Methodology: Beverage Operating Metrics
What these figures are
The Operating Metrics card on a beverage company’s stock page shows the operating statistics the company reports in its own quarterly earnings release — the SEC Form 8-K exhibit filed alongside the results. These are the numbers beverage companies use to describe how fast the underlying business is growing, how much of that is real volume versus price, and how much product is actually moving to consumers. Oxford Ledge reads them directly from the as-filed exhibit and normalizes the labels so you can compare a company to itself over time.
They are an Oxford Ledge Signal: our reading of a public filing, not a re-audit of the company’s books and not a licensed data-vendor feed. Every value on the card carries its filing as-of date and links back to the SEC source.
The metrics, in plain English
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Organic revenue growth | Revenue growth stripped of currency and acquisition effects — the demand the business generated on its own. The number management is really judged on. |
| Net revenue growth | The as-reported change in net revenues, before the organic adjustments — what actually hit the top line, including currency and acquisitions. |
| Unit case volume | The physical amount of product sold, in standardized unit cases, as year-over-year growth — the truest read on real consumer demand, independent of price. |
| Effective net pricing | The share of growth that came from higher prices and richer mix rather than more units — the “price” half of the volume-vs-price split. |
| Depletions | For alcohol companies, the rate product is sold from distributors to retailers — a better read on end-demand than shipments, which distributor inventories distort. |
Why organic growth shows its bridge
Organic revenue growth is a single headline number, but companies build it from components, and the split is where the real signal is. The volume component is how much came from selling more product; the price/mix component is how much came from charging more or selling a richer mix. Growth built on volume is healthier and more durable than growth built only on price, which can eventually dent demand. On the card we show the headline organic total, and badge any single bridge component (volume, price/mix, currency, acquisitions) so it is never mistaken for the whole figure. On the peer table, the organic-growth column shows only the headline total, so you are comparing the same thing across companies.
Why the peer table leaves cells blank
On the industry peer table, each column pins one definition — organic revenue growth on its headline total basis, the volume and pricing metrics as reported. A company is shown in a column only if it reports that metric on that basis; a company that discloses, say, only a bridge component and not a headline organic total leaves an honest blank there, never a value pooled in from a different basis. A blank is a coverage gap, and the column footnotes how many companies it covers.
How we read and normalize it
For each company we fetch the most recent quarterly earnings 8-K exhibit from SEC EDGAR, locate the operating table, and read each value verbatim from the reported column — never a prior-year or year-to-date column standing in for the quarter. We record whether an organic-growth figure is the headline total or a single bridge component (volume, price/mix, currency, acquisitions), and keep them as distinct rows so a component never overwrites the total.
The reading is checked against a hand-verified golden set for each company before any figure is allowed to publish; a value whose basis the extractor cannot confidently determine is withheld rather than shown.
What we deliberately do not do
- We do not re-audit. The figures are as reported by the issuer under regulatory convention. We normalize labels; we do not restate the company’s numbers.
- We do not pool a bridge component with the total. A price/mix component and a headline organic total are different numbers; the peer table compares only the totals.
- We do not show a value we are unsure of. Any reading our extractor flags is dropped from the display, never shown greyed or asterisked. Honest or absent.
- We do not treat these as forecasts, ratings, or advice. They are historical operating results a company disclosed, presented for study.
Freshness
The stock page is cached at the edge, so a brand-new filing’s figures can lag up to a day on the cached page. Each value is stamped with the filing it came from, so the as-of date always tells you exactly how current the number is.