With Crisp, Grandy Organics sales have never been heartier

Part of our Customer Spotlight series, featuring brands on the Crisp platform and their growth stories.

Grandy Organics makes small-batch organic granolas, trail mix, and roasted nuts out of a solar-powered former schoolhouse in Maine. Sound idyllic? It is. Founded in 1979 around a campfire by friends who believed that “purest pleasures are found off the beaten path,” Grandy Organics has been running a food business its own way ever since – to great success. Grandy Organics’ leaders have won the U.S. Small Business Association’s Person of the Year award and an EPA Merit Award for sustainable practices.

Organic oats with unsustainable data

Growth at Grandy Organics has been, well, organic. That’s intentional. The team has incrementally found ways to improve and stay true to their values like fair trade sourcing and using all organic certified ingredients. They grew into a national brand over time, but saw overnight growth in 2017 with Coconola: a coconut-based granola product that made them an industry leader in the grain-free space. But don’t be fooled: these crunchy Mainers are also data savvy. The only problem was, digging into data meant manually downloading reports from retailers and distributors and importing them into PowerBI on a daily basis. And with syndicated data on a 30-day delay, their ability to take action based on insights was limited. At the end of the day, their data solution just wasn’t sustainable unless they were prepared to hire a full-time data scientist. That’s when Owner and Chief Granola Officer Aaron Anker decided to look at Crisp.

Insights that are accessible to all

Now, the Grandy Organics team can instantly access the latest data from UNFI, Whole Foods, and other retailers, which powers their sales team’s daily workflow. Director of Sales Kyle Gaither says that “With Crisp, we can look at our data every day — at any moment.” Saying goodbye to static reports, they now use Crisp dashboards to easily drill into different data sets to uncover meaningful insights. 

In particular, Kyle likes that he can view trends over any time period, whether that’s a two-week promotion, a 6-month period, or YOY data. Looking at specific territories on the velocity dashboard, he can find success stories like strong sales performance in the Atlantic for a particular product. With that information, he can advocate for national distribution or identify a region-and-retailer combination with similar demographics. And with relatively affordable grain products in their portfolio, it’s helpful to leverage velocity data (units per store per week) rather than total dollar volume when building the case.

Kyle’s team also uses Crisp data over time to evaluate and refine promotions. If the results fell short of expectations, his team can follow up with retailers or brokers to see if implementation needs to be improved for the future. The team’s strategy is to eye long-term sales trends following the promotion, after the instant sales lift and predictable correction. Do the longer-term trend lines show sustainable growth? Finally, the team can manage chargebacks related to these promotions to stay on top of trade spend.

“Crisp makes data very quick, insights easy to digest, and problem solving simple.”

Kyle Gaither, Director of Sales

Doing data their way

Now that they’re data power-users, Kyle’s team uses Crisp to organize and customize retail data for maximum insights. Kyle uses the Master Data Manager tool to rename report data to match internal naming conventions, then group products by category. This way, they can easily track how sales are trending across bulk products vs. packaged, or trail mixes and mueslis. They save their filtered reports so they can come back later to check for updates with just a click. One interesting insight: as the pandemic continued, popularity of bulk items steadily increased, with unsuspecting regions like the Midwest and Florida showing the most growth. These trends are helpful to understand as Grandy Organics continues to promote bulk as a great option for affordability and waste reduction. Kyle reflects that “Crisp makes data very quick, insights easy to digest, and problem solving simple.”

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