Themen:
Event
June 11, 2026
Each year, Deutsche Bank’s dbAccess Global Consumer Conference brings together companies, investors, and industry leaders shaping the future of the consumer sector. The 23rd edition of the conference, held over three days last week, convened more than 120 leading companies with a combined market capitalisation of over $5 trillion and more than 1,000 senior decision-makers and attendees, spanning food and beverage, household and personal care, tobacco, and beauty. Deutsche Bank's leadership in the global consumer industry is built on our unique ability to convene its most influential players. The dbAccess Global Consumer Conference is our premier platform for doing just that, connecting leading corporate management teams with key institutional investors. This creates a powerful ecosystem that strengthens client relationships, drives strategic business opportunities across the bank, and provides a real-time pulse on the future of the sector.
The conference serves as a real-time pulse-check on the direction of the sector, capturing how management teams are adapting to shifting consumer priorities and the next wave of growth drivers.
The message from this year’s conference was clear: consumer demand remains resilient, but growth is becoming more selective and less reliant on pricing. The tone was constructive, with demand holding up better than feared and greater emphasis on value, mix, innovation, AI, category exposure, and share gains as drivers of outperformance.
While geopolitical and cost headwinds were generally viewed as manageable, input costs remain an important consideration for the second half of the year. This is prompting companies to focus more closely on balancing accessible entry points with premium propositions, using product newness, brand strength, and sharper execution to sustain demand.
Five recurring trends from the Global Consumer Conference:
Channel execution emerges as a key growth differentiator
The evolution of consumer channels is no longer a simple offline-versus-online debate. Companies now need to manage a more complex mix of consumer touchpoints across discovery, engagement, and conversion, with success increasingly dependent on balancing physical retail, e-commerce, social commerce, and online-led marketing.
This has important implications for growth and profitability. A stronger presence across channels can improve brand visibility, tailor product assortment and pricing structure, and enable faster responses to changing consumer behaviour.
Winning in channels is less about substitution and more about integration. Companies that can connect digital engagement with strong retail execution are better positioned to protect brand relevance, improve conversion, and capture demand as consumer journeys become less linear.
Input cost pressures and supply chain resilience remain front of mind
Cost pressures are moving back into focus, placing renewed emphasis on supply chain management as companies prepare for a potentially more challenging second half of the year. While there are no immediate signs of availability issues, energy, freight, and raw materials are becoming more visible pressure points, with hedging delaying rather than fully eliminating potential impacts.
The Middle East was also discussed through a more cautious lens, with freight costs emerging as the most immediate route through which pressures could reach consumers over time. Against this backdrop, flexible sourcing and strong operational execution are becoming increasingly critical to sustaining margin resilience.
AI adoption moves from productivity to value-chain integration
AI has moved beyond experimental use cases and is increasingly being deployed at scale across consumer companies, although adoption remains at different stages of maturity. For some, AI remains more focused on foundational productivity applications, while others have broadened its use to drive topline growth through more advanced consumer engagement and tailored marketing.
At the leading edge, however, companies are deploying AI across the value chain to better inform decision-making across innovation, pricing, and supply chain. With greater scale, richer consumer datasets, and stronger investment capacity, these companies are better positioned to operationalise AI end-to-end, translating its potential into tangible productivity and innovation gains – potentially widening the gap relative to their smaller or less digitally mature competitors.
Health and wellness reshape consumer priorities, with GLP-1 as a catalyst
Consumers are becoming more deliberate in how they eat, shop, and allocate their spending, with a greater emphasis on nutritional efficiency, functionality, and portion control.
GLP-1 medication1 remains an important emerging watchpoint, particularly for food, beverage, and snacking categories where the read-across is most direct, but it is only part of a broader health and wellness shift. This is reflected in growing demand for protein and gut health, as well as more targeted consumer messaging around satiety and overall wellbeing.
Companies exposed to health-oriented nutrition, functional beverages, and fresh food are better placed to capture shifting consumer spend, while more traditional packaged food, indulgent, or discretionary categories may face greater scrutiny around long-term growth.
As priorities shift towards health and wellness, companies will need to adapt product portfolios and category mix, rather than solely relying on a stronger macroeconomic environment.
Disciplined capital allocation and targeted M&A
Capital allocation across the sector remains disciplined, reflecting a renewed focus on financial prudence, leverage discipline, and returns on capital.
This is reinforcing a preference for selective, value-accretive transactions over large-scale transformative deals, with companies using M&A to reinforce category leadership, strengthen capabilities, access innovation, improve growth quality, and enhance margins.
This discipline is also visible internally. Companies are increasingly using portfolio optimisation, selective divestitures, and capital redeployment to sharpen strategic priorities and reinvest in champion brands, innovation, and commercial execution.
The common thread is that, rather than purely pursuing scale, management teams are placing greater emphasis on margins and returns, prioritising assets and initiatives that can enhance profitability, improve earnings visibility, and lift returns on capital.
1GLP-1 stands for Glucagon-Like Peptide-1, a hormone naturally produced in your intestines after you eat. It plays important role in regulating blood sugar, appetite, and digestion. GLP-1 medications are drugs developed by scientists that mimic the effects of natural GLP-1.
Further links on the topic
US CPG: Paris Takeaways 2026
dbAccess Global Consumer Conference: Key Equity Strategy Takeaways
European Consumer Staples: Global Consumer Conference - Key themes for European Staples
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