With the FIFA World Cup kicking off on June 11, businesses in Toronto and Vancouver are facing a supply chain challenge unlike anything they have planned for.
Canada has never hosted the men’s World Cup and there is no historical data to draw from. Demand will not build gradually either. Bars, restaurants, retailers and hospitality businesses will see it spike hard and fast in line with the match schedule, at a time when Canadian businesses are already navigating geopolitical-driven cost increases and squeezed margins.
Fab Brasca, SVP of Market Strategy at Kinaxis, has spent his career helping the world’s largest supply chains navigate exactly this kind of demand uncertainty.
Kinaxis, based in Ottawa, powers the supply chains of some of the world’s largest companies, including Toyota, Pfizer, and Unilever.
Here are five tips he’s shared that will help businesses prepare:
- Stock up early: Start building stock levels now, before match-day road closures in Toronto and Vancouver make last-minute deliveries impossible.
- Think beyond the obvious sellers: The products that will actually move are not always the obvious ones. Draft beer will spike, but so will phone chargers, bottled water and imports tied to whichever rival nations are drawing crowds to your neighbourhood.
- Build your backup supplier relationships now: Your primary suppliers will get overwhelmed. Identify a backup for your top 10 products now and place at least one small order before June so the relationship exists when you need it.
- Forget last year’s sales data: Build your demand forecast from live signals like flight bookings and hotel occupancy rates instead, because traditional forecasting has no baseline for an event Canada has never hosted before.
- Don’t forget about staff: Inventory means nothing if you’re short-handed on a match day. Get your part-time hires confirmed by May, and know who you’re calling when it gets unexpectedly busy.
Brasca spoke with Retail Insider about the upcoming sports extravaganza.
Question: With no Canadian precedent for a men’s FIFA World Cup, how should Toronto and Vancouver businesses rethink demand forecasting in the absence of historical data?
Answer: The instinct is going to be to reach for whatever historical data exists, last summer’s numbers, a busy long weekend, maybe a major concert or festival. But that data won’t help you here. This is
a genuinely novel event for Canadian businesses and the sooner they accept that, the better positioned they’ll be.
What you want to be looking at instead are live signals. Flight bookings into Toronto and Vancouver, hotel occupancy, ticket sales patterns, which fan communities are mobilizing and where. The World Cup doesn’t ramp up the way a seasonal trend does. It spikes hard, match by match, and the demand curve follows the schedule. A Tuesday afternoon kickoff is a completely different planning problem than a Saturday evening one.
The businesses that will come out ahead are the ones running multiple scenarios right now. Canada advances, Canada exits early, a rival nation brings tens of thousands of fans into specific neighbourhoods. You need to have a plan for the range of things that could actually happen.
Q: Where do you expect the biggest supply chain bottlenecks to emerge during the tournament, particularly around match days and road closures?
A: Last-mile delivery is the one I’d watch most closely. Match-day road closures in a city like Toronto isn’t a minor inconvenience. If you’re expecting a Tuesday morning replenishment and there’s a match Tuesday afternoon, that window may already be gone by the time you realize it.
The other pressure point is at the supplier level. Every bar, restaurant and retailer in the city is going to be calling the same distributors around the same time. Your primary supplier is going to get overwhelmed. If you haven’t already identified a backup for your highest-volume products, that’s the most urgent thing on your list right now.
And I’d add that all of this is happening while Canadian businesses are already absorbing real cost pressure from tariffs and the broader geopolitical environment. Any further increase in fuel costs flows straight into transportation and distribution. That needs to be in your margin assumptions now, not landing as a surprise in July.
Q: What kinds of ‘non-obvious’ products tend to see unexpected demand spikes during global sporting events like this?
A: Everyone plans for beer. Not everyone plans for what runs out while people are waiting for their beer.
The things that actually create the most operational pain are the secondary items. Phone chargers, portable batteries, bottled water, ice, condiments, disposable serviceware. These are the types of products that disappear first when foot traffic is running two or three times your normal volume.
The other thing that’s unique about the World Cup compared to most sporting events is how international the fan base is, and how localized that looks on the ground. Depending on which teams are drawing supporters to a specific neighbourhood, you’re going to see demand for particular imports, particular foods, particular beverages tied to those communities.
Q: How can small and mid-sized retailers or restaurants realistically build supply chain resilience, including backup supplier relationships, on short notice?
A: The relationship you build under pressure is worth a lot less than the one you build before you need it. You don’t want to be introducing yourself to a backup supplier for the first time when your primary can’t deliver.
So the practical starting point is simple: identify your 10 highest-velocity products and find at least one alternative supplier for each. Then place a small order before June. This means a lot if you’;re a known customer when you call in July needing a fast turnaround, rather than a cold call they’ve never heard of.
For smaller businesses that don’t have dedicated planning teams, just making that list is itself a useful exercise. It forces you to prioritize things that would actually hurt you to run out of.
Q: What are the biggest mistakes businesses make when preparing for sudden, event-driven demand surges and how can they avoid them?
A: The most common one is planning for the event you want rather than the range of events that might actually happen. Businesses anchor on a best-case scenario. Canada wins, the city goes wild, everything sells. And they optimize their inventory for that, but it’s a fragile position to be in if reality looks different.
The second one is treating this as a one-time planning exercise. You need to stay flexible, keeping tabs on the match schedule details, the road closure specifics, the cost environment, these things will keep evolving between now and June 11. You need to be checking your plan regularly.
And the third one, which I think is the most underrated, is treating this purely as an inventory problem. Inventory sitting in your back room means nothing if you don’t have enough people to move it on a match day. The staffing plan and the supply plan have to be built together. If you’re expecting three times your normal Saturday volume, your part-time hires need to be confirmed well in advance and you need to know who you’re calling when it gets busier than even that. Get one right without the other and you’re still exposed.
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