The Lean Brewery and Its Data-Driven Edge

Walk down the alcohol-beverage aisle of your grocery, convenience, or package store today and yet again, you’re reminded of your new beverage reality—such a tremendous number of beer options: Pink Grapefruit Ale, Salted Caramel Triple Fudge Stout, Yuzu Lemon & Ginger NA, When the Vibes Were Poppin’ IPA, and other names that double as indie-band EPs or breakup texts. It’s a wild shelf out there—the variety of craft beers is exploding endlessly thanks to modern consumers’ curiosity, affinity for health-conscious options, and lack of brand loyalty. To add fuel to the fire, production costs are rising across the board—from hops and malt to steel equipment and shrink wrap—tightening margins even more. The pressure is here, and it is real.

Given this changing consumer and economic landscape, as a brewer, you are forced to consider how to be agile and adopt a leaner production to save time, cut costs, streamline operations, and grow smart. In other words, the key to success in today’s dynamic and competitive market is to become the “lean brewery”—optimizing the performance of your investments, assets, processes, etc. And becoming a “lean brewery” can happen only when you have centralized data and a deep understanding of it.

How Data Enables Smart Growth

Tech has become too advanced for breweries to still rely on disparate production systems, multiple spreadsheets, and outdated data. Production Cloud is an all-in-one platform that serves as a single source of truth, providing real-time numbers and analytics throughout the production process. Accurate and unified information lets you uncover operational gaps, identify revenue opportunities, and drive sustainable growth for your brewery.

With the right insights, you can:

• Confidently diversify your portfolio through multi-segment production
• Align SKU rationalization with performance-driven planning
• Optimize asset allocation
• Explore copacking as a strategic revenue stream

Diversifying Your Product Portfolio through Multi-Segment Production

Gone are the days when loyal consumers stick with a single brand and when breweries can rely on a single flagship to drive growth. With the explosion of options on the shelf, today’s drinkers are explorers—sampling across styles, formats, and brands. Curiosity is replacing loyalty, and brand affinity is earned sip by sip, not assumed.

Diversifying product portfolios is a must—think core beers and nonalcoholic beverages (NAs), RTDs, and seltzers. From Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, Beer Business Daily reported those last three categories actually grew almost 25 percent in volume and 16 percent in share, reaching 9 percent share of overall packaged on-premise offerings. And from January 2024 to January 2025, health-conscious options such as NAs saw 33 percent growth in sales, according to BrewBound.

With real-time data, you can see which categories are growing in popularity. You can then prioritize production of higher performing existing SKUs and/or craft new recipes.

But that’s not all. Good data that connect the maker to the market also provide a level of visibility into your distributor sales activity, giving you a clearer picture of the retail market. With those details, you can assess and fill the gaps in your distributors’ portfolio and make tailored product recommendations. The result is a stronger relationship and trust with your distributors, unlocking more strategic growth opportunities.

Aligning SKU Rationalization with Performance-Driven Planning

Real-time analytics on inventory and sales allow for smarter decision-making on which SKUs are selling best according to what channel. This empowers production teams to assess which products and channels to pour more attention and resources into. At the same time, data also let you see which products are contributing to margin drag and should be dropped, so you can reallocate those resources elsewhere to optimize performance and revenue.

Optimizing Asset Allocation

Brewing equipment is already costly enough with its upfront price and its ongoing maintenance costs. By leveraging data on brewing schedules and tank/equipment usage, you can pinpoint efficiencies that directly translate to revenue. For instance, the numbers may reveal which tanks are being underutilized, letting you assess the opportunity cost of idle assets. You can then repurpose this equipment to expand into high-growth categories such as NAs, RTDs, spirits, etc. Alternatively, you can leverage it as an additional revenue stream by becoming a copacker or contract brewer for other breweries.

Exploring Copacking

According to Grand View Research, the copacking market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12.1 percent from 2021 to 2028. That growth signals a significant shift: breweries are increasingly embracing copacking. Having data on your workforce, equipment production capabilities, and raw-ingredient COGS is crucial when you’re deciding whether to scale up internally or partner with a copacker. This information helps you assess whether it’s more cost-effective to invest in new equipment and team members to launch your own brand or to outsource small-batch, experimental SKUs to a copacker without overextending on space and capital.

Alternatively, if your production data show underutilized space or idle equipment, you can offer copacking services for interested breweries looking to quicken their speed-to-shelf process in new beverage categories.

Re-evaluate Your Current System and Dataset

Innovating to meet shifting consumer preferences and the challenges of today’s tight economy has never been more critical. Yet, it’s not just about cutting costs where you can. The path to becoming a lean brewery starts with having centralized data that can be analyzed.

In turn, it’s important to consider these questions:

• Does your system provide end-to-end production support?
• Does your platform offer real-time data for strategic decision-making?
• Does your tech stack better connect the “maker” to the “market”?

So, the next time you walk down that alcohol-beverage aisle, know that the brewers winning today aren’t just creative; they’re lean and data-driven producers who’ve learned to do more with less. If you’re ready to join the winners’ circle, contact us today.