Weissbeerger, the company that’s turning drinks into data, announced its official partnership with Lancer, a leading manufacturer and marketer of beverage dispensing systems serving customers throughout the world. The partnership is the first of its kind in the beverage industry. It will provide unique capabilities to retailers and beverage manufacturers by harnessing and leveraging the power of big data, analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to offer retailers and beverage manufacturers the first operating platform that will turn their existing Lancer Fountain Dispensers into “smart” dispensers. Coca-Cola and its U.S.-based quick-serve restaurant customers, Carl’s Jr. and Hardees, are the first to premier and pilot the launch of this technology and partnership.
A quick and simple installation of the Weissbeerger Beverage Analytics technology product in Lancer beverage dispensing systems will enable the enormous transformation of more than 500,000 machines in the U.S. into “smart” machines. World-class beverage companies such as Coca-Cola have already embraced this technology and are testing its impact with their retail customers.
“This agreement propels technological disruption for the beverage industry unlike anything that’s been done before, says Ilan Sobel, COO for Weissbeerger. “With our technology installed in Lancer machines, we are able to offer fountain beverage manufacturers and customers unparalleled insights and analytical data that will revolutionize the way they operate across every element of the fountain value chain.”
“This partnership allows us to offer critical insights for our customers,” says John Hawkins, vice president of business development of Lancer. “The data can increase sales and will act as an intelligence hub to better understand consumer behavior and demand unlike ever before.”
“It's important to have an ecosystem of connected tools that easily integrate into our existing beverage platform,” says Scott Woodburn, vice president of national sales at Coca-Cola Foodservice and on-premise at Coca-Cola North America Group. “The Weissbeerger technology did just that and we have been very impressed with its ability to enable us to better understand our business and to make smarter business decisions across the fountain business."
With this partnership, retailers and beverage manufacturers can now step-change the sales volume and revenue performance of their fountain machine assets. This includes recording and analyzing sales trends by machine and by valve. It also provides real-time dashboards for both the retail customer and the beverage manufacturer to leverage, drive actions, and to improve their business performance across the end-to-end value chain.
With real-time consumption data, retail marketers can more efficiently gauge the individual performance impact of all elements of the marketing mix and their trade spend activities. With these insights they can optimize their marketing and trade spend productivity.
It also allows for optimizing the portfolio of brands across each machine by removing non-performing valves and replacing them with brands that will drive incremental volume, optimizing pricing by day part and to conduct dynamic pricing promotions where consumers are offered lower pricing at key time segments when store traffic levels are traditionally slow. It also enables retailers to view machine performance and key aspects such as temperature of the cooling system and carbonation levels available.
The benefits of the partnership also extend to the supply chain, where retailers will now have better visibility into what brand, by volume they need to order, enabling them to optimize working capital by preventing excess inventory orders, over-ordering and reducing out of stock occurrences. In the future, as beverage manufacturers connect their order management systems to the Weissbeerger platform, they will also significantly reduce their cost-per-serve as ordering will be done by the retailer with the click of a button based on volume predictions made by the Beverage Analytics solution.
