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November 8, 2021
Crisp and UNFI have teamed up to empower suppliers with seamless data and advanced analytics to grow sales, improve profitability, and reduce waste.
For thousands of CPG brands, UNFI is a key partner to unlocking growth and success in retail, enabling distribution through a wide range of retailers to connect with the right shoppers and perfect their merchandising strategies. Key to making the most of this opportunity is data: on-the-ground sales and supply chain insights from retail stores that inform everything from store placements to inventory allocation. At Crisp, we believe that a brand’s ability to use data effectively is ultimately what helps them turn a great product into a thriving, profitable business.
UNFI shares Crisp’s commitment to helping brands leverage data to succeed, all while building a more sustainable food system in the process. In 2021, UNFI endorsed Crisp as the solution to enable suppliers to more easily leverage their UNFI data to drive their business. Now, we’ve taken data access and transparency to an entirely new level with the launch of UNFI Insights, which brings the power of the Crisp data platform directly into UNFI’s supplier portal.
Powerful insights to grow your brand
UNFI Insights equips suppliers with seamless access to comprehensive sales, inventory and trade spend data, designed to directly inform their day-to-day sales and supply chain success. Crisp’s interactive dashboards make it easy to view top-level trends with two years of historical data or drill down by retailer, product type, or region to answer questions and problem-solve.
Leading brands like Kraft Heinz are already seeing the power of UNFI Insights. “UNFI Insights, powered by Crisp, should help us drive category growth by accessing category-level data and pushing the latest available distribution and sales data directly into our Snowflake cloud data platform,” said Stefanie McNansky, Customer Vice President-UNFI at Kraft Heinz. Having easy access to this data throughout our organization is also expected to reduce out-of-stocks, benefitting our retail partners while creating a better experience for our consumers.”
UNFI Insights features a suite of new, exclusive data sets and dashboards, which include:
- Distribution expansion: What stores should you expand to next? The distribution expansion dashboard identifies chains, geographies and stores where your product is most likely to succeed based on past sales, helping brands prioritize new distribution and make a strong case to buyers.
- Category analysis: With all-new data for UNFI suppliers, the Category Analysis Dashboard helps brands understand their products’ category performance within the UNFI network and demonstrate how their brand contributes to category growth.
- Spoilage risk: Data is key to meeting demand while also avoiding over-supply that leads to food waste. New spoilage risk dashboards alert brands to identify products nearing expiration, helping them reduce waste to improve sustainability and profitability.
In addition to dashboards within the myUNFI portal, UNFI Insights can pipe a brand’s latest UNFI data into their favorite tools, automatically refreshing data sets within Excel, BI tools like PowerBI and Tableau, or cloud infrastructure.
“UNFI Insights, powered by Crisp, should help us drive category growth by accessing category-level data and pushing the latest available distribution and sales data directly into our Snowflake cloud data platform. Having easy access to this data throughout our organization is also expected to reduce out-of-stocks, benefitting our retail partners while creating a better experience for our consumers.”
Customer Vice President-UNFI at Kraft Heinz
Streamlined trade spend management
Trade spend is the cost of doing business in the retail world – and when done right, it can accelerate sales velocity and attract new customers. But keeping an eye on invoices and chargeback statements, often in PDF format, can become a headache for suppliers. UNFI Insights includes a new, streamlined deductions management platform that helps brands quickly understand and optimize trade spend.
The deductions categorization tool automatically pulls in deductions backup documentation and helps brands conveniently categorize and dispute deductions to improve accounting and save on costs. Additionally, deductions and chargeback dashboards make it easy to analyze spend effectiveness and design more effective promotions in the future.
With business-critical insights at their fingertips, suppliers can manage a thriving business, better meet shopper needs, and develop stronger relationships with their distributor and retailer partners. “Expanding our relationship with Crisp to deliver access to both natural and conventional sales and inventory data housed in one location, provides CPG brands with an unrivaled opportunity to boost their relationships and growth prospects with retailers,” said John Raiche, EVP of Supplier Services at UNFI.
“This platform is going to be a game-changer for me,” said James Pescatore, VP of Sales at BONO USA. “With UNFI Insights, I’m able to break the data down by SKU and retailer to show a compelling story to buyers and grow our business. Knowledge is power, and UNFI Insights gives me that.
To learn more about UNFI insights, contact your UNFI Supplier Relationship Manager. For more product news and updates from Crisp, subscribe to the blog.
