What Separates the Distributors Protecting Margin from the Ones Still Recovering?

This is the third and final article in a three-part blog series drawn from the live discussion, How Food, Beverage, and Alcohol Distributors Turn Known Demand into Protected Margin. In the first two articles, we looked at where promotional planning breaks down and why predictable seasonal peaks still strain execution. In this article, we look at what separates F&B distributors who protect margin under today's pressures from those who don't.

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F&B distributors are contending with real pressure this year, softening demand in some categories, rising freight costs, and new tariffs. None of that is going away, and none of it is fully within a distributor's control.  

What separates the distributors protecting margin from the ones still recovering isn't one clever move, it's four consistent habits:  

1. Planning by the year instead of promotion to promotion

2. Knowing suppliers' own seasonal calendars

3. Reading each promotion for what's driving it

4. Treating finance as a partner rather than an afterthought

During the discussion, Peter Lijewski, who spent years in supply chain leadership at Breakthru Beverage and now is the founder of Enlighten Supply Chain, walked through each one.

First: plan the year, not promotion to promotion

“Great organizations don't go promotion to promotion or seasonality to seasonality, they look at the year,” Lijewski said. He tied that directly to financial planning cycles: “Whatever your planning cycle is, 2027 is only six months away, and some organizations are already doing their financial planning for next year, what does that calendar look like?”

He connected that habit back to something already surfacing earlier in the conversation: “You can't assume that what's going to happen next year is going to be the same as what happens this year.” That assumption creeps in by default when planning happens cycle by cycle, this promotion looks like last year's, so it probably plays out the same way. A full-year calendar forces the opposite habit: asking what's different before the year starts, rather than reacting to each promotion or season as it arrives.

Second: know your supplier's calendar as well as your own

Lijewski's point: distributors are good at planning around their own customers' seasonality, but rarely extend that same thinking to suppliers. "Do you know your supplier's seasonality?" he asked. "We all know, if we're importing wine and spirits, there's the August shutdown in Europe, so we all stock up ahead of time, and we hope to bleed that off." That example is well known across the industry precisely because experienced teams already plan around it.

The example that catches people off guard is the less obvious one. “Another firm I worked with, they were buying folding cartons from a company where approximately 60% of their sales was the ice cream business,” Lijewski said. “What happens to their summer lead times? Their summer lead times increased by three weeks for folding cartons, because the demand was for ice cream.” His takeaway, “You need to build the supplier's seasonality into your plans as well”, not just your own.

Third: know the story behind a promotion, not just the category

The same forward-looking approach applies to sales incentives, not just supplier capacity. Lijewski used tequila as the example: “If a year ago you had a tequila producer who had a heavy incentive to the sales folks, and we just look at that base demand, well, that might not be repeating next year if that incentive to the sales force isn't in place, or somebody else has come in. We know tequila as a category is going to come up, but do we know what brand to carry?” Knowing what's driving a specific promotion, rather than assuming it reflects the broader category trend, is what lets a team plan the next cycle with real confidence instead of a guess.

Lijewski described what that looks like in practice: “Great organizations, the supply chain is getting out with the sales team and understanding what the promotion is about, rather than dealing with the generic of a tequila or whiskey or beer. They're really getting into the specifics of what's happening, and then managing that against my goals if I'm running the supply chain.”

Fourth: make finance your closest ally

Lijewski's last point extends past the supply chain function entirely. “I don't care what level you are, – if you're the leader, your best friend needs to be the CFO,” he said. “If you're somewhere else in the organization, find that partner in finance, so you are talking about the consequences of my actions to the P&L and to cash flow. Because in the end, that's what everybody's talking about in the board meeting: what's our cash look like, what's our ability to pay bills, how much money do we make. They don't care about forecast accuracy, they don't care who said what, they want to know about the P&L.”

The payoff of that habit, he said, compounds: “The more you're communicating with your financial people, the better off the results and the communication. And now the financial organization helps us put pressure on other players in the organization to bring that in.”

Putting it into practice: margin-protection checklist

The distributors handling today's headwinds well aren't doing one clever thing,  they're doing four ordinary things consistently: planning by the year, knowing their suppliers' calendars, reading each promotion for what's driving it, and treating finance as a partner instead of an afterthought. That consistency, more than any single tactic, is what separates them from the ones still recovering. Here's a checklist you can refer to to help your business:

•  Build a full-year planning view, including your own financial planning cycle, rather than treating each promotion or season as its own isolated decision

•  Map key suppliers' seasonal patterns and capacity constraints into your own planning calendar, not just customer demand

•  Separate promotion-driven or incentive-driven demand from true category growth before setting next year's baseline

•  Communicate lead time and forecast risk to finance in cash-flow and working-capital terms, not just service level

•  Build a standing cadence with finance/FP&A, rather than only talking when there's already a problem

•  Speak up on emerging risk early, a margin conversation is easier before it reaches the board, not after

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The Blue Ridge platform is built to give F&B distributors visibility that extends past their own four walls, into supplier capacity, into what's really driving a promotion, and into the working-capital impact of a planning call, so that visibility is built into the tools a team already works in every day, not something they have to go chasing down after the fact.

Across all three articles in this series, the same thread holds: F&B distributors rarely struggle because demand is hard to see. The promotional calendar is known. The seasonal peaks are known. What separates the distributors protecting their margin from the ones losing ground is whether their planning and operations are built to act on what they already know, early enough, and with the right information, to turn known demand into protected margin.