PROVIDENCE, R.I.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--United Natural Foods, Inc. (NYSE: UNFI) (“UNFI”) today 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: https://www.gocrisp.com/unfi-insights-webinar.
About UNFI
UNFI is North America's premier grocery wholesaler delivering the widest variety of fresh, branded, and owned brand products to more than 30,000 locations throughout North America, including natural product superstores, independent retailers, conventional supermarket chains, ecommerce providers, and food service customers. UNFI also provides a broad range of value-added services and segmented marketing expertise, including proprietary technology, data, market insights, and shelf management to help customers and suppliers build their businesses and brands. As the largest full-service grocery partner in North America, UNFI is committed to building a food system that is better for all and is uniquely positioned to deliver great food, more choices, and fresh thinking to customers. To learn more about how UNFI is Fueling the Future of Food, visit www.unfi.com.
About Crisp
Crisp leverages the power of the cloud to connect and normalize retail data sources to provide real-time insights and trends. CPG suppliers, retailers, and distributors use Crisp to manage supply more efficiently, reduce waste and skyrocket profitability. Learn more at www.gocrisp.com.
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Statements in this press release regarding the Company’s business that are not historical facts are “forward-looking statements” that involve risks and uncertainties and are based on current expectations and management estimates; actual results may differ materially. The risks and uncertainties which could impact these statements include those described in the Company’s filings under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, including its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended July 30, 2022 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on September 27, 2022 and other filings the Company makes with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and, as such, speak only as of the date made. The Company is not undertaking to update any information contained in this press release to reflect subsequently occurring events or circumstances. Any estimates of future results of operations are based on a number of assumptions, many of which are outside the Company’s control and should not be construed in any manner as a guarantee that such results will in fact occur. These estimates are subject to change and could differ materially from final reported results.
