At ABI, as we progress with our major digital commercial transformation (BEES), it has become clear that the act of selling products to retailers in traditional ways – as most CPGs continue to do with their own route to market – is in its last days.

Anyone familiar with the corporate world knows that, occasionally, a new business concept or practice arises and becomes ‘the latest fad’. They are often good ideas that can broaden how companies think about opportunities but, as they are transformed into mantras, they run the risk of becoming mere words or jargon endlessly repeated without any clarity of the purpose behind it.

At BEES, we believe that over the next five years the retail world will migrate from the current “push model” – where traditional retailers acquire the products they are going to re-sell to the final customer from companies that send Sales Representatives to visit or call them – to a digitally enabled “pull model”, where the same retailers will acquire everything they need to run their business online with much greater convenience, transparency and empowerment.