How the World's 5th-Largest Spirits Company Manages Formulation Complexity Across 170+ Markets

Why Brown-Forman chose Trace One Devex PLM to stay ahead of ingredient regulation, accelerate product launches, and manage the growing complexity of alcoholic beverage formulation.

Why Are Alcoholic Beverage Manufacturers Rethinking Product Development?

The alcoholic beverages market is not shrinking. Mintel’s 2025 research shows that US alcohol consumption actually rose three percentage points year-over-year, with wine-based drinks, ready-to-drink cocktails, and beer-based innovations all maintaining or growing their share.

What is changing is the pace and complexity of product innovation. Brands are launching sweet-heat combinations that pair tropical fruits with chili and jalapeño, wellness-infused lines featuring chamomile, hibiscus, and matcha, and variety packs that bundle four or five distinct flavor profiles into a single SKU. Each new variant requires its own formulation, its own ingredient specification, its own regulatory validation, and its own label.

For a company like Brown-Forman — the 5th-largest global spirits company, with products sold in more than 170 countries and a history spanning over 150 years — the question is not whether to innovate, but how to manage the formulation complexity that innovation creates.

What Formulation Challenges Do Global Spirits Companies Face?

Brown-Forman’s product development challenges are representative of what the broader alcoholic beverages industry faces at scale. Before implementing Trace One Devex PLM, Brown-Forman managed product development processes through Excel and Word, storing documents in an electronic file box.

The specific challenges included cost threshold control for new products, where multiple suppliers and countries required the ability to change production parameters quickly for ingredient and material attributes, with minimal disruption. Sugar, as one example, is regulated across different markets and its use varies among different consumer signals and product types. Brown-Forman uses many types of sugar worldwide and needed to evaluate cost structures in formula specifications to determine which type to use in each market.

This complexity is amplified by consumer expectations. According to Mintel, 66% of US consumers now prefer alcoholic beverages with natural ingredients over lower-calorie alternatives — a preference that rises to 76% among financially constrained consumers. For spirits manufacturers, this is not a premium-only trend. It is a universal expectation that affects every product in the portfolio, from flagship brands to new innovation lines.

How Does Regulatory Compliance Differ Across Alcoholic Beverage Markets?

As food safety, inspection, and regulatory standards have evolved to focus on preventative measures, alcoholic beverage manufacturers must build more efficient procedures for monitoring, scoping, and changing the traceability of their product ingredients. Brown-Forman needed a more automated workflow for these tasks.

The regulatory challenge is compounded by the speed at which new ingredients are entering alcoholic beverages. Mintel’s 2025 data shows 39% of Gen Z consumers use social media to discover new flavors — making it their primary trial driver, ahead of sampling, pricing, and brand loyalty. When a flavor trend goes viral on TikTok, brands face pressure to formulate, validate ingredients, clear regulatory requirements, and ship. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), EU food safety directives, and market-specific labeling requirements do not move at social media speed.

Today, Brown-Forman uses Trace One Devex PLM to identify problematic ingredients and manage regulatory changes across the globe. Running stability testing, containing possible contamination events, and preventing risks proactively within its portfolio — these activities are centralized in a single system with a centralized search capability.

The TTB example illustrates the practical value: when a regulatory body restricts an ingredient, Brown-Forman can query its entire global formula database instantly, identify every affected product, and initiate label amendments — rather than manually checking spreadsheets across 170+ markets.

How Does PLM Accelerate Speed to Market for Alcoholic Beverages?

In a market where consumer preferences shift rapidly — variety packs now dominate new launches, with brands like Captain Morgan releasing both a Sweet vs Heat variety pack and a Sweet Chili Lime rum in the same product cycle — speed to market is a competitive necessity, not a luxury.

Before Trace One Devex PLM, creating a new finished and approved product and potentially updating the labeling process at Brown-Forman could greatly disrupt and stop production. The math for formulation decision points was incredibly complex, and avoiding time-consuming manual steps was becoming impossible without a system that automated the process.

With Trace One Devex PLM, Brown-Forman can efficiently manage all the critical details within its production formulas, ensuring quicker launches and faster response to consumer trends. The system manages the complexity of alcoholic beverage formulations and their traceable components, freeing innovators to focus on developing the next product rather than wrestling with documentation and compliance workflows.

Brown-Forman is not alone in this approach. Suntory Global Spirits, another global spirits leader, chose Trace One Devex PLM for similar reasons — centralizing product development to accelerate innovation while maintaining regulatory compliance across multiple markets.

What Should Alcoholic Beverage Manufacturers Look for in PLM Software?

Brown-Forman’s experience highlights the capabilities that matter most for spirits and alcoholic beverage manufacturers evaluating PLM software for food and beverage product development.

First, formulation management with version control and what-if analysis. When a brand needs to evaluate whether substituting one type of sugar for another affects cost thresholds, regulatory compliance, and label accuracy simultaneously, the PLM system must support that scenario planning natively. This is the challenge Brown-Forman faced — and the capability that Trace One Devex PLM delivered.

Second, integrated regulatory compliance across markets. With Trace One’s proprietary regulatory intelligence database covering 37,000+ legal statutes across 170+ countries, spirits manufacturers can validate ingredients against market-specific requirements before production — not after. This is a fundamentally different approach from managing compliance through manual lookups.

Third, centralized ingredient and supplier management. The shift to natural ingredients — driven by the 66% consumer preference that Mintel documents — means brands are onboarding new, often smaller specialty suppliers for botanical ingredients, exotic fruits, and natural flavor components. Reducing supplier onboarding friction directly enables the ingredient diversity consumers demand.

Fourth, aggregate labeling capability. With variety packs dominating new product launches, the ability to generate accurate multi-product nutritional fact panels from a single system eliminates one of the most error-prone steps in the launch process.

An independent Total Economic Impact™ study found that organizations using Trace One Devex PLM achieved 70% ROI, $6.06M in benefits, and a 16-month payback period — measured outcomes that reinforce the commercial case for purpose-built process PLM.