Getting product to the retailer's backroom no longer guarantees shoppers can actually buy it, and closing that on-shelf gap has become one of the biggest commercial levers for CPGs today.
For decades, the CPG industry has measured success by getting product into the distribution center and maintaining strong fill rates. Those metrics remain essential, but they no longer tell the full story.
Today, leading CPGs are increasingly focused on a different question: Can shoppers actually buy the product?
The distinction matters. A product that is not on the shelf cannot capture the demand that marketing teams create, sales teams negotiate, and supply chain teams work tirelessly to fulfill. As growth becomes harder to find, many teams are recognizing on-shelf availability (OSA) as one of the most important commercial levers available to them.
To explore this shift, we recently hosted a private dinner in New York with a group of general managers from several bops’ CPGs customers. The discussion was conducted under Chatham House Rule, allowing participants to speak candidly about the challenges, opportunities, and realities of managing product availability.
While the conversation covered a wide range of topics, three themes emerged repeatedly.
One of the strongest points of agreement was that OSA cannot be treated as either a supply chain problem or a retail execution problem.
That distinction may exist inside an organization, but it does not exist for the shopper. Consumers do not differentiate between a forecasting error, a replenishment issue, a merchandising failure, or an inventory inaccuracy. They simply see an empty shelf and make a different purchase decision.
The executives around the table described OSA as an end-to-end process that begins with forecasting and inventory planning and extends through distribution, store replenishment, shelf execution, and digital availability. A breakdown at any point in that chain creates the same outcome: a missed sale.
This is why traditional metrics often create a false sense of confidence. A supplier can achieve excellent fill rates while still suffering significant out-of-stocks at the shelf. On-time, in-full metrics confirm that product reached the retailer. They do not confirm that shoppers can find and purchase it.
The lesson is straightforward: OSA should not be measured at a single point in the value chain. It must be managed across the entire path to purchase.
Historically, the biggest obstacle to improving OSA was visibility. That is no longer the case. Today, CPGs have access to more signals than ever. Shelf cameras, point-of-sale data, retailer inventory feeds, e-commerce listings, and on-demand delivery platforms all indicate when a product may be off the shelf.
On its own, each signal is noisy. A single feed can raise a false alert, misread phantom stock, or miss the gap entirely. Together, they confirm one another: a drop in sales velocity flags a possible gap, a shelf camera confirms the empty facing, and an RFID read shows the units sitting in the back room. At that point, detection becomes diagnosis. The question is no longer whether a product is missing, but why it is missing and which action will fix it. And because every confirmed fix is recorded, the feedback loop means the next alert is sharper than the last.
That shift changes what creates competitive advantage. Knowing why the gap occurred is only the start, as visibility alone is becoming table stakes. Increasingly, the leaders differentiate through their ability to act on it, connecting insight to action, action to execution, and execution to a measurable outcome.
Another consistent theme was how organizations are approaching OSA transformation initiatives. No executive at the table suggested rolling out a new process, technology, or operating model across the entire business from day one. Instead, the pattern was remarkably similar: start small, prove value, build trust, and then scale.
Pilots serve a specific purpose. They focus on a specific business unit, customer, geography, or product category. And most importantly, they answer a simple question:
Can we identify OSA issues, resolve them, and recover sales that would otherwise have been lost? Once that proof exists, the conversation changes.
The challenge is no longer whether the solution works. The challenge becomes how to embed OSA into the way the organization operates every day.
That requires more than technology. It requires governance, processes, accountability, cross-functional alignment, and new ways of working. The companies making the most progress are treating OSA as a business discipline rather than a standalone tool or a one-time initiative.
As the evening concluded, the conversation kept returning to the same observation.
The shelf has historically received the least attention, yet it now carries some of the greatest commercial consequences. Getting product into the building was once the hardest part. Today, most organizations have become exceptionally good at that challenge.
The harder problem today is ensuring that product successfully completes the final step from the backroom to the shelf and remains available when a shopper is ready to make the purchase.
