Where We Come From — and Why the Model Is Starting to Weigh Us Down.
Many beverage and soft drink distribution companies did not start out as distributors. They began as small local producers of soda water, siphon bottles, or soft drinks. Family businesses, closely tied to their territory, that grew by solving a simple problem: supplying drinks to the bars in their area.
Carbòniques Montaner is a clear example of that journey. It went from manufacturing siphon bottles in the 1930s to distributing water, then beer, and later soft drinks. The next step was a logical one: together with other distributors in the region, it created a buying group to better manage that growth, add more product lines, and gain autonomy and independence from manufacturers who put pressure on our company, fully aware of the leverage they held over it. Over time, it continued expanding the catalogue until it was distributing around 1,000 SKUs.
That model worked. And it worked well for many years. Until, gradually, we became Red Paralela, leaving behind the capillary, local delivery model that had accompanied us for so many decades.
Technology followed that evolution too: from the fax machine to the first IT systems, and from there to what Red Paralela is today—an extranet designed to organise and manage distributors’ parallel operations.
Three generations along this path.
Today, many distributors still build their business around one or two official brands that are the true backbone of their revenue. In many cases, more than 50% of the business depends on them. Around that core, there is a very broad range of brands and product families that “tag along”, but are not strategic.
And that “tag-along” range comes at a cost:
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- A growing labour cost: more sick leave and lower productivity than ever.
- An ever-increasing financial cost.
A logistics cost that is hard to justify. - And a management cost that never stops rising.
- While the core brand sustains the business, everything else starts to weigh it down. More SKUs, more stock, more breakages, more errors, and more resources spent on products that do not create real value
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On top of that, the current context is especially challenging. Labour costs rising out of control. A suffocating regulatory environment. New laws, procedures, and obligations piling up—and instead of helping, they make day-to-day operations harder and reduce the ability to be efficient.
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- More rules every day.
- Less margin every day.
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And that is where uncomfortable questions begin to appear:
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- Does it make sense to maintain structures designed for massive catalogues when the real business rests on three or four key manufacturers?
- Wouldn’t it be more sensible to simplify, focus efforts, and be extremely efficient by representing only those manufacturers that truly support the distributor (now and in the future) and that the distributor can genuinely defend?
- Could it be time to stop and rethink the model before the structural weight makes it unviable?
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Rethinking the model is not always comfortable, but it is almost always necessary.
