Why horeca has always been the blind spot

Retail has had sales data for years. Bars, cafés and restaurants haven't, until now.

In retail, drink brands know exactly what sells, where and at what price. In horeca (the on-trade), they have had to work with estimates.

Why retail had data, and horeca didn't

For years, retail sales data has been available to brands. There are three reasons why retail got there first, and why horeca stayed in the dark.

	Retail	Horeca
Who holds the data	A few large retail chains, which share their ticket data.	Thousands of independent bars, cafés and restaurants.
How products are recorded	Products already carry an EAN barcode. No classification needed.	Each venue types product names as it likes in its POS system.
Data culture	Data-sophisticated for a long time.	Not the case, until recently.

Lower volumes, higher margins

For drink producers, horeca has always been very important. Volumes can be lower than in retail, but margins tend to be higher. That makes every decision on price, venues and promotions in the on-trade worth getting right.

Volumes can be lower than in retail, but margins tend to be higher.

Without data, those decisions were hard to make well:

Marketing relied on wholesaler data, surveys and sales-team feedback. Market share, price elasticity and consumption patterns were guesswork.
Sales teams lacked hard facts to support their pitch, and couldn't be sent where they would have the most impact.
Promotion budgets were large, but their real return couldn't be measured.

The key issues are being solved

Four changes now make the on-trade market transparent.

01
POS systems
Point-of-sale systems in horeca now record every sale.
02
The European Data Act
It makes it possible to share anonymised data.
03
AI
AI can reconcile many inconsistent data sources, like the product names typed in each venue.
04
Openness to data
Businesses are more open than ever to deciding with data.

The blind spot is disappearing

For the first time, drink brands can answer the four questions behind every sales and marketing decision (price, place, promotion and product) with real on-trade sales data instead of estimates.

Our case studies show what that looks like in practice, from a 38% price gap between regions to a brand launch focused on the two venue types that really matter.

Key takeaways

Retail had large chains that shared their ticket data, products with barcodes and a long data culture. Horeca had none of these.
Yet horeca matters a lot to drink producers: volumes can be lower, but margins tend to be higher.
Four changes now make on-trade data available: POS systems, the European Data Act, AI and a new openness to data.