Coverage and audience across four continents and eleven markets: Nigeria, Kenya, Luxembourg, Ethiopia, South Africa, Ghana, United States, Virgin Islands (Caribbean), Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon.
Global beverage and agency firms, and the builders and consultants shaping the next pour. One room, eight hours.
Tap any photo to view it larger
A Kenyan original poured through the day, the heritage brand that gave the room its taste of home.
Actnable AI
Open Squares Africa
Pierrine Consulting
Pop Culture Varsity
Nyle
Building for Africa
MX5 PR
EABL
Nine pickups across broadcast, digital and print. The summit carried past the building.
Why money in beverages is flowing South.
Unveiled live on the Nairobi stage, the inaugural New Pour Report reads the continent's beverage market the way operators actually experience it: capital moving south, informal trade carrying the volume, and culture deciding which brands earn a place in the glass.
There's no tired brand. There are only tired brand managers.
When a consumer wakes up, they are not thinking about your brand. They are thinking about a job to be done.
Africans are modernising, but they are not westernising.
If you're old school, you're using the stairs. AI is a lift.
You get a brief, and quickly people go and do a prompt. You get something interesting, but it looks like a 500 dollar job.
Taste like home is not geography. It's that sense of familiarity, warmth, and connection.
Story is everything, especially when it comes to beverages.
My strategy has always been to be so good that we can't be ignored. We couldn't find distribution, so we built our own.
From return on investment, we must now start looking at return on culture.
Building in Africa requires a certain kind of madness to navigate.
The brand says this is who I am, but the consumer now says it louder: no, this is who you are.
The consumer is now thinking more about what they're projecting than what they're drinking.
We're moving from functional to intentional. What matters now is what drinking that brand says about me.
"Run a workshop with the client team, so the research produces direct action they can implement the next week."
"First, you have to own and trust your own brand."
"Even in Uyo, one of the highest drinking populations in the country, mocktails have become a thing."
"People consume very intentionally now, in how they move, the occasions they choose, and the brands they choose."
"Your target audience are the ones driving the experience now. All you need to do as a brand is empower them."
"It's super easy to sit at your laptops and outsource your thinking to ChatGPT. Until you've lived the experience, you've not really lived it."
"The most important thing an ad can do is not be seen as an ad. The less it looks like an ad, the better."
"A sharp brief goes in, three rounds of internal approval happen, and what comes out the other side is competent, polished, and forgettable."
"Rare calibre of thinking in one room. I came for the report and left with a full playbook."
"The Villager framework alone justified the trip. It changed how I read the African consumer."
"Most summits hand you theory. This one handed me things I could act on by Monday."
"The move from descriptive to predictive research finally made sense to me here."
"Strategy sessions that actually challenged how we work. Rare, and overdue."
"Seeing the Manyatta story told through this lens was something. Proof of what local heritage can build."
"The advertising panel hit a nerve. Protecting courage between insight and final cut is exactly our gap."
"Watching from Douala, the Francophone voices on the panel made it feel truly continental."
"A summit that respects the data and the culture behind it in equal measure. Hard to find."
In 2026, we decoded the unwritten rules of survival through building resilient brands. In 2027, we will take the conversation deeper into operational and regulatory dynamics of future-proofing beverage brands in Africa.
Before a brand can scale, it must secure its core operations against external market shocks, illicit competition, and regulatory volatility.
Moving the liquid: mastering last-mile execution, cross-border corridors, and sales engine performance.
Scaling the business: converting market traction into long-term valuation, investment, and category dominance.
Position your organization in front of decision-makers, operators and institutional investors shaping the continent's drink sector. Category exclusivity for '27 is allocated on a first-aligned basis.
One form for every way to engage with The New Pour Summit 2027.
Tap any photo to view it larger
