Food and beverage competitor analysis: a complete guide

In 2018, Olipop launched into a soda category dominated by Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Two giants with century-old brands, billion-dollar marketing budgets, and a footprint in every store on the planet.

By 2025, Olipop held 60% of the prebiotic soda market and posted $400m in sales — before Coca-Cola even launched its competitor product. 

That’s the power of understanding the F&B competitive landscape better than the competition and identifying white space opportunities.

F&B competitor analysis is more than market research: it’s how challenger brands spot opportunities incumbents miss, how established brands defend market share against disruptors, and how every brand in the category makes smarter decisions about products, pricing, and positioning.

In this guide, we’ll cover what F&B competitor analysis involves, including the eight components every analysis should focus on.

TL;DR

• What F&B competitor analysis is and why it’s the foundation of every winning F&B brand strategy
• The 8 components that make up a complete competitor analysis — from market mapping to customer experience
• How to conduct a competitor analysis in 8 clear steps, from defining objectives to turning insights into action
• When to use desk research, store visits, and consumer surveys to get a complete picture of competitor performance
• How consumer insights separate brands that act on competitor analysis from those that just collect it

What is competitor analysis and why does it matter for F&B brands?

Competitor analysis is the process of evaluating rival brands to understand their products, pricing, positioning, distribution, marketing, and consumer perception in your category.

For F&B brands, it matters more than in most other industries: shelf space is finite, consumer choice is overwhelming, and loyalty is fragile, which means every decision requires reliable insight.

Olipop, Liquid Death, Graza — the brands that consistently win in F&B aren’t necessarily the ones with the largest budgets, but rather those that understand the competitive landscape better than the competition, and act on what they learn faster than anyone else.

Key components of a comprehensive F&B competitor analysis

A complete F&B competitor analysis covers eight components:

1. Market and category market mapping. Visually define and segment your target market based on how customers perceive products and/or brands relative to other products/brands in the market.

2. Market share and financial analysis. Track which brands hold the greatest share of the category and how market shifts affect (positively or negatively) their performance. Combine retail data, public financials, and industry reports to understand who’s growing, who’s losing ground, and why.

3. Product and packaging audits. Examine competitor products closely: ingredients, flavors, formats, sizes, claims, materials, processes, costs, and packaging design. A thorough audit helps uncover opportunities (e.g., where competitors are overspending or underspending on materials) that you can capitalize on. 

4. Pricing and promotion analysis. Compare price points across competitors, including standard pricing, promotional cycles, multi-buy offers, and private label positioning. Understanding price architecture helps you decide where to compete on value and where to hold premium positioning.

5. Distribution channel analysis. Identify where competitors sell — major retailers, convenience stores, foodservice, DTC, online marketplaces — to see which channels they dominate and which they’ve ignored.

6. Brand perception and consumer preference. Interview consumers directly to measure brand perception. Ask them which brands they trust, recommend, and consider premium versus value. Perception data reveals what marketing alone can’t tell you.

7. Innovation pipeline analysis. Monitor new product launches, line extensions, packaging changes, and reformulations across competitors. Patent filings, trademark applications, trade show announcements, and product changes all signal where competitors are investing next.

8. Customer experience analysis. Evaluate the full customer journey with competitor brands from the digital experience through to post-purchase support. Experience gaps create opportunities to differentiate beyond product alone.

How to conduct a food and beverage competitor analysis

Competitor analysis follows a clear eight-step process:

1. Define the scope and objectives
2. Identify your competitors
3. Analyze products & pricing
4. Analyze market share
5. Examine marketing
6. Evaluate customer experience
7. Perform a SWOT analysis
8. Turn insights into action

1. Define the scope and objectives

The data you collect depends on your objective. Start by deciding what you want to learn from the competitor analysis process. For example, are you launching a new product, repositioning an old one, or entering a new category? 

Set specific questions you want answered, but don’t go too broad. Rather than “understand the energy drink market”, try “identify white space opportunities in low-sugar energy drinks for 20-30 year olds”.

2. Identify your competitors

Map out competitors across three layers: direct, indirect, and adjacent. Direct competitors sell similar products to similar audiences, indirect competitors compete for the same consumer need with different offerings (e.g., coffee competing with energy drinks), and adjacent competitors compete in nearby categories that could expand into yours.

3. Analyze their products and pricing

Audit competitor ingredients, formats, claims, packaging, nutrition, and price across products. Visit the stores to see what’s on the shelf. Buy products to evaluate quality. Monitor pricing across different retailers and over time to understand promotional patterns and positioning (e.g., value vs premium).

4. Analyze their market share

Retail data, market research, and category reports can reveal who holds market share and how it’s shifting. Growth rates, channel performance, regional differences — these can all show which brands are gaining ground, which are declining, and what’s driving the changes.

5. Examine their marketing and online presence

Track competitor marketing across TV, digital, social, and in-store channels to understand their messaging, target audiences, creative direction, and campaign frequency. Take the time to examine their websites, social media engagement, search rankings, and reviews to see how they perform across digital mediums and where they’re investing most.

6. Evaluate their customer experience

Walk through the full consumer journey to identify friction points and standout moments — this means buying products in store, ordering online, and speaking to customer service. Customer experience data is often where the biggest opportunities hide. Brands that solve for experience problems competitors ignore can win loyalty, even when product and price are similar.

7. Perform a SWOT analysis

For each competitor, create a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) framework. This forces you to translate raw data into more tangible aspects you can reliably address. Strengths show what your competitors do well, weaknesses reveal where you can double down, opportunities highlight market gaps, and threats you need to immediately defend against.

8. Turn the insights into action

Translate findings from research into actionable decisions, whether that’s product changes, pricing adjustments, marketing shifts, distribution expansion, or messaging updates. 

Set clear priorities. Identify the top three to five actions that will have the most meaningful competitive impact in both the short and long term. Assign owners to each priority, set timelines, and include checkpoints to assess whether the changes are moving the right metrics.

Competitor analysis best practices for F&B teams

Competitor analysis is all about uncovering actionable insights from the data. Here’s how to do it well:

• Go beyond desktop analysis
  Visit stores. Buy products and use them. Talk to consumers. The best F&B brands are doing the legwork in the real world — they’re watching how competitors stack shelves and package products, and they’re constantly evaluating product elements like taste to find opportunities.
  
• Analyze their product range and flavors
  F&B is a category where small product differences can create huge competitive advantages. Changes in flavor profiles, ingredient choices, and formats can make the difference between products that sell reasonably well and overnight successes. Take Olipop, for example, they didn’t launch just one flavor — they continuously iterated based on customer demand.
  
• Leverage competitors’ online reviews
  Online reviews are essentially free consumer research on your competitors. Analyze what people praise, complain about, and request from competitor products. Patterns in reviews reveal product strengths to learn from and weaknesses to exploit. 
  
• Focus on market gaps
  Don’t just track what competitors do. Look for what they’re missing. Liquid Death didn’t compete with Evian or Fiji on premium water — they spotted a gap (young consumers wanted water that didn’t feel boring) and filled it (while using some clever marketing along the way). Use review analysis, consumer surveys, and category data to identify market gaps where demand exists, but no brand is meeting it. 
  
• Leverage consumer insight tools
  Secondary research tells you what competitors do. Primary research tells you exactly what consumers think. With platforms like Attest, you can survey your target consumers directly to validate brand perception, test positioning against competitors, and benchmark performance with real data — not assumptions.

How Attest helps F&B teams do better competitor analysis

The brands winning in F&B aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most, but rather the ones out-thinking their competitors. 

Brands like Olipop, Liquid Death, Chobani, and Graza didn’t beat established players through bigger budgets or better distribution. They focused on market gaps identified through research, made faster, more effective decisions, and had a clearer understanding of what their consumers wanted.

Competitor analysis is how you build these advantages, and consumer insights make competitor analysis worth doing. 

Attest gives F&B teams the means and insights to benchmark against competitors using real data from real consumers. Survey target audiences to compare brand awareness, gauge perceptions, test concepts against competitors’ offerings, and identify where demand isn’t being met.

You’ll move faster, decide with confidence, and catch competitive shifts before anyone else does.