After decades working in beverage alcohol, two industry veterans set out to solve one of the three-tier system's most persistent data challenges.
For beverage alcohol suppliers, having data has rarely been the problem. Making sense of it all is another story.
Between distributor depletion reports, ERP systems, pricing structures, and trade spend analysis, suppliers have access to enormous amounts of information about their business. Yet much of that information remains disconnected, leaving sales, finance, and operations teams struggling to develop a complete and consistent picture of wholesale market performance.
It's a challenge Andrew and Mark witnessed and addressed repeatedly throughout their combined 30-plus years working in the beverage alcohol industry.
Across suppliers of different sizes and markets, they encountered the same fundamental problem. Critical business data existed across multiple systems, formats, and spreadsheets, but there was no straightforward way to bring it all together.
The result was an industry accustomed to spending significant time and resources reconciling information before it could be used to make business decisions.
Rethinking the Traditional Approach to Beverage Alcohol Data
Historically, suppliers looking to consolidate their wholesale data faced a complicated and costly path. Building a comprehensive data foundation typically required custom integrations, specialized engineering resources, significant upfront investment, and ongoing maintenance.
For many organizations, the cost and complexity of developing that infrastructure made comprehensive wholesale visibility difficult to achieve.
After decades of working directly with beverage alcohol suppliers, both internally and as consultants, to address these challenges through individualized solutions, Andrew and Mark recognized an opportunity to take a different approach to one of the industry's most persistent problems.
Rather than requiring each supplier to build and maintain its own data infrastructure, they envisioned a platform that could deliver those same foundational capabilities through a depletion-first subscription model designed specifically around the complexities of beverage alcohol distribution.
That vision became DataBacon, a data automation platform developed to give beverage alcohol suppliers end-to-end visibility into wholesale performance.
Decades of Industry Knowledge, Built Into One Platform
Unlike general-purpose business intelligence solutions, DataBacon was developed around the unique data challenges of the three-tier distribution system.
The platform automates the collection, organization, and integration of critical business information, including distributor depletions, ERP and financial data, pricing, and trade spend.
By connecting information that traditionally resides in separate systems, DataBacon helps suppliers establish a more consistent, reliable foundation for understanding sales performance, evaluating market activity, and making financial and operational decisions.
The subscription model also represents a departure from the traditional custom-development approach, making purpose-built data infrastructure accessible without requiring suppliers to assemble their own engineering teams or develop integrations from scratch.
A Different Approach to Wholesale Visibility
As beverage alcohol suppliers face increasing pressure to manage margins, evaluate distributor performance, and make faster decisions across markets, the ability to work from accurate, connected data has become increasingly important.
For DataBacon's founders, the objective was to address a problem they had spent much of their careers navigating - the disconnect between having business data and being able to use it effectively.
Their solution brings decades of firsthand industry experience into a standardized, automated platform designed to eliminate much of the manual work traditionally required to understand wholesale performance.
Learn more about the founders, their industry experience, and the origins of DataBacon at DataBaconTech.com/about.
AI can't fix what it can't trust.
There's a lot of noise right now about what AI can do for beverage alcohol suppliers. Better forecasting. Smarter pricing decisions. Instant answers about what's selling, where distributors are underperforming, and which deals are actually making money.
Sounds great. There's just one problem.
AI is only as good as the data behind it.
When your depletion data doesn't match your ERP, your pricing lives in spreadsheets, and your distributor reports tell three different stories, AI isn't going to magically connect the dots. It'll just give you questionable answers a whole lot faster.
The real opportunity isn't simply adding AI to your technology stack. It's building the connected, governed data foundation that makes AI worth using in the first place.
Because you can't optimize what you can't actually see. And AI can't either.
We dug into what being truly "AI-ready" means for beverage alcohol suppliers, why disconnected data is the bigger problem, and what needs to happen before AI can deliver on all that hype.
DataBacon Reporting and Analytics connects your depletions and ERP data, cleans it automatically, and delivers it straight to the tools your team already uses, like Power BI, Tableau, and Excel. No servers, no data engineers, and no custom warehouse build. Just a clear, end-to-end view of your wholesale performance, delivered as a subscription and up and running in less than a week.
For many wineries, getting a clear view of wholesale performance still means a long, manual process of pulling depletion reports, ERP data, and pricing spreadsheets together. Today, Napa Valley-based DataBacon Technologies launched a subscription platform built to change all that.
DataBacon is launching with its complete Reporting and Analytics and Wholesale Pricing solutions, connecting distributor, finance, operations, and pricing data sources into one clean foundation that works with the reporting and AI tools beverage alcohol suppliers already use. What once required a custom data warehouse project can now be up and running in days.
Its co-founders, who bring more than 30 years of combined beverage alcohol experience, designed the platform to start with what really sold in the market and build financial, pricing, and trade spend visibility from there. DataBacon is independent and supplier-side, and is now available to mid-to-large wineries and spirits producers across the U.S.
We're excited to officially introduce DataBacon to the industry!
Learn how the first subscription-based, end-to-end wholesale data platform, DataBacon, instantly feeds beverage alcohol suppliers the real-time visibility needed to plan smarter, price better, and grow faster.
DataBacon Wholesale Pricing builds your full price grid once, then automatically matches real depletion activity against the deals and DA rates you negotiated. See where pricing is holding up and where it isn't, by distributor, product line, and account, before the invoice or quarter-end reports arrive. Built on the same foundation as DataBacon Reporting and Analytics, it adds centralized pricing management and real-time trade spend visibility without a new data model or separate implementation.