CPG brand manager · 01 · Answer

How much of a packaged food brand's sales going through one retailer is too risky?

There is no normal to measure yourself against, and that is the finding. Inside a single segment the disclosed top-customer concentration runs from roughly 23% to 74%. What is consistent is a different number: in every filer we could read, receivables concentration runs higher than revenue concentration — and only the revenue number gets discussed.

The evidence

The disclosed range, inside one segment.

BellRing: Walmart, Costco and Amazon together at 74.0% of net sales. Honest Company: Amazon 39%, Target 28%, Walmart 8%. Simply Good Foods: Walmart about 31%, Amazon about 18%. e.l.f. Beauty: Target 18%, Walmart 13%, Amazon 11%, Sephora 10%. Olaplex: one customer at 18%. Oatly: five largest at about 23%. Utz: top ten at about 40%.

Eleven of twelve disclose the retailer. None disclose the brand.

Customer concentration is a required disclosure above a materiality threshold. Brand concentration is not — so the risk section describes in detail the dependency the company does not control, and says nothing about the one it built on purpose.

The cash exposure is the larger one.

Celsius disclosed Pepsi at 54.7% of total revenue in FY2024 and 43.2% in FY2025. The receivables shares for the same two years were 62.2% and 46.2%. It is a working-capital exposure, not only a revenue one, and it behaves differently in a bad quarter.

One company is visibly solving it.

Those Celsius figures are a deliberate de-risking, disclosed in both directions, with risk-factor headings naming the partner explicitly. It is the only clean worked example of the problem being reduced rather than described.

What would have to be true for this to be wrong

If your contract with that retailer carries term, minimum volumes or exclusivity that a competitor cannot displace inside a planning cycle, concentration is a commercial position rather than a risk, and the percentage is the wrong frame entirely. The number matters when the relationship is terminable at will.

Sources: SEC EDGAR full-text search and company filings, with each figure's period stated above. AI-answer measurements are CULT+MATH primary research, criteria registered before retrieval. Published 2026-10-21 by Ipalibo Da-Wariboko, CULT+MATH LLC. Figures carry the date they were pulled; where a number could not be sourced, this page says so and gives none.

This is one of six decisions covered in the CPG brand manager decision brief — each with the evidence behind it, who owns it, who it is contested with, and what would have to be true for the answer to flip.

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