A contract manufacturer I talked to this summer lost its citric acid supplier overnight. No warning, no backup qualified, 1,500 ingredients and 250 suppliers on the books. The supply chain lead told me they had been putting about 2% of their spend out to bid. The other 98% was running on relationships they assumed were solid.
They were not solid. They were just quiet.
Here is the part that stuck with me. When I asked how the supplier decided who got the last of the inventory, he did not say “the biggest account.” He said something closer to “whoever was easiest to call back.”
I have had a version of that conversation maybe a hundred times in the last year. Brands, co-mans, supplement companies, beverage companies, mostly in the $20M to $1B range. The pattern is consistent enough that I now believe it, even though plenty of people will push back on it.
In a tight year, allocation does not go to the biggest customer. It goes to the easiest one.
The industry is starting to say this out loud. Procurement analysts are predicting that suppliers will favor the customers who make it easy to do business with them. Supply chain outlooks for 2026 talk about shortages in cocoa, protein, aluminum, and a dozen other inputs, and the advice is always some version of “build real partnerships.” That is correct and also useless, because nobody tells you what the supplier is actually grading you on.
The scorecard you never see
Your supplier keeps score. Not formally (usually), but their customer service rep and their sales rep absolutely know which accounts are a pleasure and which are a tax. Here is what I think is on that scorecard, based on what I hear from both sides (partial list!):
How fast you answer. A spec question, a PO change, a substitution request. Hours or weeks? Our own read of supplier threads found the median procurement topic takes about a month to resolve, and most of that month is your side.
Whether you ask for the same document twice. A supplement co-man I know spends roughly 7.5% of team time just chasing quotes and gathering documents. Their suppliers feel every one of those touches, and so does the brand — it takes more emails than anyone expects just to land a price. It gets worse when three teams email the same supplier independently. One procurement manager at a flavor house told me suppliers flat out refuse to use the document portals his company tried, so they send 250-page packets and expect him to parse them. He finds out an audit lapsed when he physically picks up the product.
Whether your PO matches what you agreed to on the phone. A snack brand I talked to caught a meaningful overcharge two months before our call. Not fraud. Just a price that changed in a conversation and never made it to the PO, and nobody on either side caught it for months.
Whether you pay without a fight. A better-for-you snack brand I work with was matching every invoice line by hand in Bill.com. That is admirable. It is also slow, and the supplier on the other end is waiting.
Whether you surprise them. Reformulations, launch scrambles, a Costco order that doubles volume. A condiment brand CEO described his team finding suppliers, checking availability, and gathering docs “at speed” every time a launch hits. Speed on your side means chaos on theirs.
Notice what is not on the list. Price. Price is what the brand thinks the relationship is about. The supplier is grading on friction.
Why mid-market companies are the hardest customer and do not know it
Big CPG solves this with headcount. A $5B company has a category manager for corrugate. You have a four-person procurement team, 40 to 1,400 ingredients, and one person who knows where everything is.
That is not a hypothetical. A pet food founder told me his CRM is his inbox, and Gemini search finds the right thread about 60% of the time. A chocolate brand’s procurement lead had 10,000 emails, hand-starred and labeled by supplier, with expiration dates tracked in Excel. A supplement co-man has one person managing 190 active work orders, and suppliers do not even acknowledge his POs unless he sends remittance first. A $200M to $500M beverage company keeps pricing history in individual spreadsheets that do not get shared across the team.
The CEO of a condiment brand put it best:
If Cole goes on vacation or gets hit by a bus, it’s all lost.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Your supplier already knows this about you. They know which accounts go dark when one person is out. They know whose POs never match the quote. They know who will ask for the CoA a third time. And in the year when they have to choose, they will choose.
The other side of the same coin
It cuts the other way too. A craft baked goods brand that is 100% co-packed has been trying since May to get its co-mans to share bills of materials. Three months. Two emails to one co-man, no response. Another co-man showed “little interest from minute one.” A third no-showed a call and left two follow-ups unanswered.
The founder’s read: they know customers will not switch, so they will negotiate down later.
He is probably right. And the reason he cannot switch is the same reason he is hard to serve. The supplier relationship lives in someone’s head, not in a system. There is no approved supplier list, no raw material database, no ingredient IDs. Moving would mean rebuilding all of it from scratch. The co-man knows that. So the brand is simultaneously the customer who is hardest to serve and the customer who cannot leave. That is the worst position on the board.
A test you can run Monday
Pick your top five suppliers. Ask your team one question about each: if this supplier had to drop one customer next quarter, would it be us, and why?
Then, next time you are at a trade show or on a site visit, ask the supplier’s rep the same question over a beer. I mean it. They will tell you, and the gap between your team’s answer and theirs is the coordination tax you are paying without knowing it.
If you want a second, more quantitative version: count how many times your team requested the same document from the same supplier last quarter. Most teams I have met cannot answer that. That is the answer.
Where I have landed
We spend enormous energy trying to be a good customer to our retail buyers. We do line reviews, we prep for category resets, we learn the buyer’s scorecard cold. We spend almost none of that energy trying to be a good customer to the people who make the product possible.
I built Waystation because the brand never sees the scorecard the supplier keeps, and a four-person team cannot fix that by working harder. But the insight is bigger than any tool. Your supplier is a customer of your operations too. In a year with enough to go around, that does not matter. In a year without, they get to choose.
Price gets you a quote. Friction decides the allocation.
