Crisp and UNFI: The foods people love, now data ready

UNFI has chosen Crisp to provide brands with up-to-date, actionable retail data for their business.

Crisp’s mission is to power collaboration in the retail industry, helping supply chain partners increase efficiency, meet demand, and reduce waste. We believe that when retailers, distributors, and brands work together, we can tackle major challenges like those we saw in the pandemic and seize the opportunities that lay ahead. So we’re delighted to announce a formalized relationship with UNFI, North America’s largest publicly-traded grocery wholesaler and distributor, to help brands leverage data to improve operations and drive growth.

For so many customers on the Crisp platform, from emerging brands to household names, UNFI has been an important partner in connecting shoppers everywhere with the foods they love. It’s a critical relationship with lots of moving pieces as products flow from supplier to distribution center to retailer to a shopper’s home. In order for suppliers to successfully serve their customers, they need a clear picture of what is happening at each stage, leveraging sales and inventory data to keep shelves stocked and shoppers satisfied. UNFI shares our vision that a better business starts with data, which is why they’ve chosen Crisp to deliver higher levels of supply chain visibility to leading food and beverage brands.

For brands, the challenge is not the existence of data — it’s how to harness all that data to gain actionable insights in real time. In the past, this has required downloading several reports a week from vendor portals or syndicated data platforms, and then relying on someone with analytics capabilities to aggregate and analyze it. This means insights were either prohibitively difficult, too slow, or too time consuming to take advantage of. Crisp was built to change that, automating the process of ingesting and aggregating retail data to bring important trends and insights to the surface.

Here are some of the ways Crisp helps brands do more with retail data:

Data at your fingertips

Crisp’s UNFI connector automatically ingests live data from UNFI’s reports, saving significant amounts of time and reducing data errors. The most up-to-date data is always accessible through Crisp’s dashboards, or through Analytics and Business Intelligence platforms like Excel, Power BI, and Snowflake.

Uncover meaningful insights 

Crisp’s dashboards bring data to life, with visualizations to help managers identify performance issues, spot voids, discover regional sales opportunities, and manage inventory. It’s easy to drill down on a particular product, retailer, or region with a click to find the root cause of changing sales, identify service disruptions, or spot new growth opportunities.

Use data to drive action

Insights are only valuable if they’re actionable. Crisp makes that next step easy, whether that’s downloading a store list, presenting charts and graphs to a buyer, or following up with brokers about a re-order. For example, customers who spot a surplus of inventory at a given distribution center can offer a product on promotion, preventing waste, or build an advertising campaign targeting shoppers near a particular retail location. 

One of Crisp’s customers already using Crisp’s Connector for UNFI, Katz Gluten Free, uses data to drive decisions from distribution to product launches to marketing programs. Roberto Cruz, Katz’s Marketing Director, explains his approach: “From reports, you can build insights, and then build a data-driven case for additional items, increased shelf space, or more merchandising. The key is to create value for our partners by leveraging the data to generate valuable consumer insights.” 

We look forward to helping more brands be data-ready through our relationship with UNFI. To learn how Crisp can help you get more out of your supplier data, contact us for a demo.

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