Our story

History

From humble beginnings, over 50 years ago, IWSR has become the trusted source of Global drinks industry data and intelligence, with offices in London, New York and Singapore and covering 160 countries.

The global market for beverage alcohol is huge, complex and fast-evolving. Even within a single alcohol category, there are multiple routes to market, a myriad of products and often unreliable statutory data.

There are also shifting consumer tastes to contend with, and anomalies between supply chains in different markets. Brand owners, investors and intermediaries worldwide, face some challenging questions: What is actually happening? Why is it happening? And what should I do about it?

This was the research problem that confronted Val Smith in the early 1970s, and led him to founding IWSR. In an era of typewriters, hand-drawn spreadsheets and telex machines, he responded by creating the first global network of drinks market experts reporting on beverage alcohol sales.

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Fast-forward to today, and IWSR is a global technology-driven data and analytics business. We deploy consumer and market insights, to answer these questions in the most thorough way possible for the world’s leading drinks companies. In 2020, the business merged with Wine Intelligence, a leading consumer research agency servicing the wine industry, further enhancing our consumer insights capability. 

Today, IWSR holds the most comprehensive proprietary beverage alcohol dataset in the world and leverages the latest AI-enabled analytics technologies. This is all underpinned by our unrivalled global drinks industry expertise, helping you pinpoint, and take advantage of, current and future trends in the drinks industry.

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Our team

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