UNFI and Crisp Unveil New Platform Giving Consumer Packaged Goods Companies Enhanced Access to Retail Insights
United Natural Foods, Inc. announced the launch of UNFI Insights, an exclusive product developed with Crisp, the open data platform for the consumer goods industry. UNFI Insights, Powered by Crisp, is designed to provide UNFI suppliers with the most comprehensive and cohesive sales, inventory and deduction data across both natural and conventional channels.
The new platform builds on the relationship formed in the summer of 2021 between the two companies and now provides value-added insights directly through the MyUNFI.com supplier portal. Insights are designed to strengthen suppliers’ marketing and merchandising efforts and include store and category recommendations, fill rates, voids, as well as deduction and food waste dashboards. This will allow consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to easily monitor their brands’ UNFI sales and inventory levels across their retail sales channels and manipulate and utilize UNFI 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 to deliver to CPGs access to both their natural and conventional sales and inventory data, all housed in one location, provides CPG brands with an unrivaled opportunity to boost their relationships and growth prospects with retailers,” said John Raiche, Executive Vice President 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.”
“Kraft Heinz is 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,” explained Stefanie McNansky, Customer Vice President-UNFI at Kraft Heinz. “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.”
UNFI Insights is expected to enable suppliers to better manage their supply chain, through on-hand inventory dashboards, to avoid out-of-stocks. Additionally, since reducing food waste is a core value to both UNFI and Crisp, a significant 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, 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.”
CPG brands interested in learning more about UNFI Insights, Powered by Crisp, should access a webinar available at: UNFI.