Data You Need to Forecast Craft Beer Sales & Grow Your Brewery

Effective sales forecasting is a key component of any successful business. With frequent changes in seasonal trends, shifting consumer alcohol preferences, and a diverse range of product offerings, forecasting sales is no easy feat for craft breweries. Balancing beer sales and production needs is hard, so it's essential that you have a robust strategy in place.

Identifying trends in your brewery's sales helps you manage your operations more effectively, and in turn maximize profitability. So how do you do it? Let's breakdown the puzzle:

• Analyze sales history and identify trends
• Use your findings to optimize your production schedule
• Close the feedback loop to drive revenue

Let's dive in!

Understanding your brewery's sales trends is critical for the growth of your brewery, but where do you start? Let's explore key data points that could help you to develop a sales planning strategy.

A great place to start is looking at how your sales volumes fluctuate on a daily, monthly and quarterly basis. This could help you to plan staffing for your taproom, plan beer releases, and deepen your understanding of your seasonal peaks.

Start by looking at the data you're already collecting. Your POS system likely has reports that tell you how much you sell each day. If possible, get this data into a graph to make identifying trends a breeze. Consider using a spreadsheet to convert quantities sold into volumes sold. Take it a step further by filtering this for different recipes. This could help you understand what your bestsellers are in any given month or season. Pair this information with profitability reports to increase revenue.

Use your accounting platform to compare the profit margins of each beer and layer this information over the sales volume for each beer. This could helps you to identify any opportunities to adjust your pricing strategy. Maybe you want to run a discount on an unpopular beer to sell the stock before it expires. On the flip side, maybe some of your popular, but less profitable beers would work better as exclusive seasonal offerings at a higher price point. Make sure to keep tabs on your distribution sales too. By identifying trends there, you can be sure you have everything you need ahead of each delivery which will keep your customers happier and inspire loyalty. Use your findings to plan and prioritize your production schedule.

Once you know what your bestsellers are within each season, and what beers yield the highest margins, share this information with your brewmaster. This could inform their production schedule and make prioritizing their workload much easier

Plan out your brews for the upcoming period and then use this as a guideline to plan your purchases. This way you can order all of the raw materials that you need for your upcoming brews so that they show up just in time for brew day, freeing up shelf space, and improving your cashflow. Depending on how you manage inventory, you could even set low inventory alerts for beers that you know sell fast in any given season.

This isn't a one and done job, you'll want to consistently monitor your brewery's sales trends. The more you track sales data, the more you empower yourself to make better decisions for your business. Use your findings to inform your marketing efforts, strengthen your brand and help your brewery and taproom flourish.

Interested in how brewery management software could help simplify this process and improve the accuracy of your reporting? Click here to book a personalized chat with one of our team members.