Away From Home (AFH) channels are now becoming the new home for consumers who continue to blur the lines between home and “third spaces,” such as restaurants, restobars, pubs, cafes, and more. As an emerging growth driver for CPG companies with profit margins predicted to be 1.5x – 2.5x more than traditional retail and grocery channels, AFH offers almost 24/7 revenue streams with higher margins, reduced retailer dependency, and new customer acquisition opportunities.
Consider a scenario where a consumer grabs a protein drink on the way to work, discovers a new snack at a concert, and tries a new skincare product at a pop-up stall—none of these touch points involve traditional retail. Brand visibility is no longer restricted to a retail shelf but everywhere and on the go, and the AFH channel nurtures this, shaping perception and preferences and driving repeat purchases.
Tailoring AFH Channels for CPG Brands
In 2025, when the younger and Gen Z audiences enter the buyer category, brands must meet them where they work, socialize, and recharge. For CPG enterprises, especially food, beverage, and alcohol brands, the stakes are high as AFH channels offer direct access to high-consumption scenarios where the intent of purchase is impulsive, and loyalty is quickly built. Along with these, brands should consider package sizes appropriate for the occasion and point-of-sale, the right market entry strategy, and develop an efficient sales model.
An optimal AFH strategy for CPG enterprises must consider these and adopt a data-driven approach. While data plays a critical role here, it remains one of the most complex barriers enterprises struggles to overcome.
Navigating AFH Channels with MathCo’s End-to-End Framework
AFH channels’ primary field consists of fragmented and decentralized ecosystems, from vending operators to restaurant owners and entertainment venues. They have limited data infrastructure and inconsistent reporting mechanisms, which challenge measuring consumption patterns, product performance, inventory, promotion impact, and pricing in real-time. The absence of visibility across last-mile consumption points affects the enterprises’ ability to activate personalized offerings, forecast demand, and invest smartly in growth levers, ultimately affecting their performance in AFH channels.
An end-to-end framework contextually designed for enterprises can help navigate both the fragmented nature of the ecosystem and the operational and executional challenges associated with it, as well as the limitations of data maturity, to unlock advanced insights. Investment in the right data and analytics partnership is the way forward for businesses to leverage this growth opportunity.
At MathCo, we bring a proven end-to-end framework built to design, deploy, and scale AFH performance measurement. Our roadmap to unlocking AFH channel success for enterprises is as follows:
Designing a Measurement Strategy
Measurement strategies are most effective when tailored to the enterprise context. To achieve this, we run a focused discovery program that aligns key business objectives and identifies critical data needs. This involves mapping the client’s data ecosystem, building an inventory, engaging stakeholders to define success criteria, and assessing data extraction processes. Our key deliverables here include:
- Designing panel surveys to address data gaps
- Creating a holistic AFH features set customized for preferred goals and outcomes
- Developing an insight-activation roadmap that enables clients to tap into the right opportunity at the right time
Establishing Data Foundations
Enterprises should access relevant data sources to provide appropriate insights and support AFH measurement goals. With diverse experience across multiple AFH data providers, we recommend the right sources catering to the client’s needs. The recommendation comes after analyzing the data availability at a granular scale, such as Markets x Subchannels x Subcategories, to ensure that the source offers the best coverage for respective markets. We also provide pre-built plug-ins that enrich internal data with public sources to unlock deeper downstream insights.
Harmonizing Away from Home KPIs
The chances of multiple sources reporting the same metric, such as footfall or conversion rate related to AFH channels, are high, leading to inconsistencies in insights and data interpretation. MathCo navigates this by adopting a structured approach to identify the most reliable sources and metrics as the single source of truth. This helps us assess business relevance and data quality and align teams with certified metrics. We also help create custom mapping logic to create new features and enrich existing features available across various data providers.
Activating Market Intelligence
To uncover actionable growth opportunities, we deliver market-wise predictive and prescriptive intelligence reporting. Our approach includes capabilities to support ad-hoc business questions through a curated analysis framework. We also deploy additional predictive models to project key penetration metrics across markets by leveraging internal and alternative data sources. This approach, over time, reduces dependency on third-party data collectors and minimizes the collection frequency, enabling faster and self-sustained insights generation.
Proven Framework, Proven Results
Our AFH data integration framework has had a remarkable impact on our clients. For instance, a Fortune 100 beverage corporation operating in 80+ global markets lacked robust and reliable data sources for AFH channels across primary markets in North America, Europe, and APAC. This hindered them from measuring accurate brand performance and making data-driven decisions. Their key data challenges included incomplete and inconsistent data coverage, data fragmentation and redundancy, and an unscalable approach.
MathCo onboarded this project to tackle these and integrated ~13+ external data sources with internal shipments data to create a single source of truth. We developed a data availability report for each market and a data quality report with coverage and consistency scoring. Our key deliverables included an integrated AFH dataset, an E2E data integration framework, insights, and recommendations.
This helped the client unlock:
- $45 million growth opportunities by prioritizing investments in the top 20% outlets
- 70% faster time-to-insights across all primary markets
Away From Home is no longer just a distribution channel; it’s a strategic imperative for CPG brands aiming to grow beyond traditional retail. It offers access to new consumption moments, impulse-driven purchases, and higher-margin opportunities that demand a more agile, insight-led approach.
To succeed, CPG enterprises must move beyond fragmented experimentation and adopt scalable, data-driven strategies tailored to the AFH ecosystem. MathCo steps in as a strategic partner in this process. Our end-to-end analytics solutions empower brands to uncover growth opportunities, optimize investments, and respond faster to market shifts.
The future of CPG growth lies beyond the shelf. With the proper data foundation and a trusted partner like MathCo, enterprises can confidently lead into this new frontier.
