IRI Tracking Portfolio for Beer, Wine & Suppliers.

Information Resources, Inc .underscored its ongoing commitment to beverage alcohol manufacturers today by announcing the immediate availability of its InfoScan On-Premise point-of-sale (POS) beverage tracking service.

IRI’s InfoScan On-Premise service is the industry’s first available service to provide beverage suppliers with the information tools, transactional data, and demographic insights to effectively measure beer, wine, and spirits categories at many of today’s top casual dining restaurant chains.

The $399 billion on-premise channel represents a critical revenue segment for beverage alcohol suppliers. However, volumetric sales information has not been readily available in the restaurant industry. The InfoScan On-Premise service is designed to deliver this critical data to beverage alcohol manufacturers and is the result of IRI’s ongoing business relationship with Gazelle Systems, a leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to the hospitality industry.

“This exclusive offering represents a major milestone for beverage alcohol manufacturers and further solidifies our strategy of providing insights into both on-premise and off-premise beverage consumption behavior,” said Ed Kuehnle, group president, IRI North America. “The on-premise beverage market continues to be an area driven by innovation and we are pleased to offer both new and existing beverage alcohol customers this entirely new level of intelligence.”

Using customer sales check details gathered by Gazelle, InfoScan On-Premise utilizes 100% POS sales information to help beverage manufacturers and suppliers understand what is being consumed on-premise within the casual dining sector, giving manufacturers valuable insights to drive their businesses.

“Understanding sales and share information in the on-premise channel is critical for Diageo,” said Jill Hart, director of brand and business performance, Consumer Planning and Research at Diageo. “IRI’s InfoScan On-Premise service will allow us to go beyond the basic numbers to help us better understand our consumers, make smarter decisions, and more efficiently manage the channel overall. We’re very enthusiastic about the insights the demographic and transaction information should provide Diageo.”

Available via pure Web-based reports or through IRI’s CPGNetwork, IRI’s Web-based decision support delivery platform, InfoScan On-Premise will provide manufacturers with access to a fully integrated series of reports including category snapshots, category trends, and consumer profiles by brand. Based on these reports, manufacturers can now measure basic sales and shares of their brands as well as understand the consumer dynamics of the sales by restaurant account.

Key benefits of the service include:

— Allows manufacturers to measure and maximize product mix by account
— Enables benchmark category and competitive performance analysis
— Leverages sales and promotional strategies
— Provides detailed profiles of a particular brand’s consumers
— Identifies on-premise trial behaviors and trends

For more information at http://www.infores.com