123 | When The On-Trade Toy Breaks: Listing Fees, Distillery Trips and the Pay-To-Play Trap with Chris Maffeo at BCB

123 | When The On-Trade Toy Breaks: Listing Fees, Distillery Trips and the Pay-To-Play Trap with Chris Maffeo at BCB

April 26, 2026 · 20 min · Season 4 · Episode 123

About this episode

Chris Maffeo discusses the complexities of trade investment and partnerships in the drinks and hospitality industries.

The MAFFEO DRINKS Podcast is a leading drinks business podcast, listened to in 120 countries worldwide with 125+ episodes. Honest conversations about how the industry actually works, from the bar and what it means for the boardroom. This Episode is hosted by Chris Maffeo and brought to you by MAFFEO DRINKS . This solo episode captures my Bar Convent Berlin talk on the distance between transactional trade investment and genuine partnership. I open with the refusal to call anything a playbook (“there’s no such thing as a playbook, you cannot really copy paste things”) and reframe the drinks and hospitality industries as two sides of the same coin that, despite sitting on the same metal, do not speak the same language. From there I map the drinks ecosystem as four players (brands, distributors, bars, consumers) and put distributors back in the middle of the conversation where they belong. The talk then walks through the trade investment reality, guest shifts, listing fees, distillery trips, competitions, activations, and explains why the aggregate feels messy: too much theory, too much PowerPoint, too little time at the bar. I share the credibility problem created by brand…

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