I've spent my career on pretty much every side of this business, supplier, distributor, operator, consultant, and if there's one thing that never changes, it's that the best conversations happen in person. That's the whole idea behind the VIP Customer Roadshow.
We kicked off this year with stops in Tampa and Houston back in June (and we’ll be doing two more in September in Columbus, OH and Philadelphia, PA). New faces, familiar faces, real conversations, and honestly, a lot of sharp questions that told me our customers are thinking hard about where this industry is headed.
A Full Day, Built Around You
This isn't a quick meet-and-greet. Each stop is a full day, morning through happy hour, built so every part of a customer's team gets something out of it. Our friends in distributor leadership get to see our AI vision session and a first look at VIP's product roadmap before it's shared anywhere else. Sales and trade teams get hands-on workshops on the tools they use every day. Operations teams get deep dives on routing, warehouse tools, and everything in between. And everyone gets lunch, a customer story from a peer who's actually lived it, and time to grab our support and implementation specialists one-on-one.
Watching Andrew Talk AI
One of my favorite parts of both stops was watching our CEO Andrew Criezis walk through VIP's AI vision. Not a pitch, an actual conversation. What's coming, why we built it the way we did, and what it means for the people running pricing, sales, and operations day to day. I've sat through a lot of vendor AI conversations from the other side of the table, and this felt different, because the questions were about real workflows.
What I'm Hearing About the Industry
Beyond VIP, the Roadshow has turned into a genuinely useful pulse check on where this industry stands. A few themes came up again and again in Houston and Tampa:
- The beverage industry is no longer in a growth-by-volume era. Beer, wine, and spirits are all seeing sustained volume softness, and the old playbook of chasing more cases isn't the strategy it used to be.
- Ready-to-Drink remains the industry's most reliable lever. While other categories soften, RTD keeps delivering, and it's shaping how distributors and suppliers think about portfolio investment.
- Consumers are being more deliberate. Trusted brands, smaller formats, and specific occasions are winning out over broad, undifferentiated purchasing.
- Non-alcoholic categories have crossed $1 billion in sales. NA isn't a niche anymore. It's a real, fast-growing piece of the business.
- Future growth is about alignment, not volume. Quality, flexibility, and matching products to specific consumer occasions are where the next phase of growth will come from.
I've watched these shifts play out from both the supplier side and the distributor side. But hearing it from customers directly, city by city, is a different kind of confirmation, and it's exactly the kind of conversation VIP is positioned to help navigate, given the data and relationships we've built over fifty years.
More Stops Ahead
Tampa and Houston were just the start. We're heading to Columbus on September 15 and Philadelphia on September 17, and the Roadshow is free to attend for VIP customers. More info, including the full agenda and registration, on our information page.
Hope to see you out there.
