For the first time in years, the headline procurement objective is not savings. The Hackett Group’s 2026 Procurement Agenda and Key Issues Study ranks supply continuity as the top priority, ahead of cost reduction. That reversal sits at the centre of any honest conversation about supply chain resilience hospitality procurement teams need to have in 2026. The supplier scorecard, often a quiet artefact of category management, is the place where the new ranking gets translated into actual buying behaviour.
This post sets out the case for re-weighting that scorecard. It compares two approaches: a price-weighted scorecard that has dominated hospitality category reviews for the last decade, and a continuity-weighted scorecard that more accurately reflects the 2026 risk environment. Neither is universally correct. The strategic question is which weights survive contact with the next twelve months.
The 2026 reversal: what the data says
Hackett’s study, based on responses from procurement leaders globally, is unusually direct on the reordering. Supply continuity overtakes cost reduction as the leading procurement objective, with AI-enabled technology and operating model transformation entering the top tier for the first time (Ironclad summary of the Hackett 2026 study).
The enterprise risk picture explains the move. Trade wars now sit at number two on the enterprise-wide risk register, with 42% of respondents flagging the issue as a major concern and a further 36% as a moderate one. Cybersecurity remains the single most prevalent risk (Ironclad summary of the Hackett 2026 study). Procurement workloads are projected to rise 8% in 2026 while headcount falls 0.9% and operating budgets contract 0.4%, with a projected 6.1% increase in technology spend to close the gap (Ironclad summary of the Hackett 2026 study).
Freight markets corroborate the macro picture. Far East to Mediterranean long-term contract rates entering Q1 2026 averaged USD 2,308 per FEU, 45% above the end of 2023 baseline. Far East to North Europe contract rates averaged USD 2,010 per FEU, 58% above 2023 (Xeneta, January 2026). Average monthly capacity through the Suez Canal sat at roughly 292,000 TEU in 2025, against 4.1 million TEU in 2023, before the Red Sea disruption (Xeneta, January 2026).
For hospitality buyers, this matters because the categories most exposed to long-haul freight (electronics in guestroom refresh cycles, OS&E porcelain and stoneware, certain F&B specialty SKUs) still carry a structural premium versus pre-crisis baselines, even as rates soften from the 2024 spike.
Why hospitality felt the shift later than other sectors
Hospitality procurement has historically lagged manufacturing and retail in the formalisation of supplier risk metrics. In our view, that lag is partly cultural and partly structural. F&B procurement runs on weekly cycles with multiple local suppliers per category, which masks single-source exposure at the SKU level. OS&E and capex categories run on multi-year refresh cycles, which delays the moment when a disrupted supplier becomes visible in operating data.
HOTREC’s 2026 commentary captures the operating environment. The April assembly flagged energy, aviation fuel, and oil as connected pressure points, with industry voices estimating a potential 9% impact on hotel profitability from a 30% energy increase (HOTREC General Assembly 2026 coverage). STR and Tourism Economics project full-year 2026 RevPAR growth of 0.6% for US hotels, with GOP margins revised down 2.3 percentage points mainly on F&B cost expectations (CoStar US hotel forecast assumptions, February 2026).
Tight margins normally argue for harder cost negotiation. The 2026 evidence argues differently. When margins are tight and a single supplier disruption forces a same-day substitute at uncontrolled price, the realised cost is materially worse than any negotiated saving on the original SKU. Continuity becomes a cost lever, not a substitute for one.
Approach A: the price-weighted scorecard
A typical hospitality price-weighted scorecard allocates roughly 60% to landed cost and savings against baseline, 20% to service level and on-time delivery, 10% to quality and returns, and 10% to commercial and contractual factors. Variants exist, but the centre of gravity is price.
The approach has real strengths. It is auditable, it aligns to the financial KPIs procurement is measured against, and it produces clear winners during competitive tendering. In stable supply markets it works. The weakness is that it underweights the probability and impact of disruption. A supplier with the lowest landed cost and a single production site in a geopolitically exposed corridor scores well until the corridor closes.
Hackett’s data, with 42% of leaders flagging trade wars as a major enterprise risk (Ironclad summary), suggests the probability term has moved.
Approach B: the continuity-weighted scorecard
A continuity-weighted scorecard reallocates the weights. A workable starting point: 35% landed cost, 25% continuity and multi-source readiness, 15% lead-time variability, 10% geopolitical and corridor exposure, 10% service and quality, 5% commercial and contractual.
Continuity and multi-source readiness asks a binary question per critical SKU: is there a qualified, contractable second source that can be activated within an agreed lead time. Lead-time variability tracks the standard deviation of delivered lead time over the last twelve months, not the headline quoted lead time. Geopolitical and corridor exposure flags suppliers whose production or primary freight corridor sits in a region rated elevated by an external risk index.
This is heavier to operate. It requires data the existing supplier master does not always hold, and it asks category managers to score risk dimensions they may not have been trained on. For categories where annual spend is below a meaningful threshold, the additional cost of operating the scorecard may exceed the risk it prices. The continuity-weighted approach is for the categories where a disruption hurts.
How to choose the weights for your portfolio
In our view, the right answer is not a single scorecard applied uniformly across categories. It is a tiered model. Tier 1 categories (mission-critical SKUs with no easy substitute, capex categories on long refresh cycles, food safety-sensitive items) move to a continuity-weighted scorecard. Tier 2 categories (commodity F&B, OS&E with abundant supply) stay closer to price-weighted, with continuity treated as a qualifying threshold rather than a scored dimension. Tier 3 (low-spend, low-risk) keeps the existing approach.
The decision rule per category is two-dimensional: probability of disruption multiplied by operational impact. A high-probability, high-impact category earns the continuity weighting. A low-probability, low-impact category does not, because the operating cost of the scorecard is not justified.
The supporting structures matter. GPO programmes that have invested in supplier diversification can pre-qualify second sources at scale, which lowers the cost of operating a continuity-weighted scorecard for member hotels. Independent operators and smaller groups face a harder problem and may need to compensate through tighter contractual terms (capacity reservations, alternate-source clauses) rather than full dual sourcing.
The execution gap: data and people
The harder question is not which weights to choose. It is whether the supplier master and the team have the data and the discipline to operate a continuity-weighted scorecard at all. Geopolitical exposure scoring requires a primary production location per supplier and a refresh cadence on that field. Lead-time variability requires clean delivery date data over twelve months. Multi-source readiness requires an active second-source register that is not allowed to go stale.
Hackett’s projection of an 8% workload increase against falling headcount (Ironclad summary) is the constraint. The continuity-weighted scorecard cannot be operated by hand at scale. The 6.1% projected increase in procurement technology spend is the lever, though our view is that the lever only works when the underlying data model is fit for purpose first. The EUDR-driven push for hotel F&B traceability is a parallel example of the same data discipline problem.
Supply chain resilience hospitality procurement: what we would do in 2026
We would start by re-tiering the category portfolio against the two-dimensional disruption rule, then re-weight the scorecard only on the categories where the math justifies it. We would publish the new weights to category managers and to the finance partners who track procurement savings, so that the reporting line absorbs the change at the same time as the buying behaviour. We would invest in the supplier master fields that the new scorecard depends on before deploying it, not after.
The Hackett reversal is not a permanent state of the world. Supply continuity may yield the top slot back to cost in two or three years if the geopolitical and freight environment stabilises. The scorecard architecture should be flexible enough to re-weight again when that happens. What is durable is the discipline of pricing risk explicitly, rather than letting the price column carry the weight by default.