Providence, Rhode Island-based United Natural Foods Inc. has launched UNFI Insights, an open data platform developed with Crisp for the consumer goods industry.
The platform is designed to provide suppliers with comprehensive and cohesive sales, inventory and deduction data across natural and conventional channels.
Building on the companies’ relationship formed in summer 2021, it provides value-added insights through the MyUNFI.com supplier portal. The insights are designed to strengthen suppliers’ marketing and merchandising efforts, while including store and category recommendations, fill rates and voids, as well as deduction and food waste dashboards.
This will allow CPG companies to monitor their brands’ UNFI sales and inventory levels across retail sales channels and use data within their own business intelligence tools, such as Tableau, Excel, Power BI. It also works with cloud-based analytics tools from Google and Microsoft, as well as Databricks and Snowflake.
“Expanding our relationship with Crisp…provides CPG brands with an unrivaled opportunity to boost their relationships and growth prospects with retailers,” said John Raiche, EVP of supplier services.
“Leveraging our scale, focusing on investments in technology, and enhancing connectivity with and market visibility for our suppliers is expected to lead to better overall service levels for our retail customers and differentiate UNFI in a competitive marketplace.”
Stefanie McNansky, customer VP-UNFI at Kraft Heinz, said, “[We are] committed to building a single data hub to power digital transformation initiatives and use a single source of truth for the analytics that power our daily decisions.”
“[It] 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.”
Since reducing food waste is a core value to UNFI and Crisp, a major effort was made to provide an actionable spoilage dashboard to monitor short-dated inventory, which should help brands identify which products are nearing their expiration date.
“With hundreds of joint customers, the UNFI and Crisp strategic partnership enables both natural and conventional brands to collaborate more effectively with UNFI and their retail partners,” said Are Traasdahl, CEO and founder of Crisp.
“By removing data silos, data becomes more actionable, which should lead to brands increasing profitability while reducing food waste. We applaud UNFI’s leadership in facilitating data access and their commitment to supplier success.”
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