The Food and Beverage (F&B) market has an ever-changing dynamic trends. With evolving consumer needs and intensifying competition along with razor-thin margins, it is necessary for an F&B company to keep pace with the changing market conditions. But it’s easier said than done. The Food and Beverage industry has too many aspects and metrics, and it generates a huge amount of data. Analysing each of them manually to discover the sales, consumption, delivery, and other patterns is an uphill task. This is where Tableau comes in. With Tableau, any F&B business can analyse big data quickly and effortlessly discover the hidden insights beneath it. These insights are extremely valuable and can help a business stay ahead of the curve.
The manufacturers, distributors and retailers in the food and beverage industry are experiencing a rapid change in consumer behaviour with each passing year. The pandemic has accelerated this change. Along with that, the global supply chain is in for a big overhaul, thanks to the pandemic.
Anticipating the fast-evolving consumer trends and realigning the business operations with the trends is the key to achieve a differentiation strategy. This is only possible when we analyse consumer data and combine it with business data. However, taming this data is not easy. Too much data can actually turn out to be counterproductive if you don't have any tool to analyse it. Tableau does this job of analysing the huge amount of data and visually presenting it so that you can easily and quickly gain insights from it.
A 1000-column data and an interactive bar chart presenting the same data: Which one is easier to examine and analyse?
Tableau presents thousands of columns of data in a visual format so that you get exactly the insight that you were looking for. For example, after the pandemic subsided, people's buying patterns have changed a lot. There are some products that most people are inclined to buy offline, and then there are some products that are mostly bought online. To analyse this changed buying pattern, companies have to combine the offline and online data and visualise them in the form of charts and plots.
The Food and Beverage industry is a highly fragmented industry with too many small and medium stakeholders. If you examine the case study provided on the Tableau website, you will see that Pepsi was suffering from this exact issue. Pepsi had its own tracking system, and the retailers it partnered with had their own different kinds of tracing systems. So Pepsi was receiving a huge amount of disparate data. Hence, the data remained useless until it found a way to combine and analyse the disparate data.
What Pepsi did was, use Hadoop to combine the disparate data and then it connected the data to Tableau to analyse it. This power of data gave Pepsi the upper hand to predict store sales and replenish the retailers before their shelves got empty.
Ecommerce is the order of the day. Today consumers are keener to order food online. However, there are some food items that consumers tend to buy from physical stores. Gaining clarity on multi-channel sales can give an F&B company an edge. The company can gauge which product is popular offline and which is popular online. They can analyse the demographic and gender data and analyse which part of the population is more inclined to buy a certain product online and vice versa. The possibilities are endless. Without Tableau, you have to face too many hurdles with spreadsheets to hunt for the data that you need. Uneecops is your leading Tableau partner rendering exact business solutions.
Amit Kumar is a guest blogger and is well known to predict market trends. Check out his blog at Digital Drona