There are many challenges the food and beverage industry is facing today. Even though the industry generated a revenue of $0.74 billion in 2022, “shrinkflation” has been a struggle for all manufacturers and consumers.

If you’re not familiar with this term, it essentially means a reduced size for all food or drinks but at the same price. The reduction in sizes, while prices continue to increase, has more than half of the consumers worried. With high exchange rates and increasing costs for ingredients, transport, and packaging, “shrinkflation’ has also driven down profits for many businesses.

If businesses want to continue operating in a competitive market, they need to do more than just try to wait it out. Food and beverage businesses need to evaluate how they are using insights that can help them find lucrative opportunities and gain an edge over their competitors.

Technology and data science tools can help businesses generate insights that will help them keep up with customer tastes and demands, ensure product quality and compliance, and make well-informed business decisions. In this guide, we’ll look at how hiring abig data analytics company like PREDIK Data-Driven can help food and beverage businesses.

Changing Customer Demands and Tastes

Many organizations in the food and beverage industry have failed to restructure their businesses according to changing customer demands and tastes. It’s a real challenge that many businesses worldwide face yet don’t know how to deal with.

However, food and beverage companies can achieve a competitive advantage using the right data analytics solutions. Consumers today prefer to eat and consume things that are healthy and good for the environment.

In today’s digital age, with social media awareness, all food and beverage companies need to be as transparent as they can with their audiences. Millennials expect complete honesty and authenticity from the businesses they purchase from.

They question the food or beverages they are consuming and want to know the source of each ingredient. Not just this, but they also are highly conscious about buying from companies that treat their employees well, offer fair compensation, and provide safe working conditions.

Data analytics is a must for food and beverage manufacturers to keep up with customer states while also building a good relationship with them. Customer analytics solutions can help companies unlock ways to reach their audience and be as innovative as they can.

Making Data-Driven Decisions

Food manufacturers must also use customer analytics to make better, well-informed decisions. Around 64% of people around the world exclude one thing or the other from their diets. Hence, food and beverage companies need to provide them with tailored choices. Even if businesses figure out what the customers want, how can they cater to individual needs?

Customer analytics is the answer. It can help businesses innovate their offering and use artificial intelligence to present highly-personalized products and services to customers by tracking their location across different channels. With advanced data mining techniques, businesses can understand customers better and offer targeted products.

Ensuring Compliance and Quality

Food and beverage businesses don’t just have to deal with competitive pressures and changing customer demands but also ensure compliance and quality. Compliance includes meeting the current regulations as well as future ones. They need to avoid product recalls at all costs. Most global standards are designed to regulate supply chain visibility.

Businesses can use supply chain mapping software and tools to ensure their processes adhere to all standards. If they are using new practices to deliver better quality products and services, they also need to enhance the technology they are using to regulate everything and improve traceability.

Becoming Data-Driven

As we discussed, if food and beverage manufacturers want to compete in the increasingly complex environment, they need to consider data analytics. Once they leverage data analytics, they can survive and thrive in the competition.

Operational efficiency, good quality products, better customer service, and meeting customer demands have always been important. However, what differentiates businesses will be how they manage to gain an edge over their competition using the data available.

The key to success will be competitive intelligence and learning about the market. The market includes suppliers, vendors, customers, and competitors. Embracing innovation and technology to become more data-driven will help companies transform and become more connected.

PREDIK Data-Driven is a big data analytics company based in the US. It’s a research firm with experts from different fields finding and building data science solutions that use big data to solve complex business problems. The company has served clients in the US, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa.

If you are a food and beverage business owner or manager, you can benefit from their advanced data science solutions. Some of their services include supply chain mapping, location intelligence analytics, customer analytics, market intelligence, and competitive intelligence.

Reach out to them to talk to an expert or request a demo today.