I’ve spent the past week reflecting on this year’s National Restaurant Association Show. More than any single product or technology, what stayed with me were the broader challenges manufacturers are trying to navigate right now.
What stood out most to me was not a lack of innovation. Quite the opposite. Across the show floor, conversations reflected an industry actively trying to adapt to changing consumer behavior, margin pressure, operational complexity, and a market that continues to evolve underneath it.
I attended this year alongside Alex Drake, one of our Client Success Managers, and Cameron Irvine, our Commercial Solutions Consultant, and the conversations were remarkably consistent. Manufacturers have always operated in a high-pressure environment where teams are expected to do more with less. But the combination of margin pressure, channel complexity, and rising expectations around speed and visibility is changing how companies evaluate technology investments. Teams are thinking more critically about where they spend, what drives measurable value, and which heavily manual processes are no longer sustainable as the business becomes more interconnected and demanding.
We talked about trade spend leakage, duplicate claim payments, operator location visibility, sales execution, and the growing expectation that commercial teams operate with better operator-level intelligence. AI was also a major topic. There is real excitement around its potential, but also understandable skepticism. AI can absolutely accelerate decision-making, but only when the commercial data beneath it is accurate, aligned, and trustworthy.
Beneath all of these conversations was a broader theme: companies are trying to build smarter, more forward-looking commercial organizations while still working around disconnected systems, inconsistent data, and operational processes that were never designed for the pace and volatility of today’s foodservice environment.
I left Chicago with a stronger sense of both the foundational work still required to support better commercial decision-making and the amount of opportunity that still exists for companies willing to address those underlying data challenges directly.
Complexity Is Outpacing the Infrastructure Supporting It
One theme that surfaced repeatedly at this year’s show was the growing gap between the complexity manufacturers are managing and the infrastructure they still rely on to support it.
Most manufacturers are no longer managing trade spend manually. They have trade promotion management (TPM) systems, internal processes, analytics tools, or some combination of all three. But many teams are still spending significant time reconciling inconsistent data, investigating exceptions, and working around systems that were not designed to operate together seamlessly.
That challenge becomes more significant as organizations expand into new channels and navigate increasingly layered commercial relationships. Non-commercial continues to grow, while manufacturers are simultaneously managing more interconnected distributor, GPO, and operator relationships, each with its own identifiers, reporting structures, and data standards.
I had more conversations than I can count at NRA around duplicate rebates and trade spend leakage. What resonated most was not just the financial impact itself, but the broader recognition that prevention is becoming more important than recovery. Recovering duplicate payments after the fact still matters, but manufacturers are increasingly focused on stopping those issues upstream before they occur.
The root problem is rarely a single operational mistake. More often, it is structural. The same operator location may be represented differently across distributors, GPOs, manufacturers, and internal systems, making it extraordinarily difficult to create a consistent and trustworthy commercial view of the business.
That same challenge surfaced repeatedly in conversations around AI and advanced analytics. There is enormous enthusiasm around faster insights and more predictive decision-making but also growing recognition that those tools are only as effective as the data supporting them.
The manufacturers that seem best positioned for what comes next are not necessarily the ones adding the most technology. They are the ones investing in stronger commercial infrastructure: cleaner operator data, better visibility across channels, and systems capable of supporting smarter, more confident decisions as the business continues to evolve.
Looking Ahead
As I reflect on this year’s show, I keep coming back to the same idea: foodservice manufacturers are being asked to make faster and more complex commercial decisions in an operating environment that is becoming more interconnected by the year.
Teams are being asked to grow in new channels, operate more efficiently, and respond more quickly to changing market conditions, all while managing increasingly layered relationships across distributors, GPOs, and operators.
At the same time, there is enormous excitement around AI and advanced analytics. But many of the conversations I had at NRA reflected the same underlying concern: if the commercial data underneath those tools is inconsistent or incomplete, the insights built on top of them become much harder to trust.
None of these initiatives reach their full potential without a trustworthy commercial foundation underneath them.
The manufacturers that navigate this next phase most successfully will not necessarily be the ones adopting new tools the fastest. I believe they will be the ones investing in the data visibility, operator intelligence, and commercial infrastructure needed to support smarter, faster decision-making at scale.
That was one of my biggest takeaways from this year’s show, and one of the reasons I remain optimistic about where the industry is headed next.
If you’d like to learn more on navigating this next phase with us, please reach out to info@tibersoft.com.
