How food and beverage companies can succeed in the microvertical space.

You can see it happening in supermarket aisles. Shoppers are moving their carts away from the big food brands and toward niche brands and specialized, fresher products.1 You can see it in the financials as well. The top US food and beverage companies have lost about $18 billion in market share since 2009, reports Fortune.

In this period of change, companies are differentiating themselves by focusing on specific niche, microvertical markets. By going niche, they can offer consumers unique products that appeal to highly specific consumer demand. But, developing a microvertical or niche business means taking on a range of new challenges. You must learn new skills, develop new and unique products, and rely on smaller production runs to produce higher margins.

You can only go big by going small.

Of all the activities that happen in a warehouse, 60% to 70% of costs are attributed to order fulfillment. You can make a significant dent in those costs by making your warehouse management system (WMS) voice-enabled. Utilizing RF wireless belt-mounted devices that incorporate speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies, voice-enabled WMSs have become table stakes for competitive third-party logistics providers (3PLs) and supply chain managers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a lot of people talking. The fact that those people no longer hail primarily from the world of science fiction is representative of just how far the ideas driving this technology have come. AI has entered the main stream, and it has the technology world buzzing with excitement. The potential applications of AI are as vast and varied as any complex technology vision that has ever been brought to life. And in truth, that is where the real excitement lies—in finding out just how far we can take AI and in turn, how far it can take us. In this paper, we’ll take a look at the many exciting applications taking shape for AI today; what ideas are on the horizon; and importantly, what the potential impact on the B2B world might be.

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For everything there is a season, as those in the Food and Beverage Industry are keenly aware. In parts of the world, harvest season is here; for others, it is spring planting. And, as 2018 coasts to year-end, it is also the season for summarizing achievements and setting new goals. Eager to capitalize on the growth momentum, F&B companies will soon be planning 2019 budgets and prioritizing the major initiatives for the coming year. With many game-changing innovations now available, companies should start early to strategize on the technology investments that will be key to seizing new opportunities.

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