Throughout 2025, we witnessed an ongoing evolution in dealmaking in the consumer products industry. Many large, branded companies shed brand assets or acquired insurgent brands to reposition their portfolios while at the same time private label manufacturers and new market entrants continued to attract capital and gain share. Amid falling total shareholder returns, most large consumer products company executives know that sustained profitable growth is needed to break this cycle. (Please see our Consumer Products Report 2025: Reclaiming Relevance in the Gen AI Era.)

However, getting back to growth for legacy brands is easier said than done. Although overall global consumer spending continues to rise, the rules of the game have changed. It is no longer enough to build broad scale across brands, go-to-market capabilities, and supply and reinvest in emerging markets or growth categories. Instead, to get back to delivering value to consumers, category-specific growth models need to be revisited, continuous improvement needs to fund investment, and AI technology models need to be embraced.

Within this environment, the search for parenting advantage and the need to stay ahead of an ever-evolving landscape demands that executives look for ways to remake their portfolios. M&A is critical to enabling those bold portfolio moves. In 2025, we saw this come to life in two major themes:

• divestitures to radically simplify the portfolio and enable increased management focus, closeness to consumers, and faster ways of working; and
• insurgent acquisitions to buy the growth as well as future capabilities to kick-start growth models.

Divestitures represented almost 50% of total consumer products M&A through 2024, and that share is expected to continue to rise, with 42% of M&A executives in the industry prepping an asset for sale over the next three years, according to Bain’s recent survey. Kraft Heinz is splitting itself into two companies to better focus resources on the core brands that they both can grow. Keurig Dr Pepper is separating to become a North American refreshment beverage business and a global coffee company with its acquisition of JDE Peet’s. Additionally, Unilever, Reckitt, and General Mills have all announced or completed major divestments.

In parallel, we continue to see increased interest in insurgent brands—that is, brands growing at 10 times their respective categories with more than $25 million in revenue in tracked channels (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Over the past five years, deals valued between $30 million and $500 million grew from 30% to 37% of global strategic deal value. Similarly, in the US (the market with the highest prevalence of insurgent brands), deals valued at less than $2 billion represented 38% of total consumer products deals, up from about 16% over the prior five years, according to our analysis. Meanwhile, average US deal size fell from roughly $900 million between 2014 and 2018 to about $400 million between 2019 and 2024. While 2025 saw a number of headline-grabbing global deals—such as Kimberly-Clark’s $51.4 billion purchase of Kenvue—smaller deals, such as PepsiCo’s acquisition of Poppi, Flowers Foods’ acquisition of Simple Mills, Unilever’s acquisitions of Dr. Squatch and Wild, and Ferrero’s acquisition of Power Crunch, continue to demonstrate incumbent consumer goods companies’ desire to enter new categories, new channels, or penetrate new consumer cohorts via insurgent brand M&A.

Successfully delivering on divestments and insurgent brands is different from scale acquisitions. Consumer products M&A teams need to develop new capabilities and repeatable models. We are privileged enough to have seen many up close. In our brief “Six Steps to Speed Insurgent Brand Growth Post-Acquisition,” we look at the best practices taken by companies such as L'Oréal and General Mills, which have turned insurgent acquisitions into billion-dollar brands. In “Five Steps for Successful Divestitures,” we describe how the best divestors use the occasion to strategically reset the base business and set the separated business up for success.