The State of Repeatable Growth Economics in Away From Home Beverages in 2026

Noufal Mohamed Basheer, Director of Away From Home Strategy at PepsiCo, discusses achieving repeatable growth in the beverage sector. The strategy emphasises using AI to predict B2B churn, coordinating field execution with local restaurants, and maintaining financial discipline through automated cash control. These pillars ensure long-term stability as restaurant industry sales are projected to reach USD 1.1 trillion.

A Friday lunch rush is not a marketing moment. It is a queue, a ticket printer, and a manager scanning a screen to see what is missing. As restaurant operations and ordering patterns keep shifting, the commercial stakes are rising with them, with restaurant industry sales climbing from $997 billion in 2023 to a projected $1.1 trillion in 2025.

Noufal Mohamed Basheer, Director of Away From Home Strategy at PepsiCo and a Forbes Business Development Council member, has built his work around a practical principle: growth in away from home is earned in repeat behavior, not one-time spikes. To understand how teams are building repeatable growth across retention, field execution, category programs, forecasting discipline, and cash control, we spoke with Basheer.

Retention Stopped Being a Finance Word

“Churn does not arrive with fireworks. It usually shows up as a few quiet weeks where orders do not repeat,” Basheer says. He is talking about B2B churn, the local restaurant customers and operator accounts that decide whether a beverage program keeps its placement, its volume, and its share. That quiet drift is easy to miss in the day to day churn of local restaurant accounts, but it is now one of the most expensive blind spots a commercial team can have. When relationships are recurring and the switching cost is low, a small change in retention can outweigh a dozen small wins in acquisition. It is not glamorous work. It is the work that keeps growth real.

That dynamic is not unique to food service. In any recurring business, retention compacts or compounds everything else. Basheer has written about the same failure mode in his HackerNoon article, “Why My Spectacular Churn Model Failed and How AI Saved It,” where he describes how churn can look “under control” in aggregate until a small behavioral shift exposes the weak spots in the model and the response plan.

Basheer treated customer loss in PepsiCo’s away from home beverages business as a system to be measured and managed, not a story to be explained after the fact.

He developed and piloted a program to predict which customers were at risk of churning, validated the model through back testing and forward testing, then coordinated with commercial, customer management, and frontline teams on the actions to take once a churn risk was flagged.

The AI lesson, as he tells it, was that prediction alone did not change field outcomes. He used AI to translate churn risk signals into practical next steps for the teams in the field by pulling from the customer’s history and internal playbooks, so the output stopped being “a warning” and became “a plan.” One dashboard does not save a business. A habit does.

Local Restaurants Reward the Teams Who Plan the Field

That habit has to survive the field. If churn is the symptom, local execution is often the cause. The hard part is that the “local” in local restaurants is not a segment label, it is thousands of operators with different rhythms, different constraints, and very little patience for programs that feel designed in a conference room.

Restaurant economics leave no room for waste, with median income before taxes at just 2.8% of sales for full service restaurants. That is why beverage growth plans that add friction tend to die quietly. Operators do not argue; they revert.

Basheer’s local restaurants strategy work focused on what it takes to win repeat placement and repeat operator reorders where decisions are made fast.

He analytically identified the incremental frontline resources required to keep share gains compounding year over year, delineated the technology tools frontline sales teams needed to win new customers efficiently, and built models to prioritize targets with the highest probability of conversion and revenue potential.

He also drove partnerships with large distributors, including Sysco, and designed incentives that made it rational for distributor representatives to sell Pepsi products into local restaurants. He remembers one tense internal review where a team was debating whether a program was “worth the operational lift.”

In the middle of the discussion, a field leader pulled up a live list of locations and said, plainly, that the lift was already happening, just without coordination. “If we do not make execution easier for the people actually doing it, the plan is a memo,” Basheer says. It was a quiet turning point. Nobody argued after that.

Category Bets Only Matter When They Survive Contact With Operators

Once the field is planned, the next question is what you are asking operators and guests to do differently. This is where category strategy often gets over romanticized. In reality, the job is to translate a trend into a program that can be sold, installed, and repeated without constant intervention.

Big channels amplify small mistakes. At scale, the only “innovation” that matters is what field teams can repeat.

Basheer led PepsiCo’s crafted beverages strategy by treating it as a business build, not a one off launch.

He identified the opportunity through market research and customer interviews, aligned internal leadership on why the category warranted investment, and partnered across marketing, commercial, sales, R&D, and new business teams to map customer needs into a product roadmap.

The work also demanded judgment about what to standardize and what to leave flexible. That judgment is shaped by how he evaluates evidence outside his day job as well, including his role as an editor for the SARC journal of Economics Intelligence and Technology, where the discipline is to separate a strong claim from a well supported one. In crafted beverages, the same mindset applies: if the offering cannot be explained clearly, repeated reliably, and measured honestly, it will not scale.

Forecasting Works Best When It Has Rituals

When churn is measured honestly and field execution is coordinated, forecasting stops being a quarterly performance and starts being an operating system.

By the time a team is juggling retention programs, local execution, and category bets, forecasting becomes less about predicting the future and more about avoiding self-inflicted surprises.

The market for enterprise performance management is projected to grow from $7.05 billion in 2025 to $11.23 billion by 2030, a signal that companies are paying for better planning and accountability as complexity rises. The tools matter, but the operating behavior matters more.

Earlier in his career, Basheer introduced an enterprise performance management planning, budgeting, and forecasting process for a large institution, starting with baselining the current process, benchmarking best practices globally, then designing a tailored approach that fit the organization’s needs and governance reality. The most important part was not the template.

It was the set of rituals and artifacts that made the process repeatable. “A forecast is only useful if the organization trusts how it was made,” Basheer says. “That trust comes from consistent inputs, clear ownership, and the discipline to revisit assumptions before they become excuses.”

Cash Control Is the Quiet Partner of Growth

The later stage view of away from home growth is simple: if you cannot control cash movement and payment risk, every other win is fragile. Automation is increasingly where that control gets baked in, with the accounts payable automation market valued at $3.07 billion in 2023 and projected to reach $7.1 billion by 2030. That curve is not just a software story.

It is a story about how companies reduce error, compress cycle time, and keep controls intact as transaction volume grows.

Basheer’s treasury modernization work at Alghanim Industries is a case study in that kind of operational math. He introduced digital payment to eliminate paper transactions, partnered with banks to institute supply chain financing programs that reduced working capital investments, and designed year end balance sheet management to reduce cash float and interest costs.

The modernization also reduced transaction processing time from multiple days to less than a day, and delivered material savings in cross border transaction expenses while reducing working capital investments and group debt.

The habit of evidence shows up here too, including his repeated SARC peer paper review service, where the expectation is that claims hold up under scrutiny. “Cash control is not a back office concern,” Basheer says. “It is what lets growth survive a bad week without breaking trust.”