B2B eCommerce in FMCG: How It Works

B2B ecommerce in FMCG is the digital sale of fast-moving consumer goods—food, drink, household and personal-care products—from one business to another rather than to the end shopper. In practice it covers a manufacturer supplying its distributors, a distributor stocking restaurants and grocery chains, and a brand giving its trade customers a way to reorder online. The goods still move through the same channels the industry has always used; what changes is that the ordering, pricing, and account management now run through a digital storefront instead of a phone line, a rep's order pad, or an emailed spreadsheet.

For most food, drink and consumer-goods companies, this is a structural feature of how they already trade. Orders repeat on a weekly or even daily cycle. Prices are agreed account by account. Products pass through several layers of distribution before they reach a shelf. Digital commerce gives that existing machinery a faster, better-instrumented front end. The companies fitting that front end are beverage manufacturers, food and beverage distributors, foodservice suppliers, and multi-channel FMCG brands selling into several customer types at once.

This article covers what B2B commerce in FMCG involves, why companies are moving to it, the patterns and company types that define the industry, and the complexities a platform has to make manageable.

• B2B ecommerce in FMCG is business-to-business trade in fast-moving consumer goods conducted through digital channels—manufacturers to distributors, distributors to retailers and foodservice, brands to their trade accounts.
• It is a structural reality of the industry rather than a trend: repeat ordering, distributor-led routes to market, and account-specific pricing already define how FMCG sells.
• Adoption is broad. Industry research puts U.S. B2B ecommerce at $2.93 trillion in 2025; 71% of B2B companies now sell this way, earning about a third of their revenue from it.
• Virto's analysis of 4,013 FMCG companies finds a handful of recurring commerce patterns, with distributor-led and replenishment ordering the most characteristic by some distance, and multi-market, self-service and account-based selling common across the industry.
• Those patterns generate specific operational and organizational complexities—indirect visibility, channel coordination, customer-specific pricing, localization—which a modern commerce platform is built to absorb.

Before mapping the patterns, it helps to place FMCG B2B commerce within the wider ecommerce family and then narrow to the routes that actually apply to B2B in FMCG—food, drink and consumer goods.

Ecommerce is usually grouped into four types by who sits on each side of the transaction:

• B2B (business to business),
• B2C (business to consumer),
• C2B (consumer to business), and
• C2C (consumer to consumer).

FMCG B2B commerce belongs to the first of these—a supplier selling to another company that will resell, prepare, or redistribute the goods rather than consume them. That label does real work, because a B2B order behaves nothing like a consumer checkout: it involves negotiated pricing, credit terms, minimum quantities, standing orders, and a buyer who is restocking a business, not treating themselves.

Within that B2B category, FMCG relies on a handful of recognizable models:

• Manufacturer → distributor → retailer. The classic chain, and still the route that carries most volume: a producer sells to a distributor, which in turn supplies retailers.
• Foodservice supply. Distributors serving restaurants, hotels, cafeterias and catering—a channel with its own rhythms of daily ordering and tight delivery windows.
• Direct store delivery (DSD). A producer's own fleet replenishes outlets directly, as PepsiCo does for its snack and beverage brands.
• B2B2B and B2B2C. Layered arrangements in which a brand equips its distributors—or its distributors' customers—to order through the same digital front end.

Whatever the model, indirect distribution through wholesalers and distributors remains, as route-to-market specialists such as Globalpraxis note, the dominant path to market across much of the FMCG world.

This is also where FMCG B2B sales diverge sharply from B2C selling. A single account may carry its own price list, its own approved catalog, and its own reorder history; the same product can ship at three different prices depending on who is buying it and under what agreement. Getting those mechanics right online is the whole task.

👉 For a fuller taxonomy of transaction types, see Virto's guide to the types of ecommerce.

Understanding the models explains what FMCG B2B commerce is; the more pressing question for most companies is why to invest in it now. The answer divides into two: the broad drivers pulling the industry online, and the specific triggers that make an individual company start a project.

McKinsey's 2026 B2B Pulse survey, drawn from nearly 4,000 decision-makers across 13 countries, finds that 71% of B2B firms now offer ecommerce and that roughly a third of their revenue flows through digital channels—enough for ecommerce to have overtaken in-person selling as the leading revenue channel. Buyers now move across about ten interaction channels in a single purchase and will change supplier if the experience across them is poor. The 2024 edition recorded in-person's share of revenue falling from 22% to 17% year over year, and more than half of buyers saying they would abandon a purchase over a weak digital experience.

That behavior translates into concrete pressure on FMCG suppliers.

• Growth stalls when a legacy platform can't add channels or markets quickly enough.
• Innovation has to arrive faster than an annual release cycle allows.
• Selling across borders demands localization—language, currency, tax, and catalog by country.
• Every trade account expects its own negotiated pricing.
• And because so much FMCG volume moves through independent distributors, brands need visibility into demand they cannot otherwise see.

Underneath all of this is the plain fact that digital ordering keeps growing while manual ordering shrinks.

Drivers describe the climate; triggers are what actually starts a project, and they tend to cluster close to the buying decision. Six come up again and again:

• A legacy platform that caps growth—the most common trigger of all.
• Thin visibility beyond the distributor tier, where a brand sees its distributors but not the retailers or operators they serve.
• Expansion into new markets, which forces the platform question whether or not anyone wants to ask it.
• The launch of a new sales channel that the existing setup can't carry.
• Several business models running at once—direct, distributor, foodservice, retail—past the point where spreadsheets and disconnected systems can cope.
• Manual commercial operations, where reps rekey orders and pricing lives in email, until the manual work itself becomes the bottleneck.

Each of these triggers has already played out at a recognizable FMCG company, and the outcomes are instructive:

• HEINEKEN began its digital B2B program in Asia-Pacific in 2018, launching a first market in Singapore in around two months and extending from there; the platform now runs across more than 25 countries and serves upwards of 370,000 users, delivering roughly 30% of participating operating companies' revenue within two years and cutting the cost of launching each new market by about 65%. That is the expansion-and-new-markets trigger in practice.
• De Klok Dranken, a Dutch beverages business within the Grolsch group, illustrates the legacy trigger: it migrated off Adobe Commerce while keeping SAP ERP as its system of record, and built a self-service portal that has reached around 80% digital adoption across its 4,000-plus corporate customers.
• Lavazza by Bluespresso, an authorized Lavazza dealer in the Benelux, shows the several-models-at-once trigger—it consolidated customer-specific price lists for 2,500 B2B clients across a 4,000-item catalog and unified two business models and both B2B and B2C into a single store.

The drivers and triggers above are not evenly distributed; they follow patterns that repeat across the industry with striking regularity. To see how regular, Virto analyzed 4,013 FMCG companies and measured how often each commerce pattern appears. The result is a map of the industry's structure that general market research does not provide.

Five patterns recur, with a sixth appearing only at the margins: