Promo-friendly references in Foodservice: how to identify products that truly respond to promotions?
- Claire Brunaud
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
A promotion is ending and volumes have increased. Good news? Not necessarily.
For a Category Manager or Key Account Manager, the real question comes right after: what actually generated this increase? Did the promotion create additional sales? Did it primarily benefit certain products? Did it acquire new end customers? Or were the volumes simply shifted over time?
Identifying the most promotionally successful products allows us to move beyond a system where the same products are systematically pushed into foodservice promotions. The goal is to understand which products truly respond to marketing campaigns, to which customers, and under what conditions.
A promotional reference is not simply a reference that sells a lot during foodservice promotions.
First pitfall: looking only at the volume produced during the operation.
A product that already performs very well outside of a promotional period can naturally remain at the top during a campaign. This does not necessarily mean that it is particularly sensitive to promotional mechanics.
To evaluate the performance of a promotion, sell-out data allows us to observe the evolution of volumes during the operation, incremental sales, the number of purchasing customers and the evolution of sales after the promotion .
A promotional product can therefore be considered, from an operational perspective, as one whose performance demonstrably improves when it benefits from an activation. However, this response must be analyzed within its context: period, product range, distributor, participating warehouses, and end-customer profile.
Start by establishing a benchmark performance
To measure a promotional effect, you first need to know what would probably have happened without the promotion.
It is therefore necessary to place the volumes observed during the operation into the sales history of the reference .
Let's imagine two products.
Reference A typically achieves high sales volumes and sees a slight increase during a promotion. Reference B normally has more modest sales but experiences a significantly sharper acceleration during the same period.
In absolute volume, A remains ahead. But B seems to react more to activation.
Sell-out data is particularly useful at this stage as it allows us to track actual performance by reference , notably through sales volumes, their evolution over time, the number of purchasing customers and presence in warehouses.
The first task is therefore to compare, over a coherent scope, the usual performance of the reference with its performance during the campaign .
Without this point of comparison, a sales peak remains just that: a peak. It doesn't yet indicate whether the product is truly promotional.
Measure incremental sales rather than just the peak in volume
Second level of analysis: to look for what the promotion actually added to sales.
KaryonFood resources specifically distinguish incremental sell-out sales , i.e., additional sales generated during the promotion, from simply observing the total volume.
The difference is significant.
A promotional campaign can cause a sharp, temporary increase in sales without creating lasting growth. Customers may buy more during the promotional period and then reduce their orders immediately afterward. In this case, part of the observed performance reflects a shift in purchasing patterns rather than a genuine increase in demand.
The guide dedicated to Category Manager analyses reminds us that a promotion can create a stockpiling effect : more products are bought during the operation, then sales slow down afterwards.
To identify a reference that is truly receptive to the promotion, it is therefore necessary to look at at least three moments: before , to know its usual level; during , to measure the acceleration; after , to check what remains of this performance.
A product that experiences a spectacular peak followed by a sharp slowdown does not tell the same story as a product whose promotion generates additional sales without simply anticipating subsequent orders.
See who's buying: foodservice promotions can reveal new customers
The volume doesn't tell the whole story.
A campaign can also aim to introduce a product or service to new end users . In this case, an increase in the number of purchasing customers can be particularly valuable information.
Promotional analyses can indeed incorporate the evolution of the number of end users and the distribution of performance according to their typology.
Let's take a fictional example.
One product saw limited volume growth during a campaign but began to be purchased by more commercial food service establishments. Another experienced a more significant increase, concentrated almost exclusively among its regular buyers.
Depending on the campaign objective, the first one may be particularly interesting: it seems to have helped to broaden the customer base of the reference .
This reading also helps the Category Manager to understand that a reference may be promotionally appealing to some categories of establishments and much less so to others.
This is valuable information for avoiding overly broad operations and better targeting future activations.
Analyze the products within their product range, not in isolation.
A promotion covering several items raises another question: do all products actually benefit from the promotion?
Not necessarily.
Some products may attract the majority of promotional activity, while others benefit little from activation. The data available in the KaryonFood promotional module allows for analysis by product range and campaign , as well as an analysis of the average basket size, in order to distinguish the most promotional products and ranges.
This analysis can lead to quite concrete changes in the development of promotional plans.
If a range includes several products but only some regularly show a strong response to activations, should the entire assortment continue to be promoted in the same way?
Conversely, a less efficient product when not on promotion can prove particularly effective when integrated into a suitable mechanism.
The goal is therefore not to find the best-selling product , but the product, campaign and target combinations that produce the most interesting results.
Compare campaigns to identify genuine promotional activity
A single operation constitutes a signal. Several comparable campaigns allow us to begin to identify a trend.
Seasonality, the distributor's calendar, activated stock locations, and the target customer base can all influence campaign results. Therefore, exceptional performance over a specific period is not enough to guarantee that a product will consistently be effective in promotional campaigns.
A useful method is to gradually build a history by reference:
usual performance → performance during the operation → sales increment → evolution of purchasing customers → behavior after promotion.
Then, these results will be compared across several campaigns.
This reading makes it possible to differentiate a product that is regularly sensitive to promotions from a product that has simply benefited from a favorable context during a particular activation.
It also allows us to research which combinations of peak time, end user type and assortment seem most effective, one of the axes identified in the KaryonFood promotional analysis.
Transforming analysis into promotional decisions
For sales and marketing teams, identifying promotional references is only useful if the analysis leads to decisions.
A reference showing a good promotional response to a specific customer category can be favored in a future activation targeting that population.
A reference whose volumes increase sharply but fall immediately after the operation deserves a different interpretation.
A product that attracts new end users can be interesting from a recruitment perspective, even if its total volume is not the highest in the portfolio.
Finally, a reference that reacts little campaign after campaign should lead to questioning its role in the promotional plan rather than mechanically renewing the investment.
These insights can then inform the promotional calendar developed by the Category Manager and the Key Account Manager's (KAM) discussions with distributors. KaryonFood's business documents, in fact, position the Category Manager to focus on optimizing product ranges and activations, while the KAM focuses on negotiating and monitoring promotional activities with distributors.
Sell-out data allows us to move from intuition to learning.
The main obstacle often remains practical: to compare campaigns, it is necessary to be able to bring together information from different distributors, references, depots and periods.
Centralizing and harmonizing sell-out data allows for a more consistent understanding of promotional performance. It is within this framework that KaryonFood enables the analysis of campaign impact, identifying the most promotional product references and assortments, and assessing their performance based on end-user behavior.
But the most useful indicator remains the business question it allows us to ask.
Before renewing a promotion, don't just look at how much the item sold during the promotion. Look at what it would probably have sold without it, what the campaign actually added, who it made buy, and what happened afterwards .
It is this reading that gradually allows us to distinguish between products that benefit from occasional promotions and those that are truly promotion-driven .
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