Non-alcoholic beer brand Bero has grown its B2B sales, in part, by leveraging its team’s prior connections — and adding ecommerce technology into the mix.
Declan Duggan, vice president of sales, told Digital Commerce 360 that because much of Bero’s team has worked on multiple beverage brands, the company made “a conscious decision at the beginning” to invest in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
“We know right from the get-go, if you don’t — if you can’t — have a centralized place that you can bolt on to and grow, the issue is that everybody goes off and buys disparate tools in different departments, and then you have somebody stuck in the middle trying to pull them all together,” Duggan told Digital Commerce 360.
He said the process “becomes super tenuous.” Then, when the company has 200 or 300 people a few years later, it will have to start again from an enterprise technology standpoint. That would be “a massive headache and super costly,” he said. It would also mean retraining the entire staff, which would be a mess, he added.
“Whether you spend it up front like we did, you’re going to spend it later,” Duggan said. “So if you believe you’re going to go somewhere, it’s the way to go because it helps you scale faster and it gives the tools and the access to all of your customers that they need quickly.”
Bero began as a DTC ecommerce brand in October 2024, co-founded by actor Tom Holland and John Herman, who is also CEO.
How Bero scaled its B2B ecommerce sales
“A lot of it is rinse and repeat,” Duggan said. “We’ve done this a few times. We’re going back to a lot of the same distributors that we’ve worked with in the past.”
And because he and others on his team have helped those distributors make money for other brands over the years, they at least get a meeting. From there, Bero still has to have a good proposition and product, he said. But the team didn’t have to start by cold calling. And having the enterprise technology in place from the beginning helped Bero scale quickly, he said.
In addition to leveraging existing relationships, Bero also relies on a direct store delivery (DSD) network in the U.S., Duggan said. About 200 distributors comprise the network, he said. He also noted that sales reps often have thousands of SKUs to manage.
“A lot of these salespeople just don’t have the time to get to every single brand and SKU that they have,” Duggan said. “These are really good ways for us to get quicker distribution when that bar owner or that retailer, on or off premises, gets going in there and placing their order.”
Expanding Bero’s distribution network
“It’s quite arduous to put together, and it takes some time, but those guys have really embraced the digital side,” Duggan said.
That network allows Bero to enter more mass merchants and grocery operators’ physical stores, he said. Duggan noted that it’s difficult to get some of those larger retailers — such as Walmart, Kroger and Safeway — if a brand can’t cover 30% of their stores. Now, Bero has gotten to the point that its network can reach everywhere in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Guam, according to Duggan.
Within the past couple of months, Bero has expanded its retail footprint to include the above-mentioned Kroger and Walmart, as well as Publix. That expansion follows Bero entering U.K. grocery chain Morrisons.
“Beverage is messy,” Duggan told Digital Commerce 360. “It’s not a great product to ship in individual boxes. It’s fraught with all kinds of problems. That’s why it does make a lot of sense. It’s heavy; it leaks if you don’t get it right, so you have to get it to a centralized place and then do that last-mile piece for it to be efficient. That’s why we end up with a lot of those beer, wine and spirits distributors across the country.”
And Bero’s products are low-alcohol, below 0.5%, he specified. As a result of its product not being entirely alcohol-free, Bero still has to go through beer distributors in about 10 states across the country.
“You have to sell it through a beer distributor and go to a licensed establishment,” Duggan said. “So it does have some uniquities to it that maybe you’re not tied down with in some other products and categories.”
Bero develops AI portal for distributors
Duggan said Bero has also developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven portal. The tool uses Anthropic’s Claude, and Bero gives distributors access to it to place purchase orders.
The AI-powered tool also has a digital asset management system. Bero uploads its latest imagery of the products, which helps with branding and marketing, Duggan explained.
“If they want to put those on to some of these other tools, then at least we know what’s up there is the latest and greatest and approved,” Duggan said. “And so they have access to pull those down and use them as they see fit or to submit for a chain’s RFP or something and they have all the information they need right there.”
He added that Bero is looking into building out mutual finance tools to enable billing and other operations all in one place.
“It’s quite advanced, quite edgy, and our distributors really like it,” Duggan said.
Some suppliers have asked if they could use the technology, he said. That could eventually lead Bero into the software business as well, he added.
“One of the things we always say is if you’re easy to do business with, you’ll do more business,” Duggan said.
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