Strategic external intelligence for consumer and retail

External risk intelligence is the continuous, quantified measurement of the risks that reach a consumer business from outside: product safety and recall, activist and consumer campaigns, sourcing and labour controversy, regulatory change and reputational damage. Polecat provides this as Strategic External Intelligence for retail, consumer goods and food and beverage companies, scoring each brand and each issue out of 100, benchmarking against peers and projecting three to six months ahead, with every score traceable to its evidence. How Polecat works

Polecat scores a campaign week on week for prominence, rate of change, reach and the authority of the voices carrying it, which shows whether it is building, plateauing or fading. Because the archive holds two decades of resolved events, a live campaign is compared with how similar campaigns against comparable brands developed and resolved. This gives corporate affairs and brand teams a measured basis for deciding whether to engage, prepare or hold, rather than reacting to volume alone. The reputation and communications view

Polecat tracks the regulators and standards bodies that govern consumer products, including the FDA, CPSC and FTC in the United States, the Food Standards Agency, Competition and Markets Authority and Office for Product Safety and Standards in the United Kingdom, and the European Commission and national authorities under the General Product Safety Regulation. Coverage follows each from consultation and guidance through investigation, recall and enforcement, alongside trade and consumer press. Clients define which product categories and markets apply.

Yes. Polecat follows the development and enforcement of rules on environmental claims, labelling and packaging, including the UK Green Claims Code, EU rules on green claims and empowering consumers, and US FTC guidance, together with the NGO and media scrutiny that usually precedes enforcement. Movement is scored for direction and velocity by market, so marketing, legal and sustainability teams see where a claim category is attracting attention before a regulator acts.

Polecat scores suppliers, sourcing regions and commodities for labour, environmental, ingredient and tariff risk, with early warning on deforestation and forced labour compliance, ingredient safety and trade disruption. Coverage draws on NGO investigations, regulatory records, local press and trade sources across 195 countries, and applies to any tier of the supply chain where a supplier can be named. Sourcing and sustainability teams see named exposure by supplier, region and ingredient, with the evidence behind each score.

Yes. Polecat provides early warning on disputes, union campaigns and workforce pressure across owned, franchised and supplier sites, scored for momentum and reach and grouped by region and brand. Local and regional sources are covered alongside national press, so an issue surfacing in one market is visible before it spreads. Operations, HR and communications teams receive alerts routed by severity, with a consolidated view of labour and franchise risk on the live dashboard.

Yes. Polecat scores each brand, business unit and the parent company as separate entities on the same basis, so a consumer goods group can see which brands are driving exposure and how each compares with its direct competitors. Scores roll up to the group view for the board while remaining traceable to brand-level events. Escalation at one brand is flagged before it affects the portfolio’s reputation.

Social listening counts mentions and sentiment on social channels. Polecat measures conversations and outcomes across more than 1.4 million premium sources, including regulators, NGOs, academia, investors and trade press as well as media and social, and scores each event for severity, velocity, sentiment, authority, reach and history against two decades of comparable events. The result is a quantified, peer-benchmarked risk index with a projection, rather than a volume chart. Many consumer brands run Polecat alongside their listening tools as the judgement layer.

At Wendy’s, 25 per cent of documented risks first surfaced through Polecat’s horizon scanning, before they were identified by any internal channel. The figure reflects Polecat’s coverage of sources that sit outside a company’s own view, such as regulator memos, think tank research, NGO reports and academic commentary, scored and routed to the right team while there is still time to act. Bob Bowman, Chief Risk Officer at Wendy’s, describes the approach as gathering everything, because you cannot model what you cannot see.

Teams choose how they consume Polecat: alerts routed by severity when a posting clears a threshold, a daily briefing on what changed in the last 24 hours, live dashboards, executive briefs on themes to escalate, AI question and answer over the data, or direct platform access. Every format runs on the same live, outside-in view, so the alert a brand manager receives in the morning and the board report at quarter end are drawn from the same scores. The risk and compliance view