The Capital That Keeps Horeca Moving

Why the distributor finances the market, while the industry finances its own value.

Horeca is no longer just a commercial channel. It has become one of the most strategic ecosystems for the growth of fast-moving consumer goods brands. Hotels, restaurants, bars, cafés, and catering are not simple points of sale: they are places where products are chosen, served, narrated, and experienced.

This is where the brand leaves the shelf and enters a real moment of consumption.

For the FMCG industry, out-of-home consumption is worth far more than volumes. It offers visibility, premium positioning, a direct relationship with the consumer, information on consumption behavior, and loyalty-building opportunities that are difficult to replicate in traditional retail. This is why many companies are investing in foodservice partnerships, dedicated formats, professional solutions, and distribution strategies specifically designed for Horeca.

But behind this growth, often described from the brand’s point of view, there is a more concrete question: who really finances the daily functioning of this market? Who advances goods, service, availability, and credit so that the product is in the right place at the right time?

In out-of-home consumption, people often talk about product, price, assortment, and service. Almost never, however, do they start from the point that holds the entire system together: working capital finance. Yet it is precisely there, in receivables, inventories, payables to suppliers, and collection times, that one understands who truly keeps Horeca moving. Because the product may travel in a few hours, but cash does not. The goods arrive tomorrow morning; the money may come back in thirty, sixty, ninety days, sometimes even later. The distributor lives inside this time gap and transforms it into an operating model.

Italian foodservice remains an enormous market, but structurally fragile. The latest FIPE data describe a sector close to 100 billion euros in out-of-home consumption, still below pre-Covid levels in volume, with productivity indicated as a persistent critical issue. This detail is decisive: in a fragmented market made up of bars, restaurants, hotels, canteens, pizzerias, chains, independent venues, and very different seasonal patterns, service continuity does not arise on its own. Someone has to buy first, keep goods available, break down the large flows of industry into small and frequent deliveries, grant payment time, and absorb the risk that this time may lengthen. That someone is the distributor.

For this reason, the Horeca distributor is not simply an intermediary. It is the daily financial infrastructure of out-of-home consumption. It stands between an industry that produces, plans, and thinks in batches, and a customer base that orders according to tomorrow’s service needs. It translates industrial scale into operational availability. It holds together the warehouses of many producers, the logistics of thousands of deliveries, the trade credit of a fragmented customer base, and the simplest but most expensive promise: when the customer calls, the product must be there.

Looking at MARR helps make this mechanism concrete. In 2025, the group closed with total consolidated revenues of 2.127 billion euros. But the most interesting figure is not revenue. It is the 342.3 million euros in net trade receivables from customers, the 272.9 million euros in inventory, and the 422.7 million euros in payables to suppliers. The difference between these three items leads to net trade working capital of 192.5 million euros. In other words, even before talking about margins, the model requires almost 200 million euros to keep the commercial cycle moving.

The comparison with the financial position makes the point even more evident. At the end of 2025, MARR’s net financial debt, before the effects of IFRS 16, was 203.8 million euros. Operating debt is therefore substantially aligned with the net commercial capital needed to make the service work. Translated out of accounting language: a very significant part of the distributor’s finance is used to cover the time that passes between when it buys, stores, delivers, and collects.

This is the heart of the model. The distributor does not use capital only to have goods in-house. It uses it to allow the customer to work before the customer has paid. It advances assortment, availability, logistics, and credit. If the season requires more stock, it absorbs more cash. If it opens a new platform or increases territorial coverage, it absorbs more cash. If volumes grow, liquidity does not necessarily improve immediately: it often worsens first, because more receivables and more inventory must be financed. In distribution, growth is good news only if the cash cycle remains under control.

MARR’s 2025 also shows this clearly in margin dynamics. EBITDA stood at 108.8 million euros and EBIT at 63.3 million euros, on total revenues above 2.1 billion euros. These are margins consistent with a highly operationally intensive business, but very thin compared with the capital that must be continuously put to work. Profitability was also affected by the operational-logistics redesign, with the launch of the Central-South platform and the internalization process of handling activities. These initiatives are designed to increase efficiency and service level, but in the short term they confirm one point: to distribute better, one must invest first.

This is where the true specificity of Horeca comes into play. The restaurateur does not buy to build inventory; they buy to serve. The hotel does not order to immobilize capital; it orders because it must guarantee breakfasts, banquets, rooms, bars, and internal catering. The bar does not think like an industrial buyer; it thinks about counter continuity. The distributor takes this fragmentation upon itself and finances it. It acts as a buffer between the rigidity of upstream flows and the urgency of downstream needs. That is why its working capital is not an accounting detail, but a system function.

The risk is not theoretical. In the fourth quarter of 2025, CRIBIS indicated restaurants and bars among the sectors with the highest incidence of serious delays beyond 90 days, equal to 7.1%. For those who sell to this market every day, the figure is not statistics: it is cash coming back more slowly, credit to be monitored, capital that remains blocked. Industry can experience this risk in a more filtered way, especially when it sells through distribution networks. The distributor, instead, encounters it directly in the daily relationship with thousands of customers.

At this point, the comparison with industry becomes clearer. Let us take Campari, not because it represents the entire beverage industry, but because it makes clear what happens when immobilized capital serves not only to support service, but to build value. In 2025, the group recorded net sales of 3.051 billion euros, adjusted EBITDA of 785.2 million euros, and adjusted EBIT of 636.9 million euros. The distance from the distribution model is not only dimensional: it lies in the economic quality of the capital employed.

Campari also has enormous working capital. At the end of 2025, it had 327.1 million euros in trade receivables, 1.721 billion euros in inventories, and 714.6 million euros in trade payables, for operating working capital of 1.334 billion euros, equal to 43.7% of rolling net sales. At first glance, this would seem an even more demanding absorption than that of the distributor. But the economic meaning is different. A significant part of Campari’s inventory is maturing inventory: liquid in maturation, equal to 1.172 billion euros, linked to categories such as bourbon, Scotch, rum, and cognac, meaning capital invested over a long horizon.

The difference can be explained simply. The distributor’s warehouse is a high-turnover parking area: goods must enter, leave, and quickly turn into cash. The warehouse of the premium industry is, in part, a cellar: the product remains still because time increases its potential value. In the first case, time is a cost to be compressed. In the second, it can become an ingredient of margin. In the first case, stationary goods signal capital absorbed by service. In the second, at least in part, capital invested in positioning.

This is not a moral distinction. It does not mean that one model is better than the other. It means that the two models must be read through different financial lenses. The distributor finances the commercial time of the supply chain: it buys first, delivers immediately, collects later. The premium industry finances industrial and brand time: it produces, lets mature, supports the brand, defends the price, and builds margins. The distributor monetizes availability through volumes and service. The industry monetizes the product through differentiation and pricing power.

The consequence is that it is not enough to say that both have working capital. This is true in the balance sheet, but not enough in the real economy. In distribution, working capital is transit capital: it serves to move product, credit, and service from one point of the supply chain to another. In the premium industry, it is often value-building capital: it serves to transform time into perceived quality, scarcity, brand equity, and margin. One keeps the market running. The other extracts more value from the market once it is running.

This also changes the way performance should be judged. For a Horeca distributor, revenue growth alone is not enough. What matters is growing without losing control over collection days, inventory turnover, credit quality, cost of debt, logistics efficiency, and gross margin. One additional euro of revenue may be positive, but if it requires too much capital before turning into cash, it becomes fragile. For a premium industry player, instead, absorbed capital is also assessed according to future pricing power, product mix, brand strength, and the ability to sustain higher margins.

In the end, the Horeca system revolves around a chain of advances. The final customer pays the venue. The venue pays the distributor. The distributor pays suppliers, logistics, personnel, banks, and platforms. Industry builds product and brand, but the distributor makes that product available at the time and in the format required by the market. Without this financial and operational lung, many out-of-home businesses would have to immobilize more capital, manage more suppliers, bear more risks, and give up part of the flexibility they now take for granted.