We examined 14,780 products purchased by more than one location inside the same restaurant, bar and hotel group across the United States and Canada. Nearly half of them carry a different price depending on which location is buying.
WISK Research | October 2026 | 14,780 products across 122 groups
What we found
- 46.5% of products bought by more than one location in the same group are priced differently from location to location.
- 42.3% of those gaps occur between locations in the same city, where freight and market differences cannot explain them.
- Buying the same product from different suppliers at different locations nearly doubles the median gap, from 8.8% to 16.3%.
- 92% of multi-location groups have at least one product where locations pay 10% or more apart.
- Price drift compounds past five locations, not below it. Growth makes this worse, not better.
The question most groups cannot answer
Ask a multi-unit operator what they pay for their best-selling spirit and you will get a confident answer. Ask what each of their locations pays for it, and the confidence usually goes.
This is not negligence. Purchasing in hospitality is local by default. A general manager builds a relationship with a sales rep. An opening team sets up accounts under time pressure. A location joins the group through acquisition and keeps the arrangements it arrived with. Each of those decisions is reasonable on its own. Collectively they produce a group where the same case of the same product arrives at two addresses at two different prices, and nobody is looking at both invoices at once.
Before a group renegotiates with a distributor, it needs to know what it is actually paying. Not the contracted rate. Not the rate head office believes is in place. The rate each location pays in practice. That is what benchmarking means in this context, and it is the step most groups skip.
We ran the numbers on our own customer base to find out how wide the problem is.
How far apart locations pay
Every product below is bought by at least two locations inside the same group, from the same distributor, in the same pack size. The bars show how far apart the cheapest and dearest location are.
Just over half of shared products are priced identically everywhere, which is what a working purchasing process looks like. The other half is the finding. Roughly one product in five differs by 10% or more, and one in eighteen by a third or more.
Distance does not explain it
The first response to these numbers is usually geographic. Different markets, different freight, different state tax and licensing regimes. It is a fair objection, and the data partly supports it: gaps between locations in different states are the widest we measured, with a median of 23.7% among restaurant and bar groups.
But the objection collapses at close range.
Between two locations in the same city, 42.3% of shared products still carry a different price. Same metro, same distributors, same tax regime, often the same delivery truck. The median gap in that group is 8.9%.
Whatever is driving this, it is not the map. It is that two sets of books were never compared.
The single largest driver is supplier fragmentation
Roughly one in five shared products is bought from a different supplier depending on the location. When that happens, the price gap widens sharply.
The pattern repeats in hotel and resort groups, where the median gap moves from 5.8% on a single supplier to 11.1% when locations buy the same product from different ones.
This is the most actionable finding in the dataset, because supplier consolidation is a decision an operator can make inside a quarter. It does not require a national contract or a new procurement team. It requires knowing which products are being sourced two different ways in which is, again, a benchmarking problem before it is a purchasing one.
Growth makes this worse
The intuitive assumption is that larger groups buy better. More volume, more leverage, more professional procurement. In our data, that holds until roughly the fifth location and then reverses.
Groups of three to five locations are the tightest in the dataset, with 12.7% of shared products differing by 10% or more. Past that point the figure roughly doubles. The likely mechanism is straightforward: a five-location operator can hold every supplier relationship in their head. A twelve-location operator cannot, and usually has not yet built the reporting that replaces doing so.
That transition — from small enough to track informally to large enough to need a system, is where price discipline is quietly lost.
Hotel groups: smaller gaps, same frequency
Hotel and resort groups behave differently from restaurant groups, but not in the direction most would predict.
They are almost exactly as likely to have a price gap — 45.3% of shared products, against 46.5% for restaurant and bar groups. What differs is the size of the gap. Only 15.0% of hotel products differ by 10% or more, against 22.8% for restaurants, and the median gap is 5.9% against 9.6%.
That shape is what centralized purchasing produces. A property-level or brand-level procurement function catches the egregious misses: the outlet paying a third more than its neighbour, the account nobody renegotiated after an opening. What it does not catch is the long tail of five- and eight-percent differences that look like rounding until they are multiplied by annual volume across every outlet in the portfolio.
For a hotel group, the uncomfortable reading is not that procurement is broken. It is that procurement is working and money is still leaking through it.
How to benchmark before you renegotiate
A renegotiation opened without internal benchmarking is a conversation where only one party has the numbers. These are the steps that change that, in the order they pay off.
1. Normalize before you compare
The most common error in this exercise is comparing line prices across locations that buy different pack sizes. A case is not a case. Convert everything to a price per base unit — per litre, per kilogram, per each — before any comparison. In our own analysis, skipping this step would have manufactured variance on thousands of products that are in fact priced identically.
2. Find the products you buy more than once
Not your whole catalogue. The subset that appears at two or more locations is where comparison is possible and where leverage exists. For the typical group in our data, 16.9% of that shared basket carries a gap of 10% or more. That is your working list.
3. Separate the two failure modes
Same product, same supplier, different price is a negotiation problem — one location has terms another does not. Same product, different supplier is a sourcing problem, and it carries roughly double the gap. They need different conversations and often different people.
4. Set the internal floor as your opening position
The lowest price any of your own locations already pays is not a target. It is an existing commercial fact, agreed by the same supplier, in the same market, for the same product. It is the most defensible number you can bring to a renegotiation, because the supplier cannot argue it is unachievable.
5. Re-run it on a schedule
Distributor pricing moves continuously. A benchmark performed once is a snapshot that starts decaying immediately. Groups that hold price discipline do this quarterly, not annually.
How this compares internationally
Supplier price benchmarking has received more attention outside North America than within it. Supy, working with operators in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Gulf, reports a median gap of 32% for the same product from the same supplier.
Our North American figures are considerably tighter. Where a gap exists in our data, the median is 9.6% for restaurant and bar groups and 5.9% for hotel groups. Only 5.7% of the products we examined reach the 32% band at all.
The two numbers measure different markets under different definitions and should not be read as a contest. The more useful conclusion is that distribution in the United States and Canada is more consolidated and more price-transparent than in the markets Supy covers — and that a 9.6% median gap, applied across the shared basket of a group with a dozen locations, is still a material sum that nobody budgeted for.
Tighter is not the same as solved.
Methodology
We examined current supplier pricing across venues belonging to the same organization in WISK, limited to the United States and Canada. A product qualifies for comparison when two or more locations in a group buy it from the same distributor under the same item code and the same pack size, so that prices are directly comparable. All prices were normalized to a single container before comparison.
Records where a location's price is inherited from a parent property rather than set independently were excluded, as these do not represent separate purchasing decisions. Products showing a gap above 200% were excluded as data-entry error, removing 2.4% of the set. The final sample is 14,780 products: 13,280 across 110 restaurant and bar groups, and 1,500 across 12 hotel and resort groups.
Figures describe current contracted pricing by location rather than volume-weighted prices paid. All data is aggregated and anonymized; no group, venue or supplier is identifiable. Hotel findings are reported at product level, as the hotel segment comprises twelve groups.
See what your locations actually pay
WISK compares item costs across every distributor and every location in your group, normalized to a common unit, so the comparison in this report is one you can run on your own purchasing in an afternoon rather than a quarter.
