“Can’t we just handle this ourselves?”
It’s among the most common questions we hear from procurement leaders considering their next beverage deal. And it’s a fair one.
Your Procurement Team Is Good at What They Do
We should start with what’s true: your procurement team is talented. They manage dozens (sometimes hundreds) of supplier relationships. They know how to run an RFP, negotiate terms, and hold vendors accountable. Nobody is questioning their competence.
But beverage deal negotiation is a different animal. And the gap between “capable” and “optimized” in this category is worth millions of dollars over the life of an agreement.
The Information Problem
Here’s what makes beverage deals unlike almost any other procurement category: there are no public benchmarks.
You can pull Gartner data on IT spend. You can benchmark janitorial contracts against industry averages. You can find published pricing for food distributors. But beverage deal pricing? It doesn’t exist in any report you can buy.
The reason is structural. Net pricing in a beverage deal isn’t determined by the invoice. It’s determined by the funding, rebates, sponsorship dollars, marketing allowances, and price protections negotiated behind closed doors. And nobody talks about their deals. The beverage companies prefer it that way.
So when your procurement team sits down to negotiate, they’re working with incomplete information. They don’t know what comparable organizations are paying. They don’t know what terms are standard and which are below market. They don’t know what the beverage company offered their competitor last quarter.
A specialist does. Our database spans hundreds of agreements across every major industry vertical. We know what “good” looks like because we see it every day, across airports, hospitals, restaurant groups, entertainment venues, and retail chains. Your procurement team, no matter how skilled, has likely negotiated two or three beverage deals in a career. We negotiate five or six at any given time.
The Frequency Problem
Beverage deals typically last five to ten years. That means even the most experienced procurement executive might negotiate three of these in an entire career. By the time the next renewal comes around, the industry has changed dramatically.
Think about what the beverage market looked like ten years ago. No Poppi. No gut health sodas. No Liquid Death. The competitive dynamics between Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Keurig Dr Pepper have shifted significantly, and so have the deal structures, funding mechanisms, and marketing expectations that come with them.
A team that does this all day, every day stays current on those shifts. A team that does this once a decade is starting over.
The Complexity Problem
From the outside, a beverage deal looks straightforward: pick Coke or Pepsi, negotiate a price, sign the contract.
The reality is far more involved. A well-structured beverage partnership includes pricing with annual caps, upfront sponsorship payments, variable rebates tied to volume, fixed annual funding, marketing activation budgets, equipment strategy, service level guarantees, and contract terms that protect you from price escalation and supply disruption.
And that’s before you factor in the internal dynamics. Multiple stakeholders (finance, operations, clinical teams in healthcare, marketing in airports and entertainment) often have competing priorities. Aligning those stakeholders while managing a competitive RFP process with two or three beverage companies is a project management challenge on top of a negotiation challenge.
What the Data Shows
We track every deal we touch. Pre-Enliven baseline and post-Enliven results.
Our most recent analysis shows that average dead net prices in Enliven-led programs are 43.8% lower than those negotiated in-house. That’s not a theoretical estimate. That’s real data from real agreements across multiple industries and beverage partners.
Why the gap? Three reasons:
1. We create genuine competition. Many organizations negotiate with their incumbent only, or bring in a second bidder as a formality. We run a structured process that gives every qualified beverage company a real shot, including Keurig Dr Pepper and, potentially, powerhouses in specific categories (like water or energy) or venture-backed upstart brands that are looking to invest in growth. More competition at the table means more value for you.
2. We know where the money is. Beverage companies have dozens of funding mechanisms: signing bonuses, annual fixed payments, variable rebates, checkbook funds, vending commissions, equipment allowances, marketing co-op dollars. Most in-house teams capture a few of these. We capture all of them, because we know which ones to ask for and how to structure them.
3. We don’t stop at signing. 43% of the rebate payments we review contain errors or are incomplete, almost always to the client’s disadvantage. Ongoing management, auditing, and activation are where long-term value is won or lost. A great negotiation followed by poor contract management is a missed opportunity that compounds year over year.
The Alignment Question
One concern we hear is about alignment: “If we bring in an outside firm, will they really understand our business?”
It’s a reasonable question. Here’s how we think about it.
Enliven operates on a pay-for-performance model. We only get paid when we deliver measurable savings or additional revenue. If we can’t improve your deal, you owe us nothing. That structure eliminates the misalignment problem entirely. We have zero interest in claiming we can save you money if we really can’t.
And the numbers back it up. Nine out of ten clients who have completed an agreement cycle with us have renewed for their next deal. They don’t renew because of a contract obligation. They renew because the results made the decision obvious.
So Who Should Negotiate In-House?
If your organization purchases fewer than 50,000 cases annually, the deal value may not justify outside help. If your procurement team has recently completed a beverage negotiation and is confident the terms are competitive based on current market data (not data from the last deal cycle), a specialist may not move the needle enough to matter.
But if your deal is worth seven or eight figures over its lifetime, if your team hasn’t negotiated a beverage agreement in years, if you don’t have access to current benchmarks, or if you’re simply stretched thin and this project is competing for attention against twenty other priorities, the math favors a specialist.
Your team is qualified to manage your business. A specialist is qualified to maximize this specific deal. Those aren’t competing ideas. The most capable organizations we work with are the ones who understand when to bring in focused expertise. Not because they can’t do it, but because the stakes are too high to leave value on the table.
What This Means for Your Next Negotiation
Beverage deals are long commitments with large financial implications. The difference between a good deal and a great one compounds over five, seven, or ten years. And in a category where pricing is opaque, benchmarks don’t exist in any public database, and the beverage companies have dedicated teams managing their side of every negotiation full-time, the question isn’t whether your procurement team is talented.
The question is whether they’re equipped to win the absolute best deal possible.
If the answer is “I’m not sure,” that’s worth exploring. Contact us for a free, confidential savings estimate and we’ll show you exactly where you stand.
Additional Resources:
The Ultimate Guide to a Beverage Deal
Podcast: Understanding the trends, innovations within beverage
Dr Pepper Surpasses Pepsi: What This Means for Beverage Partnerships
