Return on Time Invested — Interactive PDF | ECS + COHO 2026
Being First
Caffè Nero forecast 5,000 matcha drinks in its first week. It sold 100,000.
Forecast · week one
5,000
→
Actual · week one
100,000
Matcha now runs at close to a million drinks a week across the Nero estate. Costa put a permanent range in place in January 2026. Greggs followed within weeks, supplied by Perfect Ted.
Somewhere in that story is a supplier who was in the room early, and a supplier who wasn't. The second one didn't lose on product quality. They lost because they came to talk about their product, and the buyer had come to close a gap.
Being first in the room is the whole game. Not being better. Being there while the gap is still open.
The Supply & Innovation Day gives you a fixed clock. Twenty minutes a meeting, ten meetings minimum, a confirmed schedule, a private table, and someone opposite who is actively reviewing your category. None of that is the variable. The variable is what you decided this day was for, before you got on the plane.
Three days out of your business. Flights, nights, and the people-days consumed either side. Against that, the only honest question is not was Berlin worth it. It is did I arrive knowing which job I came to do.
Allegra · ECS + COHO Intelligence Series · Interactive PDF · 7-minute read
Return on TimeInvested
Three routes through the Supply & Innovation Day. Pick yours before 29 October.
Jump straight to your route
20Minutes per meeting — the same for everyone
10Pre-qualified one-to-one meetings, minimum
3Routes through the day. Pick one.
29OctThe schedule locks. Decide before this.
Step 1 of 2 · Choose your route
Three people are at this event. The rest of this paper is written for one of them.
Pick the one that describes you. Everything below rewrites itself to match — and you can switch at any time.
You're reading · switch route
Step 2 · Route I
You're here to compare suppliers and decide.
You wrote the brief because those categories are costing you something right now, and you booked the days because closing them at your desk was going to take another two quarters. The risk on this route is not that you meet the wrong people. It's that you meet the right ones and let the conversation drift somewhere more comfortable. Ten capable suppliers will each try to widen the subject into what they most want to sell.
01
Stick to your brief
You wrote it because those categories are costing you something right now. Every minute spent somewhere else is a minute not spent on the category that made you come.
Ten capable suppliers will each try to widen the conversation into what they most want to sell. This is not bad faith — it is what a good salesperson does with an open subject. The defence is not resistance. It is having named the subject first.
The tell
If you can't name the categories under review this cycle, the supplier will choose the subject for you.
20 minIs enough to close a category — or to have a pleasant conversation. The clock does not distinguish. Only the brief does.
Write the categories down before you travel. Not a wish list — the two or three actively costing margin, with the number attached. A brief you can recite is a brief that survives contact with ten motivated suppliers.
02
Compare them side by side
This is the only day in your year when you can put an entire category side by side in a single afternoon — same brief, same questions, same room, four hours apart.
3Identical questions, asked of every supplier in a category — and the ranking writes itself
Live priceAn entire category quoted within a single afternoon
Live shortlistRanked before you leave the building
That isn't ten meetings. It's a live market price, a live capability check and a live shortlist — gathered under conditions you will not get again until next November.
The value is in the control. Every other benchmarking exercise you run is contaminated by time: quotes arrive weeks apart, market conditions shift between them, and the supplier who responded last had the advantage of knowing what they were bidding against. Here, none of that applies.
03
Decide while you're there
A sourcing decision normally takes two quarters because of diary management, not difficulty. Here the diary is gone.
The weeks in a normal sourcing cycle are not spent deliberating. They are spent waiting — for the second stakeholder to be free, for the follow-up call that slips twice, for the sample that ships to the wrong office. Berlin removes the waiting, but only if you bring the people who remove it.
4Months of margin, taken early — a category open in October and closed in November
3Pilot terms to agree in the room: sites, duration, what it's judged on
Bring whoever else has to agree. Or agree the pilot terms at the table — three decisions, all reversible, none requiring a quarter of diary management to reach. The suppliers are prepared to move at that speed. The question is whether your side of the table is.
Step 2 · Route II
You don't have a brief. You have a gap you haven't named yet.
This is the least understood route and the one with the highest ceiling. You are not here to close a category — you are here to work out which category you should have been reviewing, and to come back with it named. The failure mode is browsing: three days of interesting conversations, none anchored to a decision. The fix is to arrive at the brief from the consumer end rather than the category end.
01
Find the missing want
Run your current menu against the seven consumer wants. One or two of them your mix does not answer at all — and that is your sourcing brief.
Run the menu against these
More ChoiceBespoke & PersonalMore ConvenienceCraftsmanshipMore ValueNew FormatsSpeed of Service
It is a brief arrived at from the consumer end rather than the category end — which is why it surfaces things a category review never would. A menu can be strong in every category it stocks and still answer only five of the seven.
Then use the Innovation Discovery Gallery to source against the gap instead of browsing by product type. Not a catalogue. A decision tool.
1–2Wants your current mix does not answer at all. Almost every menu has them — and finding yours takes an afternoon, not a quarter.
02
Meet them, then try it
Conviction doesn't come from a conversation.
Pair every meeting that interests you with the brand experience on the COHO Expo floor an hour later — taste it, watch it run, put your hands on it. The two halves of the event are built to work in that order, and almost nobody uses them that way.
1 hourBetween the meeting and the tasting
1 dayMoves an idea further than two months of samples posted between offices
The reason is not enthusiasm. It is that the questions you ask after tasting something are different from the ones you ask before — sharper, more operational, and impossible to reconstruct from memory a fortnight later when the courier finally arrives.
The proximity is the product. A supplier meeting and a live brand experience an hour apart is not a scheduling convenience; it is the mechanism by which interest becomes conviction inside a single afternoon.
03
Take the helicopter view
Your competitors are in this room. The industry is considerably more open than you expect.
What an operator in another market learned implementing the innovation you're considering is worth more than any deck — and they will usually tell you. The failure they had in month three, the labour cost they didn't model, the site format where it never worked. None of that is in a supplier presentation, and all of it is available over a coffee.
3Days of thinking time outside your own business — the rarest thing on the programme isn't a supplier
The next significant thing you launch is far more likely to start there than at your desk. This is the part that resists measurement, which is exactly why it gets cut first when the diary tightens. It is also, on this route, the highest-return hour of the three days.
Step 2 · Route III
You are not selling a product. You are closing a gap in someone's menu.
The buyer opposite you did not book this meeting to hear a range walked through. They came with something costing them money right now — a slot on the menu that isn't working, a category their competitors have moved on, a want their current mix does not answer. What separates the meeting that converts from the one that doesn't is whether you arrived describing their problem or yours.
01
Start with what they're missing
Allegra's research points to seven things European customers keep asking for. The operator sitting opposite you is looking for an answer to one of them. That is what they are buying.
The seven consumer wants
More ChoiceBespoke & PersonalMore ConvenienceCraftsmanshipMore ValueNew FormatsSpeed of Service
Say which of the seven you answer in the first two minutes, using the words they would use themselves. Now the meeting has a clear subject and you can spend the rest of it on the detail. Leave it unsaid, and they will simply compare you with every other supplier in your category.
The tell
If your product answers four of the seven, you have named none of them.
Breadth reads as uncertainty. The supplier who claims a product solves choice, value, convenience and speed has told the buyer nothing they can act on — and has handed them the job of working out which one actually applies. That work does not get done after you leave the table.
02
Do the homework, then look ahead
Before you sit down, learn how their business actually works: how many sites they run, which countries they operate in, where they sit on price, and what is already on the menu. Then have your five numbers ready, so you never have to look one up mid-meeting.
The five numbers to have ready
Landed cost per serveGross profit per serveRate of saleWastageLabour seconds
Then do the thing almost nobody does — describe the partnership rather than the product. What does this look like across forty of their sites in twelve months? Who runs it? What changes on their P&L?
40Sites, twelve months, named on their P&L — the projection a buyer can take into an internal meeting
5Numbers you should never have to look up mid-meeting
A supplier who describes a product is asking to be evaluated. A supplier who describes the partnership has already started it.
03
Show them where the market is going
The buyer opposite you doesn't only need confidence in your product. They need confidence they are moving in the right direction — because they will have to defend that direction internally long after you've flown home.
2,737Greggs sites — now the UK's largest branded coffee operator
30 DecEUDR compliance lands in 2026 — a firm legal deadline
5European markets entered by Cotti this year
A supplier who can place their product inside that picture is selling certainty. A supplier who can't is selling a product — and products are comparable.
This is the difference between being the option a buyer chooses and the option a buyer has to justify. The first requires only that your product works. The second requires that the buyer can explain, six months from now and without you in the room, why this was the direction the business should have taken.
Return on investment is easy to calculate. The package is on an invoice. Return on time invested is the harder number — and it is the one that decides whether you come back.
The number that decides whether you come back
Supply & Innovation Day · JW Marriott Berlin
The Close
Nobody has a bad day in Berlin. Many arrive underprepared.
They have a productive-feeling day, and go home with a stack of business cards and no answer. Not because the meetings were poor or the room was wrong — but because the day was never assigned a job, and a day without a job fills itself with whatever the person opposite brought.
Everyone gets the same twenty minutes. The return is set by whether you knew, before the schedule locked on 29 October, which of the three routes you were on.
Decisions, not chance.
ECS + COHO 2026 · Berlin, 24–26 November
Pick your route before 29 October.
That is the date the schedule locks. A dedicated Procurement Summit, a structured Supply & Innovation Day with 10+ pre-qualified one-to-one meetings matched to your sourcing priorities, and direct access to the COHO Expo innovation floor. Every meeting is pre-qualified. This is not a trade show — it is a decision environment built for your role.
