As on-premise venues navigate an increasingly fragmented spirits landscape, the relationship between brands and bars has reached a critical inflection point. This Expert Talk features Chris Maffeo, the Founder of MAFFEO DRINKS, to examine why most brand-bar partnerships fail before they begin, and how misaligned incentives, from listing fees that deliver no ROI to guest shifts where brand managers never appear, erode trust on both sides.
Chris explore’s the disconnect between boardroom strategy and bar-floor execution, introducing a practical “if-then” framework for sustainable partnerships that balances bartender personal brand building with genuine brand advocacy. Chris reveals why treating activations as transactions rather than relationships undermines everyone’s bottom line, and demonstrates how accountability gaps, from finance teams demanding immediate returns to bartenders rotating between competing portfolios, can be transformed into long-term value creation.
Featured Guests:
Chris Maffeo, Founder, MAFFEO DRINKS
Mentioned in this episode:
Watch on YouTube:
The On-Premise Playbook: A Guide to High-Value Bar Partnerships
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Podcast Transcript
Chris Maffeo – Founder of Maffeo Drinks
Chris Maffeo (00:00.088)
Thanks a lot for being here. It’s an honor, I see many familiar faces. What we’re trying to do here is to connect all the bits and pieces of the so-called playbook of the on-trade. And it’s very tough to call it a playbook, because obviously — I’ve been working in corporate for many years before starting my own company — one of the big reasons is that everybody gets on-trade, on-premise, however we call it, on PowerPoint. But then in reality, very few people truly understand what it means to work with bars, work with hospitality, and from the hospitality perspective, to work with brands at the same time. There is too much theory, too much boardroom discussion, too many focus groups.
There’s a lot of talk about reading PowerPoint decks and PDFs, and very little time actually spent going to bars. I remember when I was in my previous job, the marketing team would sometimes say, “Sales never invites me out to the trade, so I never go to bars.” Come on. You don’t go to bars in your free time just because you work in the industry? It’s not work — just go out there and be curious, as Nicholas was saying. Be obsessed with back bars, menus, why a bartender recommends a certain thing, why not, and so on.
On the way to execution, things go wrong. Whenever I speak to people — I have my own podcast, My Fair Drinks, which you’ll see later — whenever I bump into people, everybody agrees with what I’m saying. But then in practice, very often those same two people who agreed with me had a fight that very morning.
Chris Maffeo (01:18.420)
So where do things go wrong, if you agree in the room but disagree in practice? It’s important to bring people on board with you. And this applies whether you’re an employee in a company talking to management, whether it’s about talking to stakeholders in general — brands to sales, sales to brands, logistics, finance, getting an investment. You should probably take the finance manager with you into a bar, to really explain why certain things happen.
Chris Maffeo (02:21.847)
What does a bar-brand relationship very often mean? As Nicholas was saying, the ROI is very often misunderstood. A purist Excel finance-type person will judge purely on: how much am I giving, how much am I getting back? But very often, from a brand perspective, the returns are very fluffy. It’s: “It will pay back long-term. This is about brand building. This is about brand awareness. We’re building awareness.” Who hasn’t said that in a meeting?
Nobody is going to do it for you. You have to do it. You cannot just complain. And I say this to myself in the mirror every day first. You cannot just complain. You have to be accountable. Why doesn’t that sales rep get it? Because you have to explain it.
Regardless of how busy we are, we have to be accountable. And if you’ve done all the homework you could do to make them understand, then you will ultimately make your own life easier.
There is one thing in general that has shifted in this industry. The industry has always been fairly consistent — ultimately, it’s still about moving cases from a distillery to a warehouse, to a bar, to a supermarket chain. But what has changed is that there is now a myriad of brands that weren’t there 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Things have dramatically changed on that front.
And from a big brand point of view, whether you work for a big brand or a smaller one, brands can no longer really “own” bars — I put that in brackets — because you used to walk into a bar and immediately see which company it was primarily working with. Now, that doesn’t work anymore. You go into a bar and you cannot easily read what that back bar looks like, because there are so many brands, more players, different distributors, different wholesalers bringing in bottles.
Chris Maffeo (04:42.637)
There is pressure on that small person: the bartender, the bar manager, the distributor. All of us working in the ecosystem are being pushed by brand one, two, three, four to say, “Sell my brand. Sell more of my brand.” And it’s very difficult to truly understand that people have to work with many brands because it’s about their credibility. If that person over there is a bartender, they must be able to talk about, work with, and sell bottles from many different players. They cannot only sell one portfolio from one company, because then they will lose their credibility.
So it’s important that we put ourselves in each other’s shoes — as brand owners, understanding the bartender’s position; and as bartenders and bar managers, understanding the brand owner’s or distributor’s perspective. It’s important to ask: I want to work with different brands, but how much is too much? Because when I see bartenders working with different companies, which I love, and then I see their Instagram where they’re saying this gin is the best gin — and then the next day, another gin is the best gin — how do we do this in a credible way that keeps the relationship with everybody and avoids arguments like, “I thought you were working with us, and now you’re working with them”?
So choosing the right brand for your bar is crucially important. We tend, as bartenders — I’ve discussed this with many bartenders and bar managers — to default to a brand that may not actually match your values, but matches your budget. That’s the hard reality sometimes: you may go with the person who has more money than another sales rep, just because that sales rep has money.
Chris Maffeo (07:06.573)
And my question — which I throw out there — is: how sustainable is that, really? How do we align more with brand values, and hopefully also with budgets, because bars are businesses as we were discussing before. We all need to make money, as Nicholas pointed out. But how do we do it without jumping from side to side? “Sorry, that was last year, but this year, another brand stepped in and gave me more money, so your gin, your vodka, your tequila is off the menu — we work with them now.”
At the same time, there is another issue I observe traveling mainly around Europe: when there is a relationship between brands and bars, it’s very important to understand the thin line between too much and good enough. Brands want to work with outlets that can deliver value, can deliver ROI, and can enable those uncomfortable conversations I often have in offices with finance directors.
Because suddenly, when I am the one paying for a guest shift on behalf of some brands, I’m the one facing questions like, “Why are we sponsoring this thing? It almost looks like a conflict of interest. Why did you give that money to that bar?” And I cannot explain it in a way that lands, because long-term it is very good for brand building in city X, Y, Z.
Chris Maffeo (09:30.939)
We have to understand what a good partnership looks like. As Nidal was saying before, lists, accolades, competition victories should be the byproduct of everything we do correctly — whether we are bartenders, brand owners, distributors, or anything else in the drinks ecosystem. We need to reach the point where winning is almost incidental: “Oh, by the way, I won. Thank you, guys.” But very often I see bars focusing too much on getting on a list — doing guest shifts to get on the list — and therefore asking for listing fees. No. Your ultimate goal is about doing good hospitality. Enhanced hospitality, rather than being on a list. That is not the end goal. It’s the byproduct of doing everything well.
And at the same time, I throw this out there to bartenders — I’m not a bartender myself — but all of these things: distillery visits, guest shifts, sponsorships, travel. Sometimes it becomes very transactional. “I work with this brand because they make me travel the world — they send me to Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Sydney.” It’s not about that. What about the values? Do they align with yours? What are you doing for that brand? What are you actually giving back?
Chris Maffeo (10:44.215)
How do we all make money from this, so that the brand owner can choose the right bar for the right investment? Especially in a very capital-challenged time like now, there is not unlimited money from brands to sponsor this cycle of guest shifts, investments, cellar trips, and voyages. Is it sustainable when, as a bartender, you travel on a brand’s money but focus primarily on your personal brand rather than giving back to the brand that enabled that trip?
Chris Maffeo (11:51.999)
From a bar perspective: you charge a listing fee, and then sometimes there isn’t even a mention of the brand name — it just says “gin” on the menu instead of naming the brand. Is that sustainable when I give you 2,000 euros and I bring the managing director of the company I work for, and they point to a cocktail made with our gin, and the menu just says “gin”? “Yeah, but don’t worry, it’s our gin. Trust me, they told me it’s ours.”
At the same time, from a brand perspective: you fund programs, you fund guest shifts, you fund trips, and sometimes you don’t even show up. I’ve been to guest shifts where I was the only one representing the brand, and the brand manager who signed off the invoice for that trip, for that guest shift, doesn’t even show up, doesn’t even shake hands with the bartender they enabled through their budgets. How counterproductive is that?
And at the same time, from both the bars and brands perspective, let’s not forget the wholesalers and distributors — who are actually bringing the bottle. Because when you end up out of stock during a guest shift, it’s because you didn’t brief the sales rep and didn’t place the order, because they didn’t know an activation was happening. It’s so many moving parts. How do we do less, but better, to make a relationship truly sustainable?
Chris Maffeo (13:51.057)
Today we spoke about AI, technology — all very current topics. Back when I was in high school, I used to study “informatica,” as it was called in Italy. If-then-else, repeat-until, if-this-then-that. So how about this: if a brand pays 2K, the bar trains the staff, explains the product, and we track the sales velocity. Give me some numbers I can take back to my internal stakeholders — finance director, sales director. If a brand funds a trip, have the bartender truly showcase the partnership. Let’s commit to something. “I’m going to sell this much for you.” Always bearing in mind the legal implications.
And let’s reinvest. I was recently at a guest shift that stood out as a best practice for me: a brand had paid to get in, and at the end of the contract year, the bar manager actually called and said, “Hey, there’s still some money here that we haven’t used — how about we do something together?” I call that a best practice because it’s about honesty in partnership. In that messy situation, nobody would have noticed the money was unspent. But in an honest partnership and relationship, he called and said, “Let’s do it together.” That brings real value to the relationship the following year, because then it’s like: I really want to partner with these guys. They are walking the talk.
Chris Maffeo (15:02.334)
And again, from a distributor perspective: if you receive support as a distributor to work with a brand, make sure the sales team has KPIs that connect back to the strategy and the targets we’ve actually set with that brand. Otherwise, we just get lost.
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