Howden has launched a dedicated US Food and Beverage Practice to help companies across North America address what the broker describes as increasingly interconnected risks - a characterisation that is more analytically precise than it might first appear. The three principal pressures facing US food and beverage companies in 2026 are not independent: a tariff-driven reformulation that requires new ingredients can simultaneously create a labeling exposure and generate a recall risk, with each triggering the next in a cascade that a standard single-line insurance program was not designed to contain. That cascade logic is what a dedicated practice with cross-disciplinary risk management, loss mitigation and risk financing capability is specifically built to address.
The FDA reported 295 food and beverage recalls in 2025, up from 261 the prior year, with the Consumer Product Safety Commission logging 357 recalls against 333 in 2024. Legal observers expect that trend to continue driving consumer class action litigation in 2026, with plaintiffs increasingly pairing recall announcements with claims under state consumer protection statutes - meaning a single product failure can generate both a recall cost and a litigation exposure simultaneously.
The FDA's planned phaseout of petroleum-based synthetic dyes by the end of 2026 is compounding that recall risk by pushing manufacturers toward reformulation. New ingredients mean new sourcing relationships, new supply chain dependencies and new labeling requirements - each of which creates fresh exposure at precisely the moment manufacturers are already under cost pressure from other directions. Litigation tied to "natural," "plant-based" and other labeling claims has continued to expand across food, beverage and supplement categories, meaning reformulation done under time pressure carries elevated litigation risk alongside the operational challenges.
A Lineage Logistics survey of 1,000 supply chain decision-makers across the US, Canada and Mexico found that 73% of food companies expect tariffs to hurt their finances in 2026, with more than half saying the cost impact in 2025 was already higher than expected. Industry analysts have noted that tariff-driven cost increases typically take 12 to 18 months to reach consumer prices, meaning much of the financial impact from 2025's trade actions is still working through supply chains this year - and hitting margins at the same moment recall and litigation exposure is elevated.
The practice will serve large consumer-facing businesses, multi-unit operators, distributors and packaging and product companies. It is led by Matt Replogle, managing director, food and beverage, who brings more than two decades of industry and risk management experience to what Howden describes as one of the most operationally challenging sectors in the market.
The launch is the latest step in Howden's build-out of its US retail broking business. Howden US was formed in 2025 through the combination of Atlantic Group and Gravitas, and in early 2026 its US, Latin America and Caribbean operations were united under Howden Americas, with Mike Parrish as CEO overseeing the region.
The launch adds Howden to a small but growing group of brokers building out dedicated food and beverage capability, as recall activity, tariff exposure and labeling litigation continue to reshape the risk profile facing US processors, manufacturers and distributors.
