Retail Intelligence articles
Practical writing on building and shipping software: what it costs, how to buy it, and how to get it right. From the engineers who do the work.
Minimum Advertised Price Monitoring: MAP, MSP & Shelf Price
Minimum advertised price monitoring for beverage-alcohol brands: how MAP, MSP and real shelf price differ, and what MAP enforcement can and can't legally do.
Void & Out-of-Stock Reporting: What Distributors Miss
Void, out of stock, phantom inventory and delisted are four different problems with four different fixes. How to tell them apart and price the gap.
Emerging Beverage Brands: Your First Retail Data Stack
How to sequence a retail intelligence stack as an emerging beverage brand: what to build for free, what to buy first, and what to skip until you can act on it.
Retail Execution Tracking: Verify Displays You Paid For
Retail execution tracking for beverage alcohol: how to verify the displays, features and POS material you funded, and what TTB rules actually let you pay for.
Competitor Shelf Tracking for Beverage Alcohol: 4 Methods
Four ways to track competitor shelf presence in beverage alcohol, compared on detection speed, coverage, and cost, plus a DIY store-audit protocol you can run.
Distributor Scorecards: 8 Metrics That Beat Depletions Alone
A distributor scorecard for beverage alcohol brands: 8 metrics, where each number comes from, and which ones your distributor structurally cannot see.
Circana vs NielsenIQ vs Store-Level: Bev-Alc Data Buyer's Guide
Circana vs NielsenIQ for beverage alcohol, plus store-level data: what each layer measures, what to ask each vendor, and what to buy first at your scale.
Independent Liquor Store Data: Where Your Coverage Goes Blind
Why independent liquor store data coverage thins out in syndicated panels, how ACV and projection hide the gap, and a runnable audit to size your own blind spot.
Control-State Data: NABCA, PLCB & What You Can Actually Track
NABCA data explained for supplier-side analysts: what control states publish, what PLCB actually posts, where the formats break, and how to join it to open-state data.
On-Premise vs Off-Premise Data: What Each One Actually Tells You
On-premise vs off-premise data, decision by decision: which channel answers which question, what each one structurally misses, and how to triangulate both.
AI Demand Forecasting for Beverage Distributors (2026)
A practical build guide to AI demand forecasting for beverage-alcohol distributors: data inputs, model choices, the live World Cup 2026 spike, and a 90-day pilot plan.
Depletion Data Explained: VIP, iDIG & SipSource (2026)
What depletion data is, how VIP, iDIG, and SipSource fit together, and how depletions, syndicated scan, and store-level POS differ. A 2026 engineer's field guide.