On Friday, we shared another press release from Guest Metrics divulging some interesting stats, this time focused around the fastest-growing style in craft beer: IPAs. But something caught our eye: Widmer Brothers Broken Halo IPA showed up in the press release as a top gainer despite not having been produced for two years. Guest Metrics’ Bill Pecoriello wrote in to clarify what happened and as one could have guessed, it relates to barcodes.

Barcodes cost money and when breweries introduce new brands, they don’t always (or generally don’t) replace those barcodes. One example: to help out retailers in managing items like seasonals, some brewers will apply the same barcode to a brewery’s seasonal lineup throughout the year as opposed to applying a new barcode on each. While this common practice limits the upside of what consumers with smartphones and beer apps will be able to gain from scanning a barcode, it has become useful and convenient for those in the supply chain.

And as Pecoriello’s note below makes apparent, Guest Metrics has its hands full with the number of SKUs it is tracking on a daily basis. Not only is SKU proliferation affecting those in the supply chain, it is posing challenges for those trying to help the industry analyze what is going on amongst those SKUs.

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We have 9000+ beer brands, 20,000+ wine brands, 14,000 types of cocktails and 24,000 food menu items currently in our database and growing at a rapid pace as we bring on more locations and the number of items sold at existing locations continue to expand. When the data comes in off the POS we map every item to either an existing master item already in the database or research the product and create a new master item entry. We have a large and growing team that works on this.

We researched how Widmer Brothers Broken Halo IPA showed up in our database as having sales in 2012. In over 95% of the cases, the item came in off the POS as “Widmer IPA” and because our master item list had a “Widmer Brothers Broken Halo IPA” in it from historical transactions, one of our mappers mapped the item to that master item name. Given the fast rotation of some of these craft brands we should have just kept it at the level of “Widmer IPA” because it wasn’t identified as “Broken Halo” or their current IPAs such as “Rotator series, or Pitch Black”.

In a very small % of the cases we actually did have “Broken Halo” showing up in the actual POS and that’s because a smaller bar or two in our system hadn’t changed the POS, so when they are ringing up a Widmer IPA (even if Rotator or Pitch Black) it was coming out of their system as “Broken Halo” but since over 95% was just “Widmer IPA” we would have been fine just to leave it at that high level (knowing the brewer and the style but not knowing if it was Rotator series which was probably what the majority of the 2012 “Widmer IPA transactions were).