Known Demand, Lost Margin: Why F&B Promotional Planning Breaks Down

This is the first article in a three-part blog series drawn from the webinar, How Food & Beverage, and Alcohol Distributors Turn Known Demand into Protected Margin. Over the next two articles, we'll look at why predictable seasonal peaks strain warehouse and buying operations, and how F&B distributors can protect margin as freight costs, tariffs, and softening category demand squeeze profitability.

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Every F&B distributor knows a promotion is coming. The dates are set weeks, sometimes months, in advance, a promotional calendar for beer and cider, a Q4 push for wine and spirits, a promotional lift that drives a disproportionate share of volume for food distributors. And yet promotional planning is still where a lot of F&B buying teams lose control of their inventory, not because they didn't see it coming, but because the information needed to act on it, never made it to the right desk in time.

What a complete promotion request needs to include

Promotional planning works when everyone across the organization understands the different types of promotions and events coming through, and what must happen operationally to get each one into the system correctly. It breaks down when whoever requests the promotion doesn't hand the buyer enough information to act on, specifically, whether it's a flow-through buy or a special buy, and whether the event should be filtered out of baseline demand once it's over.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. If a promotion isn't cleanly flagged and later filtered out of the baseline, the temporary lift gets baked into next year's “normal” demand, and the forecast drifts a little further off every cycle after that. When the handoff fails, Brian Bennett, Director of Purchasing at Empire Distributors, describes the fix as straightforward: “re-educate the organization on the process, the definitions, and exactly what information the buying team needs before a promotion can be actioned.”

Mike Mills, Solutions Architect Lead at Blue Ridge, spent years on the buying side before joining the company. He describes a familiar version of the same problem: a promotion notification would arrive with the launch just 7 days out, but his lead time to bring that product in was 10 days. The math never worked. He was left, as he put it, "expecting to do some magic" to get the promotional inventory in place in time. His takeaway: "communication is key."

Promotional start and end dates aren't just a calendar entry for the sales or marketing team, they exist to protect the integrity of the forecast once the promotion ends, by cleanly separating incremental promotional demand from the baseline the buyer plans against every other week of the year.

Define the goal before you buy

Before you plan a promotion, you need to know what you want from it. Are you optimizing for profit, in which case some extra inventory on hand might be the right call? Or are you optimizing for zero leftover stock at the end, which is a meaningfully different buying strategy. Without a stated goal, a buyer has no way to judge whether the outcome was a success.

Peter Lijewski, who spent years at Breakthru Beverage as a supply chain leader, and is now the founder at Enlighten Supply Chain, used this year's World Cup as an example: “Nike ran out of men's jerseys after the US team's early exit, and the instinct afterward perhaps was to look for who to blame for the stockout. But if the actual goal going in was avoiding aging inventory and end-of-season discounting, running lean and selling out might have been exactly the right outcome.”  

Knowing the goal changes what “correct” looks like, and without it, teams end up arguing about the wrong problem after the fact.

The 75% problem: why your lead time math is probably wrong

The clearest, most specific number Lijewski raised in the conversation: at one company he worked with, 75% of promotions were communicated to suppliers later than two weeks into an 8-week lead time, a pattern common across wine and spirits, but familiar in food and other beverage categories too. That gap forces a scramble every time: expediting, paying freight premiums, and absorbing cost that a slightly earlier heads-up to the supplier would have avoided entirely.

His advice applies well beyond alcohol distribution: “Know your supplier's real lead time, and know it in both directions:, when you need product to ship, and separately, when you need it in-house, put away, and  ready to sell. Those are two different dates. Buying teams that only track the ship date are routinely surprised when ‘on time’ from the supplier still isn't early enough to hit the promotion's start.”

A promotional planning checklist for F&B buyers

The pattern across all of this is the same: promotional failures rarely come from a bad forecast. They come from information that doesn't reach the right person, buyer, planner or supplier, in time to act on it. Use this as a quick audit of your own promotional process:

•  Promotion requests carry complete information up front, event dates, buy type (flow-through vs. special buy), and whether to filter the event from baseline demand

•  Lead time is confirmed in both directions: supplier ship date and in-house sell-ready date, tracked as two separate milestones

•  Every promotion has a stated goal: Profit, sell-through, zero leftover, etc. and it should be agreed on before you buy against it

•  Suppliers receive notice as early as physically possible, not just inside their stated lead-time window

•  Post-promotion demand is cleanly separated from baseline, so the forecast doesn't quietly drift after every cycle

•  Actual sell-through gets reviewed against the stated goal, and that feedback shapes how the next promotion is planned

Most of this is a communication and coordination discipline, and it's exactly the kind of gap that closes when promotion details, lead times, and baseline filtering live in one connected system instead of scattered across emails and spreadsheets.

Promotional planning is usually the first place a disconnected process shows up, and it's one of the more fixable ones once buyers, planners, and suppliers are working from the same information at the same time. Getting the handoff right protects this quarter's promotional margin and keeps next year's forecast honest.  

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In the next article in this series, we'll look at why seasonal peaks create the same kind of execution strain, even when the demand itself is completely predictable.