Brewing Uncertainty: What's Next for Beer's Key Ingredients

Behind every pint is a supply chain under pressure from directions that most procurement and supply chain teams aren't fully tracking yet.

Join Francisco Martin-Rayo, CEO of Helios AI, Randy Browne, Founder of randybrowne consulting and former Category Insights Leader at Molson Coors, for a timely conversation on the forces reshaping beer's ingredient markets — and what leaders need to do differently to stay ahead of them.

The conversation will explore why beer's input cost challenge is increasingly structural rather than cyclical, how climate exposure in barley, hops, and wheat is compounding supply pressure, and why a bifurcating consumer market is creating new blind spots for procurement teams. From softening volume trends to geographically concentrated hop supply, the forces reshaping the beer category are interacting in ways that traditional planning assumptions weren't built to handle.

What you'll learn:

• Why beer's ingredient cost pressure is structural, not just cyclical
• How climate risk in barley, hops, and wheat growing regions is creating concentrated supply vulnerability
• What a bifurcating consumer market means for ingredient demand planning — and where national assumptions break down
• Which early signals matter most for buyers and operators beyond futures prices and headlines
• How leading brewers operationalize commodity risk — from hedging strategy to real-time disruption monitoring
• What procurement and supply chain leaders should be asking about ingredient risk that most aren't

Whether you buy ingredients, manage brewery supply chains, or track commodity risk across food and beverage, this session offers a full-picture view of where beer's input markets are headed — and how to act before disruption becomes a crisis.