list in London at the end of October last year – at a time when several UK-headquartered businesses had chosen New York – has been widely read as a sign that confidence in the UK market is returning. A number of other consumer-facing companies spanning leisure, retail and food and beverage, are also reportedly weighing listings as sentiment improves and earnings visibility strengthens.
Given the volume of businesses which have exited the London Stock Exchange (through a combination of take-private, merger, re-listing elsewhere or, regrettably, in some cases administration), in many sub-sectors of the consumer world the English capital no longer has a critical mass of listed businesses. These new listings – should they come to fruition – will create a Helio effect well beyond the listed environment, and hopefully, once again, help augment London’s place as a major hub in the global consumer ecosystem.
6. Labour-cost pressures accelerate automation and self-service
Wage inflation has become structural rather than cyclical, and this will remain one of the defining operational realities for consumer businesses. The Autumn Statement in the UK in November last year made that clear: rises to the National Living Wage, continued fiscal pressure on employers, and limited movement on measures to ease workforce shortages all point to a higher-for-longer labour-cost environment.
In this context, investment in automation, robotics and self-service will accelerate. Leading grocers are scaling centralised production, automated back-of-house operations and micro-fulfilment technologies, and QSR operators are rolling out AI-driven ordering, automated fry stations and kitchen robotics at pace.
With labour becoming more expensive, businesses will reshape processes to reduce labour intensity – and therefore cost.
7. AI remains under-utilised
Despite the extraordinary hype surrounding AI, most consumer businesses remain far closer to the starting line than the finish line on AI adoption. Boards routinely overestimate their AI maturity, while leadership teams struggle to move from experimentation to operational adoption, and organisations still lack the capability, clarity and confidence required to embed AI into the heart of their business models. The gap between rhetoric and reality will widen this year.
Over the next year, AI will make a visible impact on the retail front line. More retailers will introduce AI-powered self-service, frictionless checkout and automated fulfilment, driven by sustained labour-market pressure rather than novelty. Customer service will shift further toward AI-enabled interaction, with tools capable of handling queries, returns and personalised recommendations at scale. Behind the scenes, AI forecasting, dynamic pricing and supply-chain optimisation will move from pilot projects to core infrastructure as the cost of implementation continues to fall.
However, very few consumer businesses will be truly “leading” here – rather, they will be slow followers of adjacent sectors – in particular, the digital economy. What would it take for consumer business to become fast followers?
Are the business cases for AI well understood enough? Are consumer leaders simply too busy to reimagine their business powered by technology, not people? Do consumer businesses have the right governance structures in place to ensure ethical and secure AI adoption? Who in the business owns the AI agenda – and how much airtime does it get at Board level?
8. New global centres will continue to emerge
Historically, the consumer landscape was dominated by London, New York and Paris – with Amsterdam and Milan important in certain sub-sectors.
Today, a new raft of global consumer hubs are emerging – most visible to me are: Berlin, Dubai, Miami, Lisbon and Madrid.
Berlin is now firmly established as Germany’s “start-up capital”. As of last year, the city was home to more than 2,000 active tech start-ups, and Berlin Partners — the agency responsible for supporting relocations — reported 48 new international companies moving into the city in the first half of 2025 alone, including businesses from the UK, the US and the Netherlands.
Businesses are also following the good weather, looking at tax advantageous locations, like Dubai – which sits neatly between Europe, Asia and Africa – while the surge in venture capital, startups and a booming financial sector has also positioned Miami as an attractive hub. Cruise-travel brand, Carnival Corporation, announced it will unite most North America team members in its HQ in the city, and it was ranked number one in the US for small-business creation, ahead of more traditional business hubs like New York, San Francisco and LA.
These more traditional consumer cities – including London and Paris – should take note. Talent, capital and creativity are gravitating towards newer hubs, and the cities that are quickest to adapt will be the ones that continue to attract the next generation of consumer businesses.
9. New entrants continue to challenge the traditional retail landscape
Companies like JD.com, Temu and Shein continue to push aggressively into traditional retail territory, using sophisticated supply chains, ultra-lean operating models and enormous digital reach to unsettle even the most established players.
Global platforms, cross-border marketplaces and asset-light digital retailers are moving into markets at speed, armed with scale advantages that traditional players cannot easily replicate. Shein’s revenues, for example, were estimated to exceed US$45 billion in 2024, putting it on par with the world’s largest apparel groups despite having no stores and minimal physical infrastructure. Temu – virtually unknown two years ago – has grown to over 100 million active users in the US alone, reshaping consumer expectations around price and fulfilment in the process. JD.com is expanding its international logistics footprint, offering delivery times that rival domestic operators.
Retailers will need to build a more outward-looking view of the landscape, paying closer attention to models that were once considered too distant or too specialised to pose a threat.
10. Leaders rediscover the need for reflection
The pace of the last five years in the consumer sectors has been relentless. Many leadership teams have been operating at full capacity – cycling from crisis response to transformation to cost management without ever pausing long enough to look over the horizon. That intensity has created cultures of rapid decision-making, dense meeting schedules and very little room for deeper thinking. In the year ahead, I expect leaders to reclaim that space.
As the external environment becomes more complex, the advantage will sit with those leaders who can create the mental bandwidth to think ahead, rather than simply keeping pace with the day.
For many leaders this will be a difficult re-adjustment. Moving from dealing with the urgent to investing in themselves as leaders will be key. The strongest leaders in the year ahead will take the time to invest in their own professional development, will once again read widely, will create space to network and learn from their peers and mentors – and the time to reflect on a weekly basis (not just over the Christmas period!).
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Overall, 2026 will once again require resilience, clarity and adaptability from leaders across the consumer sectors, even as markets begin to stabilise. Time and time again, our sectors have shown their extraordinary ability to evolve, to innovate and to meet challenge with ingenuity – and I am hugely excited to see how that energy will shape the year ahead, and how the UK’s role in the global consumer economies continues to evolve.
