PARIS — The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) here issued a call to action to the CPG and retail industry to address two “megatrends” — digitization and resource scarcity — identified in a new report.
The report, “Future Value Chain 2022: Industry Initiatives Address Challenges of the Digital World and the Fight for Resources,” asks the industry to implement “critical initiatives to safeguard the future and drive change across the industry.” It was published today jointly by CGF and Capgemini here and is a product of CGF’s Future Value Chain program, established over the past seven years with a focus on extensive industry research and analysis.

“Digitization is changing consumers’ lives and shopping behavior. At the same time, global demand for resources like food, water and energy is rising rapidly with the potential for demand to outstrip supply in the next decade,” said Thomas Storck, member of the Management Board, merchandising and multi-channel retailing officer, Galeria Kaufhof, a subsidiary of Metro Group, and co-chair of The Consumer Goods Forum’s Emerging Trends Steering Committee, in a statement. “The industry must work together to develop concrete milestones to respond to these megatrends and build an action plan to move these from theory to reality.”
The report identified three initiatives to address the upcoming industry challenges:
• Consumer Engagement Protocol, which will focus on establishing guidelines for digital engagement with consumers. It will examine the power of user-generated and social media technology platforms, including the need to mitigate risks from privacy invasion. “Increasingly, companies recognize the requirement to be proactive vs. being regulated in this area, but currently there is no voluntary global commitment concerning this in the consumer goods and retail industry,” said CFG.
• Next-Generation Product Identification, which will focus on providing the industry and the consumer with accurate product information by using new technology capabilities for product identification to replace the current bar code.
• Sustainable Packaging Coalition, which is designed to establish a coalition of companies to work together on non-competitive topics to improve the sustainability of packaging across the different value-chain stages.