Procurement leaders talk about supply chain resilience like it’s a strategy. Diversify your supplier base. Dual-source critical ingredients. Never be single-threaded on a key input.
Then we looked at the data.
We analyzed ingredient catalogs and supplier relationships across mid-market food, beverage, and supplement manufacturers to understand the gap between having supplier options and actually getting competitive quotes. The gap is enormous.
The headline: companies average 4 supplier options per ingredient — but fewer than 10% of items have a competitive quote
Across our dataset, the average item in a company’s ingredient catalog has 2 to 10 approved supplier options linked to it. These are suppliers the company knows can provide the ingredient. They’re in the system. They’ve been vetted.
But when we looked at how many of those items have actually received competitive pricing from two or more suppliers, the picture changes dramatically.
| Company profile | Total items | Avg supplier options/item | Items with 2+ competitive quotes | Items with zero quotes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ingredient broker | 2,970 | 11.2 | 180 (6%) | 2,349 (79%) |
| Bakery manufacturer | 201 | 2.1 | 4 (2%) | 189 (94%) |
| Snack brand | 108 | 4.0 | 5 (5%) | 101 (94%) |
| Pet food manufacturer | 61 | 3.5 | 6 (10%) | 8 (13%) |
| Functional beverage | 48 | 9.7 | 13 (27%) | 13 (27%) |
| Supplement company | 4,226 | 0.4 | 0 (0%) | 4,226 (100%) |
The median company in our dataset has competitive pricing on fewer than 10% of its ingredients. Most items sit in the catalog with one quote — or none at all.
The single-source problem is bigger than you think
Single-sourcing gets discussed in terms of catastrophic risk: what happens if your sole supplier has a quality failure, a natural disaster, or a geopolitical disruption. But the more common cost of single-sourcing is invisible — it’s the price premium you pay because no one else is quoting.
Across our dataset, 44% of items at one bakery manufacturer are linked to only one supplier in the system. 22% of items at one snack brand have only a single supplier option. Companies with the lowest single-source exposure (0–3% of items) actively maintain 8–10 supplier options per ingredient.
The companies that avoid single-source risk don’t just have backup suppliers on a list. They actively solicit quotes from multiple sources and keep pricing current.
Why the gap exists
Having supplier options and using them are two different workflows. Based on communication patterns across our dataset, we identified several reasons the gap persists:
Quoting is a communication-intensive process. Getting a single price quote requires a median of 16 emails and 29 days of elapsed time. Running a competitive process across 3–4 suppliers for a single item means 50–60 emails and potentially 2–3 months of coordination. For a catalog of 200 items, that’s an impossible workload for a small team.
Supplier relationships default to inertia. Once a price is established with a supplier, the switching cost of re-quoting feels high relative to the uncertain benefit. Teams re-order from the incumbent because the process of qualifying and quoting a new supplier is manual and slow.
Information asymmetry favors the incumbent. The incumbent supplier knows your specs, your volumes, your delivery schedule. A new supplier starts from zero — which means the quoting process is longer and more communication-intensive. This structural advantage compounds over time.
There’s no system of record for quoting status. Most procurement teams don’t have visibility into which items have been competitively quoted recently and which haven’t. Without that view, there’s no trigger to initiate a re-quote. Items go years without competitive pricing review.
The cost of not quoting
While we can’t share specific pricing data, the pattern across our dataset is consistent: items with two or more competitive quotes show meaningful price variation between suppliers. The spread exists. The savings are there. But they can only be captured if the quoting process actually happens.
Companies in our dataset that maintain active competitive quoting — defined as having 2+ suppliers with current pricing on more than 20% of their catalog — also show higher communication volume per supplier, more pricing-tagged conversation segments, and shorter RFP cycle times.
What this means
Supply chain resilience isn’t a strategy document. It’s a sourcing workflow. The data suggests that most mid-market food and beverage companies have done the first step — identifying potential suppliers — but haven’t operationalized the second step: regularly and systematically getting competitive quotes across their catalog.
The barrier isn’t supplier availability. It’s the operational cost of running the quoting process at scale when that process is email-driven and manual.
Methodology
This analysis is based on ingredient catalog and supplier relationship data from anonymized food, beverage, supplement, and pet food companies in the $50M–$500M revenue range, processed through the Waystation AI platform between 2022 and 2025. “Supplier options per item” counts the number of distinct suppliers linked to each item in the company’s approved supplier catalog. “Competitive quotes” counts items with price offerings from two or more distinct suppliers. All company profiles are anonymized and described by industry category and catalog size only.
