UNFI, Crisp Unveil New Platform for CPGs

Companies offer suppliers enhanced access to retail insights

8/1/2023

Building on a relationship that the companies established two years ago, UNFI Insights, Powered by Crisp now provides value-added insights directly through the MyUNFI.com supplier portal.

United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI) has introduced UNFI Insights, an exclusive product developed with Crisp, an open-data platform for the consumer goods industry. The solution aims to give UNFI suppliers the most comprehensive and cohesive sales, inventory and deduction data in both the natural and conventional channels.

Building on the relationship established two years ago between the two companies, UNFI Insights, Powered by Crisp now provides value-added insights directly through the MyUNFI.com supplier portal. These marketing and merchandising insights include store and category recommendations, fill rates and voids, along with deduction and food waste dashboards. Armed with such insights, consumer packaged goods companies can more easily monitor their brands’ UNFI sales and inventory levels across retail sales channels and manipulate and employ UNFI data within their own business intelligence tools, including Tableau, Excel and Power BI. The platform 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, UNFI’s EVP 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.”

UNFI Insights is expected to help suppliers better manage their supply chain, via on-hand inventory dashboards, to avoid out-of-stocks. Additionally, since reducing food waste is a core value for both UNFI and Crisp, a considerable effort was made to provide an actionable spoilage dashboard to monitor short-dated inventory, which should aid brands in determining which products are closing in on their expiration dates.

“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,” noted Are Traasdahl, CEO and founder of New York-based 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.”

The companies have a webinar available online for CPG brands interested in learning more about UNFI Insights, Powered by Crisp.

To read more about the development of the solution, click here for exclusive comments from Raiche and Traasdahl.

Providence, R.I.-based UNFI delivers a wide variety of products to customer locations throughout North America, including natural product superstores, independent retailers, conventional supermarket chains, e-commerce retailers and foodservice customers. The largest publicly traded grocery distributor in America, the company is No. 20 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2023 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America.