What is HoReCa? A guide to the hotel, restaurant, and cafe channel

The HoReCa market was valued at USD 3.02 trillion in 2023, with revenue expected to reach USD 3.88 trillion by 2030. The HoReCa beverage market alone was valued at USD 155 billion with a CAGR of around 3.5% through 2032.

HoReCa is a channel that FMCG and consumer goods brands cannot overlook. Brands like Nestle Professional and Unilever Food Solutions drive significant revenue from HoReCa by offering bulk ingredients and tailored solutions. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo leverage partnerships with fast-food chains and cafes, while Amul and Britannia cater with specialized products like cheese packs and bakery items.

Hotels, restaurants, and cafes buy differently from general trade or modern trade outlets, need different service levels, and reward brands that show up with the right product, scheme, and rep consistency. This guide covers what HoReCa means, why it matters for FMCG, the sales challenges brands face in the channel, and the tools and practices to win it.

Apa itu HoReCa?

HoReCa mengacu pada industri Hotel, Restoran, dan Katering, yang secara kolektif mewakili sektor layanan makanan dan perhotelan. Ini adalah bisnis yang berspesialisasi dalam menyiapkan dan menyajikan makanan, minuman, dan menyediakan akomodasi untuk tamu/pelanggan.

BeatRoute’s platform pemberdayaan penjualan is built to handle the multi-touch sales cycles that HoReCa demands, from lead profiling to order fulfillment.

Hotel

Within HoReCa, hotels offer accommodations, hospitality services, and experiences for guests. These range from luxury resorts to business hotels, catering to a diverse clientele. The FMCG industry focuses on supplying hotels with essential goods such as toiletries, beverages, and snacks, ensuring availability through efficient sales and distribution channels.

Restoran

As the cornerstone of the HoReCa industry, restaurants focus on delivering culinary experiences through a combination of taste, ambiance, and personalized service. From casual eateries to gourmet establishments, restaurants cover a broad range of categories and customers. The FMCG element here is ensuring a consistent supply of key ingredients (spices, sauces), packaged goods, and beverages (water bottles, aerated drinks).

Cafes and catering services

Cafes are social spaces that bring a unique charm to the HoReCa sector, offering beverages, snacks, and welcoming ambiences. From artisanal coffee houses to global chains, cafes rely heavily on FMCG products such as coffee beans, tea, dairy, and baked goods.

Catering services handle food and beverages for parties, weddings, and events. They too need a steady supply of FMCG goods from water bottles to spices to food ingredients.

Key challenges in the HoReCa channel

The HoReCa channel belongs to the hospitality industry and has its own set of challenges for brands to navigate.

Inefficient lead management and customer onboarding

Pembuatan profil creates personas with pre-defined factors, helping brands understand which HoReCa establishments align with them and which do not. Without profiling that considers location, sales potential, and type of cuisine, brands may end up onboarding irrelevant restaurants or cafes. For example, if your brand sells Chinese sauces and ingredients, pitching to a Texan restaurant will be irrelevant since their ingredient needs vary significantly.

Manual lead assignment and onboarding efforts are unreliable and prone to errors. There is no effective profiling, no systematized lead management, and no dependable structure to auto-assign tasks or match a skilled expert for a demo.

Sub-optimal post-onboarding relationship management

Berhasil menggaet pelanggan tidaklah cukup. Untuk memastikan bisnis yang berulang, merek perlu membina hubungan mereka dengan pelanggan. Tidak adanya sistem terintegrasi yang menangani keduanya manajemen kepemimpinan and relationship management leads to communication gaps, poor service, and missed opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.

Most field sales tracking apps meet only one of these requirements. As a result, sales teams end up using two separate tools or only a part of their workflows are digitized by the deployed system. This also affects a brand’s ability to build long-term loyalty.

Ineffective visit hygiene

Tracking where your sales teams go is necessary, but you must also ensure those visits are productive. Poor visit tracking leads to inconsistent customer experience, missed follow-ups, missed opportunities in key accounts, and over-saturation of visits. Selling in the HoReCa channel often involves complex sales cycles that mix telephonic and physical interactions.

Without a systematized track of visits and workflow, maintaining visit hygiene becomes hard. This causes diminishing sales outcomes and reduced revenue from the channel.

Manual ordering and lack of transparency

Manual ordering happens over telephone or face to face where order details are noted down on paper. This is unreliable, as notes can be misplaced and orders messed up. The same goes for any schemes associated with them.

Delivering products in the HoReCa channel requires highly efficient logistics and distribution, especially when items are perishable and time-sensitive. The lack of a transparent system to track orders and dispatches adds to miscommunication and a lack of accountability in the supply chain.

Product and scheme communication failure

If your customers are unaware of new products or flavors, they are not going to place orders for them. Most times, sales reps introduce the product during visits, leading to loss of valuable time that could have been spent productively.

Without sales force automation in HoReCa, your sales reps have to memorize and apply schemes manually, making the process prone to errors. A rep assigned to dozens of cafes with a large variety of products and unique schemes cannot reliably ensure that the right items for the right establishments are pitched with the right schemes every time.

BeatRoute addresses these challenges through a unified platform that digitizes lead management, visit tracking, ordering, and scheme communication in one workflow.

Solutions to key challenges in HoReCa

Digitize lead management and onboarding

Digitizing lead management and customer onboarding streamlines your sales processes, ensuring accurate profiling, lead assignment, and task tracking. By using pre-defined factors such as location, sales potential, and cuisine type, a field sales app can ensure that all onboarded customers align with personas relevant to the brand’s offerings.

You can automate lead assignment, schedule demos with technical experts for customers, and track pipeline progress in real time, eliminating reliance on manual processes and reducing delays. The co-working mechanism between the sales team and technical experts during demos drives collaboration toward common goals.

Implement a unified system

Integrating lead management and relationship management in a single platform ensures effective post-onboarding customer experience and long-term loyalty. By centralizing customer data captured during lead generation, the field sales app enables sales teams to proactively address customer needs, deliver personalized assistance, and identify upselling or cross-selling opportunities.

A unified system eliminates inefficiencies caused by siloed tools, encourages consistent communication, and strengthens customer relationships. Sales reps focus on meeting their targets while ensuring timely visits, and managers can monitor activities, spot problems (missed visits, poor performance, process gaps), and take prompt action.

Ensure visit hygiene

A dependable visit management system ensures visit hygiene for sales reps by tracking them, planning productive interactions, and streamlining workflows. AI-driven solutions help brands identify HoReCa customers that have the potential for long-term purchase, driving up efficiency in sales teams and improving revenue.

Selain itu, pelaporan dan analisis dari sistem semacam itu memungkinkan manajer penjualan untuk mengatasi masalah yang membutuhkan perhatian mereka.

Enable customers to place orders digitally

Digitizing the ordering process, both at the sales rep’s and customer’s end, ensures that users can see what they are ordering, the schemes associated with each order, and the status until fulfillment.

Consider this scenario: a cafe that serves numerous customers daily cannot afford to run out of coffee beans. A sudden surge in customers results in rapidly depleting stock that will not last more than a couple of days. The sales rep is not due for another week. Rather than be a cafe without coffee, the owner will either try to contact the sales rep by phone or buy from a competitor. Equipping the cafe with an app where they can self-order as needed keeps them loyal to your brand and keeps the revenue inflow intact.

Drive clear communication

Deploying a digital sales enablement platform with multimedia capabilities allows HoReCa customers to check out product launches and educate themselves. Sales reps can also access detailed product and scheme information tailored to each establishment, ensuring efficient pitches.

With this, sales reps can focus on building relationships and driving conversions, maximizing productivity across customers. Automating scheme applications further minimizes errors and prevents sales loss.

BeatRoute’s Kecerdasan Buatan yang Didorong oleh Tujuan platform handles all five solutions on one system, so HoReCa brands do not need separate tools for lead management, visit tracking, ordering, and communication.

Best practices in the HoReCa channel

These are not simply suggestions but strong recommendations on how brands can stay on top when operating in this channel.

Technology adoption

Brands must keep upgrading their systems periodically. If you are running a modern field sales team on a legacy system, your bottom line will never be at par with others in the market. For example, if your sales team is still using two different apps for visit tracking and lead management, they are wasting time switching between the two or are unable to use them efficiently, leading to errors, communication gaps, and broken customer experiences. This is where a unified system that integrates both into a single platform makes the difference.

Profil pelanggan

Profiling your customers is important because the same strategy will not work for everyone. You cannot expect to push a premium product tailored for five-star luxury hotels to a small cafe. Profiling using custom attributes allows businesses to segment and target customers more effectively. By defining specific attributes such as business type, purchase capacity, location, product preferences, and buying behavior, sales teams can categorize customers into meaningful groups.

Understanding customer psychology

Capture and document sales data to understand what your customers want and are likely to keep buying. This understanding of their mindset is what separates good brands from great ones and prevents waste of resources and time. For example, a luxury resort catering to high-paying clients would not buy small quantities of toiletries but instead buy top-end products in bulk. Wasting time pushing anything else to these establishments would be a futile exercise.

Demo team visits

In the HoReCa channel, brands often have their chefs demo products in customers’ kitchens to showcase quality and application. This is usually done ad-hoc, with sales reps informally coordinating visits through calls or messages. This lack of planning leads to overlooked customer needs, no proper tracking of visit impact, and missed sales opportunities that reduce the overall effectiveness of customer acquisition efforts.

Gamify sales goals

Align your goals with those of your sales reps and customers in the field. Look for SFA tools that offer full goal visibility to sales reps: achieved milestones, points to accumulate for the next milestone or reward, and a scorecard of their performance. This incentivizes them to go the extra mile every day.

Repeat sales rep visits

It is not enough that a HoReCa customer has taken up your product. A brand-customer relationship needs to be constantly nurtured. Consistently engaging customers with physical visits keeps a brand and its products fresh in their minds. Customers may also have problems or expectations they want to discuss with a sales rep, apart from ordering, that are not as effective over a digital platform. Systematized visit planning that prioritizes visits based on urgency (pending payment, sales slump) ensures visits are both effective and productive.

Keep customers in the loop

Alleviate your customers’ concerns by keeping them informed about a complaint they raised or an order that is delayed. It is not enough to quote a turnaround time; it is more important to show them the steps in between. When your customers see how well something is being handled, they turn into brand advocates and make repeat purchases.

BeatRoute serves 200+ enterprise customers across 20+ countries, including FMCG brands running HoReCa execution at scale. For perspective, see how Cremica gained visibility into their field sales operations in HoReCa and other channels. Pesan demo to see how Goal-Driven AI runs the full HoReCa workflow on your own data.

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