STRATONHUNTER · MANUFACTURING

Your Manufacturing Business. Optimized.

Listen. Learn. Communicate.

What do the world’s best-run food & beverage manufacturers actually do differently? StratonHunter’s proprietary PerformANT AI delivers your System Readiness Score — providing C-suite level intelligence across the key areas that drive performance, growth, and enterprise value in your business.

Led by Kim Cunningham, former Chief Commercial Officer of Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee — one of North America’s largest private-label coffee and tea manufacturers — we combine AI-powered diagnostics with executive-level commercial leadership and insight to build the roadmap that takes your business to its next stage.

System Readiness Overview

A single, quantified view of performance and readiness across four critical pillars.

Operating Performance

Brand & Demand Strength

Expansion Capability

Enterprise & Financial Readiness

Trusted by the brands that defined the industry. Chosen by the brands that will define it next.

Built for Mid-Tier Food & Beverage Manufacturers.

The most ambitious food & beverage manufacturers — CPG, beverage, snack foods, bakery, and beyond — share a common challenge: the complexity of scaling profitably in a market moving faster than most organizational structures can keep up with. Channel complexity. SKU proliferation. Trade spend efficiency. Customer and portfolio profitability. These aren’t simple problems — they’re strategic ones that demand C-suite level thinking and execution.

StratonHunter fills that gap — bringing AI-powered diagnostic intelligence combined with executive-level commercial leadership to identify the highest-value growth opportunities in your business and build the roadmap to capture them.

Executive Leadership. Commercial Intelligence. Real Results.

What sets The StratonHunter Group apart isn’t just what we know — it’s what we’ve done. Our team brings together over a century of combined experience across franchise operations, food & beverage manufacturing, brand development, capital markets, and enterprise value creation. We’ve built systems, led turnarounds, launched brands, closed deals, and sat in the seat you’re in. We don’t just advise. We work alongside you.
Kim Cunningham

Kim Cunningham leads StratonHunter’s Manufacturing practice as Managing Partner, bringing C-suite commercial expertise directly to the food and beverage manufacturers she works with.

As Chief Commercial Officer of Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee — one of North America’s largest private-label coffee and tea manufacturers — Kim led commercial strategy, P&L management, marketing and insights, category management, and innovation across a complex, multi-channel manufacturing business. Her background spans consumer intelligence and loyalty analytics at LoyaltyOne, through to capital projects and operational efficiency at the manufacturing level.

As Board Chair of the Coffee Association of Canada, and with a forward-looking focus on AI-powered commercial decision-making, Kim brings industry-level perspective and a modern lens to every engagement.

She has lived the challenges facing mid-tier food and beverage manufacturers at the highest level — and brings that experience directly to your business.

Where Others Advise. We Transform.

Listen

Our proprietary PerformANT AI performs a complete diagnostic of the key areas driving performance, growth, and enterprise value in your business — capturing what your commercial data, channel performance, and organizational structure are telling you, whether you can see it clearly or not. All delivered within four to six weeks.

Learn

Your System Readiness Score is your business seen clearly. Kim and your leadership team walk through exactly what it means — where you’re strong, where you’re leaving commercial value on the table, and where your highest-return growth opportunities are. Then we build the roadmap to capture them.

Communicate

The best-run manufacturers don’t just have a growth plan — they have an organization aligned behind it. Drawing from the best practices of the world’s leading food & beverage companies, we work alongside your leadership team to influence communication strategies and define what needs to happen — so your entire organization develops the mindset, discipline, and alignment to execute and grow.

Where the Roadmap Takes You

Every StratonHunter Manufacturing engagement begins with your System Readiness Score. What comes next is a structured, proven process — built around four stages that take you from insight to measurable results.
Assess

Understand where value is being created — and where it’s being lost.

  • Customer profitability — which customers are driving real margin and which are consuming it
  • Product mix — which SKUs are earning their place in your portfolio
  • Channel effectiveness — where your go-to-market is working and where it isn’t
  • Margin drivers — the pricing, trade, and cost factors shaping your bottom line
  • Commercial effectiveness — how well your sales and marketing investment is performing
Focus

Invest in the highest-return opportunities.

  • Sales effectiveness and team capability
  • Gross margin and pricing strategy improvement
  • Trade spend optimization and ROI
  • Customer mix and channel prioritization
  • Market expansion opportunities
Execute

Turn strategy into commercial results.

  • Revenue growth initiatives
  • Trade ROI improvement
  • Gross margin enhancement
  • Channel profitability optimization
  • EBITDA contribution tracking
Track what matters — every month.

Track what matters — every month.

  • Growth Performance Dashboard keeping revenue, gross margin, trade ROI, customer profitability, and EBITDA contribution visible and accountable across the organization

What Results Look Like

Real outcomes delivered for food & beverage manufacturers.
Pricing Governance & Margin
Significant year-over-year improvement in gross profit through disciplined price governance, contract optimization, and portfolio rationalization — directly improving variable distribution margin across the business.
Focused Channel Growth
Meaningful volume growth through optimized production and improved distribution margins. New channel strategies that transformed underperforming revenue streams into significant growth engines within 18 months.
Improving Sales Effectiveness
Transformational commercial leadership that materially reduced SG&A through market analysis, sales accountability frameworks, competency development, and aligned KPI systems — freeing capital for growth investment.
Trade Optimization
Enterprise-wide customer segmentation that improved service levels, strengthened customer relationships, and created a sustainable foundation for long-term profitable growth.

Built for the Leaders Who Build Great Manufacturing Businesses.

We work with owners, CEOs, and leadership teams of mid-tier food & beverage manufacturers who are committed to building maximum commercial performance and enterprise value.
CPG & Packaged Goods Manufacturers
Scaling a CPG brand in today’s retail environment demands commercial discipline, channel clarity, and the ability to compete for shelf space against brands with far larger resources. We bring the strategic and commercial expertise to help you win.
Beverage Manufacturers
From private label to branded beverage, the complexity of channels, formats, and consumer preferences has never been greater. We help beverage manufacturers build the commercial strategy and organizational capability to grow profitably across every channel they compete in.
Snack Foods & Bakery
Category velocity, promotional pressure, and retailer concentration make snack foods and bakery some of the most commercially demanding segments in food manufacturing. We help brands build the pricing, trade, and channel discipline to protect and grow margin in a highly competitive environment.
Brands Preparing for Transaction

Enterprise value in food & beverage manufacturing isn’t created at the closing table — it’s built long before it. We provide an independent valuation, optimize commercial performance, and position your brand to command maximum value when the moment arrives.
Talk to our M&A team →