Kegs and casks play a critical role in the beverage industry bringing efficiency, effectiveness and circularity to storage, transportation and quality in supplying the hospitality sector.
But kegs and casks don’t always get the appreciation they deserve. In fact, of the approximate 200 million kegs in the global beverage market, 5%-10% are estimated to be lost annually. This staggering loss rate translates to a cost of USD $0.8bn – $1.6 bn for the beverage industry, along with around 300k – 600k tonnes of CO2e for replacing them.
As experienced industry and keg management operators, Konvoy firmly believe that the introduction of their Katch Internet of Things (IoT) cellular real-time tracking device can help revolutionise the industry in so many ways. The device enables brewers to monitor keg location, temperature, and usage in real time, optimising logistics, reducing losses, and supporting quality control throughout the entire process.
Konvoy is the world’s leading keg tracking and keg pooling solution and is the pay-per-fill keg pooling market leader in Australia and New Zealand with its ambitions to operate globally well underway with the UKI. Their own 130,000 keg tracking devices have reported important supply chain location, temperature, and motion data nearly 200 million times from 20 countries.
Brewpoint, the Wells & Co owned Bedford based brewer with almost 200 pubs across the UK and France, were one of the first brewers to team up Konvoy to further underpin their triple bottom line credentials.
“Our focus on the triple bottom line approach of people, planet and profit means we invest our time and resources on social and environmental issues as much as we do our financial performance. That ethos touches every part of our business and Konvoy’s Cloud platform and Katch internet of things (IoT) cellular keg tracker will give us real-time location, temperature, and time-based insights that no keg fleet operator has ever had before. With that visibility and data, we can learn much more about our supply chain and the factors that can affect our beer miles as well as the quality of our beers at venue” said Tom Foddy, Commercial Director at Brewpoint.
The Brewpoint task was initially about location visibility from brewery to bar and back again to solve the millennia old problems of slow, idle, or lost kegs. Reducing keg cycle time and losses is the initial economic and environmental opportunity. By having access to temperature and motion-based keg event data there is an even broader commercial and climate-based opportunity to capture, right through to the new legislative tasks of monitoring, reporting and reducing the Scope 3 carbon emissions.
Scope 3 emissions are an increasingly critical focus in the brewing and hospitality industries. They represent the indirect emissions not controlled directly by the companies, but which occur along their supply chains or through product use and disposal. Scope 3 emissions represent ~75% of a brewers total Greenhouse Gas (GHG) footprint and ~85% of a venues total Greenhouse Gas (GHG) footprint. So, being able to identify where your kegs are, how they got there, how long they took to get there, the integrity of the product they’re carrying, and getting them all back again is increasingly in focus and important.
Using Brewpoints 39k data points collected daily, the Konvoy Katch and Cloud platform turns raw data into valuable real-time insights to empower data-based decisions for better business. All tracked keg locations are recorded to help reduce losses, mapping routes by location, and generating insights reports on the average time kegs spend at different supply chain stages. These insights have never been available to the industry until now. In the time Brewpoint and Konvoy have been working together the teams have:
- Identified and recovered kegs that have gone outside of their expected networks and countries
- Identified and responded to storage temperatures that have been outside of best practice which potentially impacts quality if the keg is full
- Identified and managed stock rotation times at key supply chain locations impacting both cycle times and quality if the keg is full
- Built a deeper understanding of the densities of the key routes to and from market, particularly in the last few miles of logistics
According to a recent report by IoT Analytics, IoT initiatives appear more successful than ever as 92% of enterprises report positive ROI from IoT use case implementations with the number of IoT use cases being adopted growing 53% between over three years to 2024. New technology adoption is not without its cultural, operational and integration complexities, but the same report also highlights significant adoption complexity reduction which is fueling the adoption growth and ROI. The top 10 use cases identified in the report all benefit keg fleet management ranging from process automation to quality, real-time inventory management to supply chain track and trace, and asset performance to remote asset tracking which all support environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.
With a significant increase in brewers across Europe and the USA enquiring and joining Konvoy to better manage their own keg and cask fleet operations, Konvoy together with Brewpoint are moving beverages forward.
To discover more about Konvoy, visit www.konvoykegs.com.
