Michelin-starred chef Thomas Keller said it best: “A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.”

The Away From Home sector is no different. Every brand today is overloaded with dashboards, metrics and machine-generated insights. But data alone doesn’t create direction. Expertise does.

As we track the industry’s journey from end-to-end data collection to practical, tech-driven results, the real competitive advantage is no longer the gathering of facts and figures. It’s the ability to read their nuance, extract meaning and turn it into momentum.

Brands crave confidence, and confidence only comes from experience. To explore this shift, we brought together three of Omne’s senior leaders to unpack how brands can unlock meaningful growth in the era of expertise.

Seeing what others miss: The experience that turns signals into strategy

Ellie Mitchell, Group Account Director at Omne

Data is easy. Clarity is hard.

Most brands sit on thousands of data points, but only a handful actually matter. Unlocking value means spotting those pearls - the signals worth backing - and knowing what to do next is where expertise earns its keep.

Living the realities of operators, categories and channels helps you understand which signals matter. When you understand how decisions land in the real world, you get sharper judgement on what’s driving behaviour, what’s noise, and where brands should act. Decades of experience enable you to:

• Detect faint market nuances before they get louder

• Understand when a trend is meaningful and when it's just a short-term fad

• Translate dashboards into decisions that affect real-world operator behaviour

• Connect market logic, category knowledge, creative instinct and activation experience into one clear commercial recommendation

We have seen this in practice: for Unilever Food Solutions, using campaign performance data we can amplify operator messaging that resonates first and optimises in real-time, and for Mondelez, using website traffic and customer journeys to shape the next improvements into a high-functioning action plan.

That’s the difference between having data and using it.

The real engine isn’t the reporting dashboard, it’s the people interpreting what they see, with strategy, data, creative and activation teams working as one commercial engine, turning insight into action, and action into growth.

From Insight to Impact: Data with a Human Lens

Laura Mach, Group Account Director at Omne

Data only creates momentum when it’s grounded in humanity. Many brands and agencies can surface data, but few can translate this through the lens of brand values, belief systems and real-world challenges.

We take what the data is telling us and shape it in a way that feels authentic to the brand, reflecting not just who they are, but what their customers genuinely believe in and trust.

For Strong Roots, this meant taking McCain’s robust data and reframing it to make plant-based feel exciting, accessible and emotionally resonant. In a declining plant-based category, we leaned into what the brand truly stands for: real veg, real food, and simplifying healthier food choices. By overlaying industry data with our deep understanding of foodservice operators – from menu pressures to staffing and margins – we created a proposition that solved real problems.

For Carlsberg Britvic this approach allowed us to take shared category and operator insights and interpret them across their diverse portfolio, ensuring each brand used data in a way that felt relevant, compelling and true to its individual identity and role within the market.

This is where data becomes powerful: when it’s values-led, emotionally intelligent and unmistakably true to the brand.

The future is hybrid: Technology evolves, but expertise endures

Emma Halewood, Regional Director at Omne

Technology will continue to transform foodservice. Tools like Omne Connect are designed to grow brands by uniting operator insights, dynamic lead scoring, always-on nurture campaigns and live analytics. But even the smartest system is only as effective as the expertise guiding it.

Data without context is just noise. Automation without strategy is inefficiency at scale. True commercial growth comes from the full spectrum of human know-how that only experience delivers:

• Crafting the right message

• Shaping the campaign

• Sharpening relevance

• Pinpointed targeting

• Applying sector intelligence

Tech platforms will keep evolving and improving. But as automation accelerates and AI amplifies across the industry, the gap between data-rich and impact-rich brands will widen. The real differentiator will be how effectively brands interpret and apply human intelligence to create an advantage.

The Omne advantage: Human expertise at the heart of data

Newly crowned as the UK’s B2B marketing agency of the year for 2025, Omne is the strategic and creative partner to the world’s best brands targeting the Away From Home channel. Our team tackle their challenges with clear and effective solutions. Our specialty? Setting up brands to lead the future of AFH.

• When Carlsberg Britvic needed that strategic reset of its hospitality portfolio, Omne delivered “Future Ready” - a unifying proposition built on deep market analysis and data-driven ABM. The commercial outcome? Engagement with 50+ national accounts and more than 1,000+ qualified leads.

• For Unilever Food Solutions, we produced the latest “Future Menus” report identifying the trends defining global foodservice. The paper analyses and anticipates important consumer needs, but we also translated this macro data into actionable ideas that operators could apply immediately. Our team even amplified reach across channels, generating over 18.9m social impressions and more than 10,442 MQLs.

Omne is the B2B foodservice agency combining data intelligence with deep sector mastery to deliver commercial outcomes in a complex, fast-moving market.

For operators, distributors and FMCG leaders, our winning formula is simple: smarter intelligence, sharper interpretation and human expertise you can trust. That’s where Omne sits. After all, data only tells you what’s happened. Expertise tells you what to do next.

Ready to see how expertise could elevate your strategy? Connect with a member of our team today.