Retail grocery is experiencing its most operationally demanding summer in years, and the weak link in the chain isn’t your store. It’s the supplier infrastructure behind it. Grocery prices are rising faster than the 20-year historical average. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, food-at-home prices rose between April-May 2026 and were 2.7% higher than in May 2025. Tariffs, Strait of Hormuz disruptions, and tightening commodity supply are adding cost pressure that most suppliers have limited room to absorb. Especially when seasonal demand is layered on.

When consumer budgets are squeezed and shoppers are making tighter decisions, an empty shelf, a mislabeled pallet, or a late shipment doesn’t just cost you sales. It costs you relationships. And it costs you during the period when food and beverage volumes, including cold beverages, seasonal packaged goods, grilling staples, and snacks are at their highest.

I work with food and beverage brands and distributors at TrueCommerce on supply chain execution, and every summer I watch the same dynamic play out. Retailers who proactively set expectations for their supplier base arrive at peak season with shelves stocked and compliance intact. Retailers who don’t spend that same period managing chargebacks, vendor disputes, and stockouts that they didn’t see coming.

The Supplier Execution Problem Retailers Underestimate

Retailers issue more than $5 billion in chargebacks annually. That number climbs during peak season, not because suppliers suddenly become careless, but because manual processes that were barely adequate at normal volume become genuinely unreliable at scale. Summer demand doesn’t add new challenges to a supplier’s system. It scales up the difficulties and pain points already there. If a supplier’s process was hard to scale in April, it will be harder in July. If it was manual in April, it will be more manual in July.

Consider this scenario. A supplier running order entry manually hits capacity in July. Advance ship notices (ASN) go out late or with errors. Invoices don’t match shipment quantities. Lot numbers and expiration data don’t make it into the documentation accurately. Your automated compliance systems flag most of these errors and trigger chargebacks accordingly. Meanwhile, your vendor management team is fielding disputes from suppliers who are already stretched thin and not positioned to resolve them quickly.

The result is a peak season that generates higher revenue and higher operational friction. That friction has real costs impacting staff time, deduction processing, delayed payment cycles, and in the worst cases, stockouts when a supplier’s fulfillment problems escalate into missed shipments.

What “Supplier Readiness” Actually Looks Like

The suppliers who consistently perform through summer peaks share a few operational characteristics that are worth building into your vendor expectations and your vendor selection criteria:

• Automated order processing – Suppliers still manually re-keying EDI purchase orders into their systems are a chargeback waiting to happen at volume. The ones processing orders automatically, directly into their ERP, without human intervention at each step, maintain accuracy regardless of how many orders hit on a given day. It’s worth noting that automation is most valuable when it’s connected to the supplier’s core business systems, not bolted on alongside them. A supplier running disconnected point solutions must reconcile data manually between systems, which means they carry much of the same risk as a supplier running no automation at all.
• Connected warehouse and 3PL workflows – Suppliers whose warehouse management systems are disconnected from their ERP lose traceability the moment volume spikes. Lot numbers, expiration dates, and shipment confirmations should be traveling with the product automatically, not being manually reconciled after the fact. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) raises the compliance stakes here as well. Accurate lot-level data isn’t just an operational preference, it’s a regulatory requirement.
• Real-time ASN and invoice accuracy – Late or inaccurate ASNs are among the most common triggers for retailer chargebacks. Suppliers with automated ASN generation, triggered by warehouse activity rather than manual entry, send accurate notifications on time because the process doesn’t depend on someone remembering to do it.

A Case Study Worth Paying Attention To

Carrington Farms, the organic and natural foods brand, was processing thousands of manual orders per month before implementing automated EDI workflows. At that volume, manual processing wasn’t just slow, it was a structural ceiling on how much the business could reliably fulfill, and a consistent source of the kinds of documentation errors that generate chargebacks at retail.

After automation, with EDI workflows connected directly into their ERP, incoming orders are processed and invoices generated in under two minutes (down from several hours), at any volume. That kind of scalability comes from integration into the core business system, not from a standalone tool running alongside it. It’s the difference between having capacity and having control. Control is what consistent in-stock performance at retail actually depends on.

What Retailers Can Do Before Peak Season Arrives

The window to shape supplier behavior for this summer is short. A few concrete actions make a measurable difference:

• Audit your chargeback data from last summer by vendor. The suppliers who generated the most deductions last July are most likely to do it again. That list is your priority vendor engagement list for right now.
• Confirm ASN compliance configuration before volumes peak.  You often assume your compliance requirements are understood, while suppliers often assume they’re already meeting them. Closing that gap requires explicit conversation, not assumption.
• Ask suppliers directly about their order processing and warehouse integration. A supplier running on spreadsheets and manual re-keying will tell you if you ask. The answer changes how you plan inventory buffers for peak weeks.
• Build lead time cushion for high-velocity summer SKUs with at-risk suppliers. If a supplier’s documentation process is likely to slow under volume, the best mitigation is not relying on just-in-time replenishment from them during peak weeks.

The Retailers Who Win This Summer Have Already Started

The macroeconomic environment heading into this peak season is genuinely more complex than it has been in recent years. Tariff uncertainty, food price inflation, and supply disruptions mean that the margin for error in the supply chain is narrower for both you and your vendors.

The retailers who set clear expectations, audit supplier readiness, and proactively identify execution risks before demand peaks will be the ones with product on shelves when consumer spending is at its highest. But the ones who don’t will spend peak season managing consequences.

Supplier performance doesn’t fix itself under pressure. It either holds because the infrastructure was built to scale, or it breaks visibly, expensively, and at the worst possible time.

About the author

Justin Woodburn serves as Director of Sales Engineering at TrueCommerce, where he leads technical pre-sales strategy and helps organizations solve complex supply chain and EDI challenges through scalable technology solutions.