Steve Garner, who operates the Cock in Dereham with Ben Hodson, used his new PricePulse software to compare products bought from two suppliers during the three months to 24 August 2026.
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The software identified 16 products purchased from both suppliers. Based on the pub’s actual buying volumes, the difference between buying each product from the cheaper supplier and the more expensive supplier came to £1,308.02.
Garner stressed the figure was not a saving already achieved, but showed the scale of the price gap available to operators when comparing products line by line.
Product by product
The data showed neither supplier was cheaper across the board. “The number that surprised me wasn’t the £1,308. It was that one supplier was cheaper on nine products and the other on seven," he said.
“There’s no villain in this. If you’d asked me to guess which of them was the dear one, I’d have got it wrong, and that’s exactly the point. You cannot answer this by picking a supplier. You can only answer it product by product, and nobody has time to do that with a calculator and a pile of invoices.”
The largest percentage gaps included a 21.4% difference on a 70cl bottle of vodka, a 17.3% gap on postmix cola and a 17% difference on a premium lager keg.
Price changes
A separate report covering price movements between 23 April and 24 August recorded 14 changes from one supplier.
Eight were increases and four were reductions, while two appeared to relate to a case versus single item coding issue.
One 50 litre keg of premium lager rose from £140 to £153.06, a 9.3% increase. Spread across 88 pints, Garner said that equated to about 15p a pint of margin before a drink was poured.
The pub bought 27 of those kegs in the period, meaning the increase represented around £353 of additional cost.
Garner added: “A thirteen pound rise on a keg can get missed on an invoice but fifteen pence a pint, across everything you pour, is a different conversation entirely.”
The reports also showed buying was concentrated across a small number of lines, with three keg products accounting for more than £12,500 of purchases over the period.
PricePulse has launched under Garner’s PubPulse umbrella, a family of apps aimed at independent pubs and smaller hospitality operators.
The software reads supplier invoices and tracks price history, supplier comparisons, gross profit impact and suggested selling prices.
Garner said: “I’m not going to pretend this is a national study. It’s one pub and one quarter. But it’s real, it’s mine, and I’d suggest most licensees would find something similar if they looked. The reason they don’t look is that finding it out by hand is a day’s work nobody has.”
The launch comes as product pricing and margin pressure remain live issues across the pub trade.
The Morning Advertiser (MA) recently reported concerns around tied product pricing, tie release fees and repairs in Stonegate’s Pub Partners estate, with operators and advisers warning that buying costs can have a significant impact on pub viability.
However, Garner said his data focused on one pub, two suppliers and a limited period, with no wider industry claim made.
He added: “A quarter’s worth of supplier cost spread at my place was £1,308. The software that found it is £10 a month. That’s the argument.”
