How Wandering Bear Coffee Runs Retail Like a Category Leader

ABOUT WANDERING BEAR

The best CPG brands aren't built on great products alone. They're built by operators who run the business with a rigor most companies only reach at scale. Wandering Bear Coffee is one of them.

The brand has become a standout in ready-to-drink cold brew across a demanding omni-channel mix of direct-to-consumer, grocery, and food service, and behind the brand are founders who treat operational discipline as a competitive weapon. 

As Ben Gordon, co-founder of Wandering Bear, puts it, the team stays lean by choice: "We very much view ourselves as a small, scrappy, emerging brand… we need to be very thoughtful about how we allocate resources." 

‍CHALLENGE

Category-leader ambition, held back by fragmented data

Even the sharpest CPG brands can only move as fast as their data lets them. Before partnering with Confido, Wandering Bear's retail intelligence lived in pieces: separate weekly reports from Whole Foods, UNFI, Kroger, and several other portals, each in its own format and naming conventions. Every week, building a unified, trustworthy view meant stitching it together in various Excel sheets by hand.

"We were brute-forcing it," Ben recalls, "figuring out what data we had to merge and creating our own pivot tables… which was rife with room for error and just took time."

It was demanding enough that the complete picture became a rarity. For Wandering Bear, the amount of time and effort it took to pull holistic, accurate reporting was so heavy that it was something they only prioritized once or twice a quarter in preparation for a board meeting or a larger planning session. When asked how long it would take to create a unified look Ben shared that it was “easily half a day.”  

For an operator making high-stakes calls across three channels, a holistic view of the business just wasn’t available often enough. 

‍SOLUTION

“It is a tab that is always open on my second monitor,” says Ben Gordon, Co-Founder of Wandering Bear. 

With Confido's Sales Analytics platform, Muffin Data, the unified view that once took half a day to create is now always on. Muffin gave a lean team the kind of real-time command over its business that used to be the preserve of a far larger organizational effort. 

• One trusted source of truth: Muffin unifies every retailer and distributor source and reconciles the overlaps automatically. "We trust Muffin's ability to deduplicate data… and not double-count our points of distribution," Ben notes — the difference between second-guessing the numbers and acting on them.

• From quarterly to daily command: A twice-a-quarter undertaking has evolved into a daily discipline. On-demand access to metrics now empowers the entire team to conduct deeper reporting and independent analysis.

• Visibility that changes the conversation: Muffin surfaces store-level detail that distributor reporting keeps masked. Using it, Ben built the case that his retail and distribution partners were under-ordering: "What I was able to show is that we are all missing sales because they carry too little inventory and stores aren't ordering enough." His verdict on the specificity: "You get just more clarity and more specificity" — evidence most brands his size can't bring to the table.

• Resources allocated with discipline: Muffin reporting helps Wandering Bear make smart and data-informed decisions about where to invest and allocate resources. Specifically, it helps the brand decide where the brand should double down on sales or pull back, channel by channel.  

RESULTS

A lean team operating like a category leader

• Four hours per day on average in time savings: The unified view is instant, not a brute-force, error-prone build. 
• New leverage over the retail relationship: Store-level visibility is powering an active push to correct under-ordering and cut shelf out-of-stocks, recovering sales that were quietly being lost. 
• Numbers the board can trust: Deduplicated, reconciled data replaces the hand-built pivot tables, so material errors no longer make it into board reporting.
• A whole team leveling up: Ben is pulling his people up with him, from a director of sales going "a layer deeper" on key accounts to coaching a junior seller to "get more comfortable looking at the data and making sense of it to shape how they prioritize their work."
  
  

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