by Donatella Saccone[1], Elena Vallino[2] and Jampel Dell'Angelo[3]
The high degree of concentration observed in agrifood supply chains has become a growing source of concern among policymakers, civil society organizations and researchers. A substantial body of work has documented how a small number of firms increasingly dominate the production, processing, distribution and retail of food, raising the prospect that such concentration distorts prices, deepens inequality, and shifts bargaining power away from producers and consumers. Ultimately, there is the concern that these dynamics may undermine food security on a global scale. Despite this increasing policy attention and a growing volume of empirical research, the evidence base remains fragmented and, until now, has not been systematically mapped. This study contributes to closing that gap in two complementary ways. First, it conducts a systematic review of the existing literature on market concentration in agrifood supply chains, with the specific aim of identifying the empirical gaps that remain in current research. Second, building directly on the gaps that emerge from the review, it provides new preliminary estimates of agrifood market concentration based on firm-level market shares, adopting a global and multi-commodity perspective that is largely absent from prior work.
The literature review draws on the Scopus database, covering articles, books and book chapters published between 2000 and 2026, restricting the subject areas to Economics, Econometrics and Finance; Agricultural and Biological Sciences; Business, Management and Accounting; Social Sciences; Environmental Sciences. The inclusion criterion required an empirical analysis – descriptive or econometric – that went beyond purely theoretical or conceptual discussion of market concentration. The final sample comprised 47 coded studies. Each study was coded along four dimensions: the analytical approach (descriptive or econometric); the geographical scope (global, regional, national or subnational); the supply chain coverage (entire chain, or a specific segment when only partial coverage was provided); and the commodity coverage (agrifood in general, or one or more single commodities). We highlighted that publications on agrifood market concentration have grown in recent years, with a marked acceleration from 2017 onward and a peak in 2024–2025, suggesting the topic has moved decisively up the research agenda. Within the coded sample, empirical approaches are almost evenly split between econometric (51%) and descriptive (49%) studies. Geographically, national-level analyses dominate (roughly half of the sample), while global-scope studies remain comparatively rare, accounting for only about one in five studies. Three structural conceptual gaps emerge. First, the vast majority of studies (81%) examine only a single segment of the supply chain – upstream, midstream or downstream – while analyses spanning the entire chain remain rare. Second, most studies (54%) focus on a single commodity, most often cereals and grains, with relatively few studies linking multiple commodities within a unified framework. Third, as noted, global-scope analysis is uncommon and, where it exists, tends to be descriptive rather than econometric. In fact, only four of the 47 studies reviewed combine a global perspective with coverage of all major commodity groups, and even these are largely descriptive in nature. These three gaps motivate the second part of the study, in which we conduct an original empirical analysis designed to provide a comprehensive picture of concentration across major commodity groups from a global perspective.
The empirical analysis relies on the Euromonitor Passport database, which records the sales of major companies by product and by country worldwide between 2016 and 2024. The level of concentration is measured through the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a widely used indicator of market concentration computed as the sum of the squared market shares of firms operating in a given market. Conventionally, an HHI below 1,500 points signals an unconcentrated market, values between 1,500 and 2,500 indicate moderate concentration, and values above 2,500 indicate high concentration. Based on data availability, the authors compiled a basket of twelve food items chosen for their relevance to food security: bottled water, tea, coffee, edible oils, drinking milk products, cheese, bread, breakfast cereals, processed fruits and vegetables, processed meat, tofu, and rice, pasta and noodles. The resulting dataset covers 5,421 companies, with sales expressed in millions of US dollars at constant prices, attributed to each company's Global Brand Owner – that is, its ultimate parent following any brand acquisitions within a given year. Private labels and artisanal bakery products were excluded. The HHI was then computed both for the basket as a whole and for each individual item, in every country and for every year between 2016 and 2024.
The preliminary empirical findings show that at the world level, concentration for the aggregate food security basket is low. Companies active in at least one basket item were identified in 99 countries, and in 38 of these all twelve items are present. A handful of countries – Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, El Salvador and Laos – display moderate concentration (HHI between 1,500 and 2,500), while most others show low concentration. Among the 5,421 companies identified, the largest firms operate across many countries: in 2024, eight companies – Nestlé, Kraft, Lactalis, Grupo Bimbo, Coca-Cola, JDE Peet's, Wilmar International and PepsiCo – generated more than 10 billion US dollars each in sales linked to food security-relevant items. Nestlé alone commands close to 42 billion US dollars in such sales – more than the entire food security-relevant sales attributed to companies operating in Italy or Spain. Nestlé is also the only company present across all twelve items and all 99 countries, followed by Unilever and Associated British Foods; more broadly, 946 companies operate in more than one country and 116 in at least ten. The picture changes considerably when individual items are examined separately. Several products display much higher concentration than the aggregate basket suggests. Breakfast cereals show medium to high concentration almost everywhere, with 72 of 99 countries above the high-concentration threshold in 2024. Bottled water and baked goods likewise show a high concentration in a large majority of the countries covered, with the Global South systematically more concentrated than Europe, and with several countries – including Argentina, Croatia, Lebanon, Serbia and Vietnam for baked goods – shifting from low to high concentration between 2016 and 2024. Coffee's world-level HHI rose from 1,150 in 2016 to 1,457 in 2024, a change plausibly linked to shifts in Nestlé's market share. By contrast, pasta and noodles remain comparatively unconcentrated at the world level, and several countries in this category moved from high to low concentration over the period. A recurring finding is that concentration does not always coincide with internationalization: for rice, pasta and noodles, the single largest firm by market share operates only within China, whereas Barilla, active in a far larger number of countries, holds a smaller share of total revenue for the same item.
Taken together, these results suggest that a low world-level HHI for the aggregate food-security basket can mask substantially higher concentration in individual items and in individual countries, likely because the behaviour of different products offsets one another at an aggregate level. This points to a clear methodological and policy lesson: monitoring efforts should prioritize single food items over aggregate baskets, should track how concentration evolves over time and investigates the drivers of any shifts, and should pay particular attention to countries in the Global South, where concentration tends to be both higher and less visible in existing research. Looking ahead, the authors identify two priorities for future work. The first is to exploit the cross-country and cross-regional comparative dimension of the dataset more fully, to understand how concentration patterns differ across distinct regulatory and economic environments and focusing on large multinational companies. The second is to examine the causal relationship between agrifood market concentration and food security outcomes – including price volatility, undernourishment, micronutrient deficiencies, and overweight and obesity – using country-level panel data from 2000 onward and identification strategies capable of disentangling the direct and indirect channels through which concentration may affect food security in its many dimensions. Such work, the authors argue, would provide a more solid empirical foundation for local, national and international policy interventions in an area where, so far, evidence has lagged well behind concern.
[1] University of Pollenzo and OEET
[2] University of Turin and OEET
[3] VU University Amsterdam
