United Natural Foods 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 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, including store and category recommendations, fill rates, voids, 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 utilise UNFI data within their business intelligence tools such as Tableau, Excel, and Power BI. It also works with cloud-based analytics tools from Google, Microsoft, 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 unrivalled opportunity to boost their relationships and growth prospects with retailers,” said John Raiche, Executive Vice President of Supplier Services.
Raiche said that leveraging the Supplier Services scale, focusing on investments in technology, and enhancing connectivity with and market visibility for suppliers is expected to lead to better overall service levels for retail customers and differentiate UNFI in a competitive marketplace.
Stefanie McNansky, Customer Vice President-UNFI at Kraft Heinz, said that the company was committed to building a single data hub to power digital transformation initiatives and use a single source of truth for the analytics that power daily decisions.
“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. Easy access to this data throughout our organisation is also expected to reduce out-of-stocks, benefitting our retail partners while creating a better consumer experience.”
UNFI Insights is expected to enable suppliers better to manage their supply chain through on-hand inventory dashboards to avoid out-of-stock.
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 of Crisp.
He continued that removing data silos makes data more actionable, leading brands to increase profitability while reducing food waste. Traasdahl said Crisp applauded UNFI’s leadership in facilitating data access and their commitment to supplier success.
