As the Food and Drink Federation's (FDF) digital partner, we spend a lot of time thinking about the challenges facing food and drink manufacturers and how digital can help address them. Its latest figures highlight just how difficult the wider commercial environment has become.
The latest figures from FDF aren't particularly encouraging for UK food and drink manufacturers. Export volumes fell 11.7% in the first half of 2026, reaching their third-lowest level since 2000, while the UK's food and drink trade deficit widened to £21.1bn, its largest in more than 25 years.
The reasons are much bigger than anything a marketing or digital team can fix. The FDF points to high energy and regulatory costs, more expensive ingredients, logistics, packaging, and labour, the additional complexity of trading with the EU, US tariffs, and geopolitical instability. Its argument is that government needs to improve the conditions in which British manufacturers compete, both at home and overseas.
But there’s another question worth asking. While manufacturers wait for changes to tariffs, regulation, and the wider business environment, what can they do themselves to compete harder for the demand that is available?
Marketing has a part to play here. There are opportunities to get better at finding demand, being found by buyers, helping them choose your products, opening up routes into new markets, and giving distributors and other partners what they need to sell them effectively.
If you're looking for growth overseas, start with how buyers actually find you
Entering a new market and being discoverable in that market are two different things. A manufacturer can have the production capacity, regulatory approvals, logistics, and distribution arrangements in place, without being particularly visible to the people you want to buy your products.
Take a market you're targeting and search for your products as a potential customer there would. Don't use your company name or the terminology you use internally. Search by product type, application, requirement, or problem. Look at which manufacturers appear, where they appear, and what information buyers encounter when they start researching them.
That exercise can expose quite a lot. International digital strategy is still sometimes treated as a translation exercise, but customers in different markets may describe and search for the same products differently. The information they need might also differ, from units and pack formats to certifications, claims, ingredients, technical information, and routes to purchase.
The Department for Business and Trade's own export guidance recommends adapting websites around local customer behaviour rather than simply translating existing content, including considering local search behaviour and terminology.
It's also worth looking beyond Google. McKinsey's 2026 B2B Pulse research, based on nearly 4,000 decision-makers across 13 countries, found that buyers now use an average of ten channels during the buying journey. Depending on the product and audience, discovery might happen through search, a distributor, an industry publication, social media, a marketplace, a trade platform, or increasingly through AI-assisted research.
That changes the question from whether you have an international website to whether you're actually present in the places your potential customers use to find and evaluate suppliers.
Getting found isn't much use if buyers can't work out whether you're right for them
For food and drink manufacturers selling B2B, the website often has quite a lot of work to do before somebody is ready to make contact. A potential retailer, wholesaler, distributor, food service buyer, or manufacturer sourcing an ingredient, might need to understand the range, formats, ingredients, allergens, certifications, shelf life, production capabilities, or markets served before there's any reason to start a conversation.
What matters will vary enormously between businesses, which is why the answer isn't to create a generic checklist of information every food manufacturer should publish. What you need is to understand what your potential buyers need to know before they'll consider your product, and then see how easily they can do it.
This is particularly important when you're trying to grow somewhere your company isn't already well-known. An existing UK customer may know exactly what you manufacture and who to contact. A buyer encountering you for the first time in another country doesn't have that context.
Your distributors and retailers are part of your digital presence too
It’s easy to spend a considerable amount of time on your own website and brand, but not give much attention to the digital experience at the point where somebody can actually buy your product.
If your products are sold by somebody else, go and look at how they're presented on that company's website. Search for them as a customer would, rather than navigating there using your own product name or code. Check the description, imagery, specifications, and supporting information, and then compare the experience with competing products on the same site.
Some of this is a content problem. Partners need accurate product descriptions, imagery, video, specifications, certifications, and campaign material. International partners may need localised versions rather than translated UK assets.
For manufacturers with large product ranges and multiple markets, this starts to become a technology and product-information problem as well as a marketing one. If the information required to launch a product with a new partner is spread across spreadsheets, PDFs, shared drives, and different systems, every new market and sales channel becomes harder to support.
Getting that foundation right can make international growth easier to scale. It can also improve how products are represented by existing UK partners.
New markets don't always require wholesale transformation
The Department for Business and Trade encourages UK businesses to consider marketplaces as one route into international markets, and its Digital Exporting Programme works with more than 30 B2B and B2C marketplaces. Its guidance suggests using marketplaces to test products and assess demand before deciding how much further to invest.
Marketplaces won't be appropriate for every manufacturer, but the principle is useful. If you're considering a particular territory for a new launch, there are ways to start gathering evidence before committing.
You could test a product proposition with a tightly-targeted campaign, create market-specific content and see what kind of search demand and enquiries it attracts, or look at which products already receive meaningful traffic from overseas markets. Existing website data may show countries where buyers are already finding you without any deliberate investment.
None of this replaces proper market research, commercial analysis, or conversations with people who understand the territory. But it can give you useful evidence about what people are actually looking for and which products appear to be attracting interest.
There's a domestic problem hiding in the FDF figures, too
The FDF's figures aren't only a story about British companies struggling to export. The volume of non-EU imports was 22% higher in the first half of 2026 than in the same period in 2023, and the FDF argues that international competitors are gaining ground in the UK.
That means some manufacturers need to think about defending demand at home as well as finding it overseas.
Again, digital can tell you quite a lot. Search your important product categories without using your brand name and look at what customers encounter. See how retailers, wholesalers, distributors, and marketplaces present your products alongside imported alternatives. Look at the information available for each and how easy they are to compare.
Then, look at the reasons customers actually choose you. British provenance might be important for some categories, but it would be dangerous to assume that's enough. Depending on your product and audience, the deciding factor could be quality, innovation, ingredients, sustainability, availability, technical performance, service, supply-chain resilience, or something completely different.
Doing the research matters, because your proposition has to be based on something customers genuinely value, rather than the things you as the manufacturer would like them to value.
Competing harder for the demand that's available
Better marketing cannot compensate for a £10bn burden from taxes and packaging regulation, remove a tariff, or make energy cheaper. The structural problems identified by the FDF require structural answers, and the industry is right to push government for them.
But waiting for those answers isn't much of a commercial strategy.
Manufacturers can get better at understanding where demand exists, how buyers discover suppliers, what information they need, what makes them choose one product over another, and where digital can make that process easier. You can improve the way products are represented by distributors and retailers, test new markets before committing heavily, and make product information easier to manage across markets and channels.
The FDF figures suggest that this isn't only about finding the next export market. If international competitors are gaining ground in the UK at the same time as British exports decline, manufacturers are going to have to work harder for customers in both directions.
Marketing and digital won't fix the conditions UK food and drink manufacturers are competing in. They can help manufacturers compete better within them.
And right now, that's worth taking seriously.
