Unilever passes commodity costs on to shoppers, tariffs look set to hold after the midterms, and AI tools put supplier data at risk

Unilever has started passing higher commodity costs on to shoppers, analysts expect tariffs to stay largely where they are after Democrats won both houses of Congress, and a survey finds that AI tools at some supply chain companies have already exposed supplier or customer data.

Unilever raises prices as commodity costs climb

Higher commodity costs pushed Unilever to lift prices across its range by 2.3% in its third quarter, executives told investors on an Oct. 28 call, as reported by Supply Chain Dive. Home care, the division behind Comfort fabric conditioner and Sunlight dish liquid, saw the steepest rise, with prices up 3.6% across that part of the business, according to finance chief Srinivas Phatak.

Phatak said half of the company's cost inflation sits in home care, where it has used "the full levers of pack price architecture". Vegetable and palm oil at historically high prices are among the main pressures, along with kerosene, logistics and exchange rates.

The company held prices close to flat earlier in the year while it waited for clearer signals on supply and costs. Now that supplies are normalizing, chief executive Fernando Fernandez said the company is "accelerating pricing". Unilever still expects more cost inflation in 2027, easing as that year goes on. Colgate-Palmolive is also covering higher costs with a mix of pricing and productivity gains, the report adds.

Why it matters: When a company as large as Unilever starts passing commodity costs through, buyers of oils, packaging, chemicals and cleaning supplies can expect similar requests from their own suppliers. Asking which inputs moved, and by how much, gives a basis for testing a requested increase rather than accepting a flat percentage.

Tariffs look set to hold after the midterm sweep

Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in Tuesday's midterm elections, but most tariffs around the world should stay roughly where they are for the coming year, according to a Moody's analysis reported by CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly. The reason is that import duties are mostly set by executive branches, and few heads of government have changed recently. Many companies would welcome lower duties, said Moody's senior director Andrei Quinn-Barabanov, but "the private sector is more focused on an easier-to-achieve objective of maintaining the tariff status quo".

Where the new Congress may move is permitting. The National Association of Manufacturers pointed to permitting reform as a fix that already has support from both parties, and the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie called it the likeliest route to quicker approvals for gas, transmission and wind projects. Wood Mackenzie said the Iran conflict pushed peak US diesel and jet fuel prices to roughly 2.5 times their pre-war forecasts, and that even as prices ease, the worst-affected fuels should still sit 30% over those forecasts during 2027. David Brown, who leads Wood Mackenzie's global integrated energy research, also warned: "Entrenched partisanship could fuel policy stagnation and regulatory confusion". The new members take their seats in January.

Why it matters: The analysis points to tariff stability rather than relief, so the duty costs already built into landed-cost models are unlikely to fall soon. Energy is where policy could still shift, through permitting rather than tariffs, so buyers with fuel-linked contracts may want to keep surcharge terms under review.

One in six supply chain firms report an AI data exposure

One in six managers at supply chain, logistics, distribution and wholesale companies say that within the last year an AI tool at their firm exposed, shared or wrongly opened up data belonging to suppliers or customers, a survey by Instalily finds, which sells AI agents to businesses, as reported by CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly. The tools already reach sensitive records: 78% of respondents say their AI can see what customers pay and the margins on those sales, and 67% say it can see supplier prices and rebates. Instalily surveyed 250 managers and more senior staff at companies that use AI tools on Oct. 9.

Sixty-three percent say supplier records and customer records mix to some degree in their systems, and 87% express at least some confidence that their AI keeps the two apart, yet incidents turned up in every segment surveyed. Instalily's examples include an AI copying the price agreed with one customer into a quote for a different one, or letting a rival see what a supplier bid. The report recommends testing controls in routine work, for example drafting a quote while keeping a supplier's confidential terms out of it, and deciding when a person must approve. Because the survey comes from a company that sells AI agents, its findings are best read as a prompt for checks rather than a measured industry rate.

Why it matters: Procurement teams hold the same kind of two-sided data: supplier bids, rebates and negotiated prices. Before an AI tool drafts quotes, compares bids or answers supplier questions, buyers can check which records it can retrieve, test it on tasks that mix confidential terms, and keep a human approval step wherever a wrong answer would reveal one party's terms to another.

The thread

Each item is about what buyers can plan around. Supplier prices are still moving with commodities, tariffs are likely to stay where they are, and the AI tools that help buyers move faster need the same data controls as any other system that sees supplier prices.