6 replies to this topic

[ParkerBarrowKJ]

I have been asked to benchmark my company's plant-controllable consumer complaint rate against others in the industry. I would appreciate if people could share their data semi-anonymously to help me out.

 

If you can, please share your:

- 2025 complaints per million units produced or sold (depending how you calculate)

- type of product (bakery, canned goods, juice, snack foods, frozen meals, etc)

- vague size of your facility (are your products in every household, or did you just start up 5 years ago? do you sell a million units per year or a million each month?)

 

 

I am not looking for advice on how to calculate CPM; I am simply looking for others to share a brief snapshot of their results. 

I have been in FS&QA for 15 years. I spent 6 years working on customer complaints for very large facilities with 100+ complaints per week and have transitioned to smaller companies where 1 per week is concerning, so I know there are a lot of variables. 

[GMO]

I can't share details on current and former employers but one thing I'd say is having exported internationally from the UK, UK complaint rates are not comparable to other countries. I've had the same batch of product with longer shelf life in EU and US markets have less than 100th of the complaints UK consumers raise.

 

We really love to complain. And some retailers have consumers who REALLY love to complain (e.g. Marks and Spencers).

 

But over the years and across retailers I'd say things like prepared, complex chilled foods are usually around the 10-20 CPMU and ambient, highly processed foods are often well below 10 CPMU. But in some non UK markets with the same products, we got 0 complaints.

[Scampi]

Where I am we average less than 5 food safety complaints/10 million units sold

total complaints is closer to 100/10 million units sold  

 

We are a incredibly high volume grocery staple, and folks do complain, but the vast majority of the complaints we receive are relative to consumer perception 

[The Prof]

Hi all,

 

I work at a chilled ready-to-cook ready meal factory. All products are our own brand (no retail branded products). The shortest shelf life is 7 days, and the longest is 10 days. Output is 25 million individual products per annum. Our consumer complaints figure is <90 complaints per million.  

Edited by The Prof, 13 April 2026 - 02:54 PM.

[ParkerBarrowKJ]

Thank you to those who provided information!

I work with ultra-processed, RTE chilled products for our own brand. We sell around 10 million units per year in multiple countries, mostly in the USA. Our worst months are around 7 CPM. In the name of continuous improvement, we're always striving to do better but questioning if that's even possible. 

[G M]

Across several US production facilities with retail output of approximately 450 million units we see rates between 1 and 20 CPM with RTE meats.

 

Certain packaging forms are more prone to problems, vacuum sealed items are far less prone to certain failures than MAP.  The size (price) is a significant multiplier motivating consumer level complaints, with one or two orders of magnitude difference in CPM moving from one ounce to one pound.

 

I don't recall a significant UK factor, but we definitely see a 4x increase for Canada compared to the US.

[GMO]

One thing I've found in the UK is the complaint rate is very much correlated with how easy to make it for consumers to complain. And this does not mean a high complaint rate is "false" either. Many people won't bother. It's also correlated with the value of the product. Complaining has got to be "worth" the time of the consumer.

 

In one factory, we had a known quality issue once which people would notice that wasn't enough for a product to be recalled (it wasn't a food safety issue) but it would be noticed. It was a small amount of product as well for the line.

 

Our complaint rate was 1 in 200 for that. So for every 200 people who got the issue, 199 didn't complain (and we had a free way of contacting, I can't remember if it was a free phone number or email address but it was on each pack so we made it pretty easy.)

 

I've seen this too with retailer branded products. Some retailers I'd get a complaint of 2 CPMU and another I'd get a complaint of 50 CPMU on virtually the same product or at least the same manufacturing techniques. Just the second retailer had a higher price and easier to use complaints system which captured complaints well. The former required you to write a letter!

 

So all of that means the 7 CPMU you have might be 2 CPMU if sold elsewhere or 100 if in another country. Doesn't mean you can't improve food safety or quality. Perhaps you need a different leading indicator to see if the performance is improving? E.g. taste panel results?

 

I think looking at the total score and deciding if you can get better because of the number is the wrong way of looking at it. You can always get better. Even if all you're doing is preventing people who wouldn't have complained from buying your competitor product next time.