ROFDA has selected BRdata as the technology partner to build and power the ROFDA Data Cloud, a new aggregated data platform designed to give participating wholesalers, grocery retailers and CPG partners a collective view of performance across the ROFDA network.
The initiative, announced at the ROFDA Spring Conference, held May 12-16, positions BRdata as the sole data aggregation partner for the effort. The company will serve as steward of the platform, collecting, normalizing and securing point-of-sale data from participating stores and presenting it through purpose-built views for each audience.
“The ROFDA Data Cloud is aggregated basket-level, transaction-level and summary item movement,” said John Abbene, president of BRdata. “We’ll be processing all sales data from participating stores, in addition implementing our core Master Data Management technologies for building ‘golden’ product data.”
The initial launch is planned to include a few thousand stores, with a goal of reaching roughly 75 percent of ROFDA’s 7,200-store network, or about 5,400 stores, within the first year.
One platform, one view of the independent channel
At the core of the ROFDA Data Cloud is a centralized item file containing every item carried by any participating store, alongside a centralized vendor UPC authorization that maps which items each vendor supplies. A central store master assigns each participating location a unique identifier and captures attributes such as store format and size, allowing performance to be analyzed by store type.
Because BRdata normalizes data across every point-of-sale system, the platform works regardless of which POS a store runs. “It doesn’t matter what the point-of-sale system is, it’s all going to appear as one type of data to all of the groups,” Abbene said.
Abbene compared the capability to other syndicated data tools, but built specifically around ROFDA member stores.
Views built for wholesalers, vendors and ROFDA
BRdata will deliver the data through three tailored views. A centralized view allows ROFDA to see deal performance across all wholesalers, supporting group-level deal negotiation and surfacing product voids and merchandising opportunities. Each participating wholesaler receives its own view with dashboards and reporting for the stores it serves. A vendor view lets CPG partners see how their authorized items and promotions are performing across the ROFDA network.
“If I’m Coca-Cola and I’m logging onto this, I’ll be able to see all the Coca-Cola items and how they’re performing across these ROFDA stores, and how their deals are performing,” Abbene said.
What it means for grocery retailers
For grocery retailers, the platform is designed to translate directly into more and better deals. Instead of a CPG negotiating separately with nine wholesalers, suppliers can work with ROFDA as a single group representing 7,200 stores, unlocking deal levels typically reserved for large chains.
“They’ll get deals that they might not have seen as a one-store group or as part of a 100-store wholesaler. Now they’re going to get deals as a 7,200-store group,” Abbene said. “They should see a lot more deals to pass along to their consumers.”
The platform also identifies mix voids, items not carried or sold across stores, giving retailers, wholesalers and vendors a shared roadmap of untapped sales opportunities. Promotional performance and product lift reporting show vendors exactly what their deals deliver, while item sales by period, category rankings and year-over-year comparisons allow ROFDA to act, in Abbene’s words, “as this large chain of 7,200 stores across the nation.”
Flexible participation, built-in upgrade path
Participation is tiered. At the entry level, BRdata simply captures a store’s transaction logs and normalizes the data for the aggregated platform. Stores can then upgrade to BRdata’s full analytics suite, adding dashboards, reporting and the company’s AI assistant Ada, which can deploy AI agents to surface opportunities in the data that dashboards alone might miss.
“Once we have their data in the ROFDA Data Cloud, they can easily add the analytics. dashboards and AI,” Abbene said.
ROFDA leadership on the initiative
“The ROFDA Data Cloud is about turning collective scale into actionable insight,” said David Politz, president and CEO of Associated Grocers Baton Rouge and ROFDA CEO sponsor for the initiative. “For our CPG partners, it creates a clearer view of performance, distribution and void management opportunities across the ROFDA network. For our members and the retailers they serve, it gives us another way to identify where the right items, the right programs and the right execution can create measurable value.”
“We are excited about this program because it is a direct output of the deeper engagement we are building with our CPG partners,” said Mark Deuschle, president and CEO of ROFDA. “ROFDA is focused on doing together what makes our members and their independent retailers more competitive, and the ROFDA Data Cloud gives us a stronger foundation for shared insight, better decisions and more meaningful supplier collaboration.”
For more information about BRdata’s analytics suite and the ROFDA Data Cloud, visit brdata.com.