Greenleaf Foods partners with Crisp to stay lean and green

Part of our Customer Spotlight series, featuring brands on the Crisp platform and their growth stories.

Plant-based pioneers

Greenleaf Foods is a leader in plant-based protein. Their portfolio brands, Lightlife and Field Roast, have been trailblazing for decades in multiple categories, including hot dogs, tempeh, sausages, deli slices, and cheese. With a true dedication to sustainability, Greenleaf is also one of the largest carbon neutral CPG companies. 

Greenleaf’s sales team is data savvy, a must to manage the company’s huge distribution — but they struggled with the 10 hours per week it took to pull reports from their various retail and distribution partners’ portals. When Adam Moleta joined Greenleaf as Key Account Manager for the natural foods channel, he knew that addressing this issue was part of building a stronger relationship with distributors. Adam was committed to building a holistic view of supply chain ins and outs, including spotting new sales opportunities and improving efficiency. That’s when he started looking at Crisp.

Champions in efficiency

Adam leverages data to understand all facets of the business, but his early focus was on recovering potential losses — something he encourages brands to focus on in addition to sales. He explains, “You need to eliminate losses before you even think about new opportunities.” Otherwise, he notes, you’ll be giving up big pieces of any new business. But it’s not easy to do: “Customers let you know when you’ve lost them – spoilage doesn’t.” Using Crisp, Adam first drilled down on costly issues like chargebacks, voids, and trade spend to address them right away.

Always pioneers, the Greenleaf team didn’t stop there. As part of their sustainability commitment to reducing waste, they partnered with Crisp to create a spoilage tracker. The tracker monitors sales and on-hand inventory at distribution centers to identify possible spoilage incidents before they occur. Adam can see, for example, that a particular warehouse has a large supply of a given product set to expire within a few weeks, and take steps to move the product or cut back on the next order volume. “With Crisp, we are now able to identify inventory spoilage risk with enough clarity and time to mitigate waste and penalties. This would typically be something that requires combing through multiple reports and circling back to make sure it lines up,” Adam says.

“As one of the largest carbon-neutral CPG companies, we worked together with Crisp to develop a spoilage tracker to further our commitment to sustainability.”  – Adam Moleta, Key Account Manager

Staying in the green

A better handle on the supply chain also helps Greenleaf grow and maintain top-line revenue. As Adam explains, “In the natural channel, finding opportunity gaps are a big part of how you stay relevant and stay on shelf. When you work with natural independent customers, that is where this data is so influential.” Partnering again on a new idea, Greenleaf worked with Crisp to create a “Potential Lost Sales” dashboard cross-referencing inventory levels, on hand orders, and retail forecasts to identify inventory gaps. This capability allows Greenleaf to work directly with buyers and retailers to stay ahead of inventory and ensure service levels remain at the highest possible level. Now, Adam can find and serve specific customers who might need a re-order before they even realize it — which adds up to big wins.

Always looking at the holistic view, Adam also likes to use Crisp’s unified dashboards that combine data from multiple distribution partners. This helps him get that singular view of the business that saves time, money, and waste: “While we have access to syndicated data and data from our distributors, it is difficult to access in a timely manner and look at the data in a format that enables us to quickly see potential sales, gaps or voids. Working with Crisp, we are able to use data to manage the business more smoothly and it saves us a significant amount of time.” 

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