Hormel Foods has adopted the Crisp platform to leverage real-time in-store inventory and supply chain data to enhance customer experience for the company’s key retail partners.

Using the Crisp platform — an open-data retail platform designed for the consumer goods industry — Hormel Foods can more readily access and share real-time data on delivery, retail sales, supply chain issues, manufacturing and inventory.

Crisp allows Hormel Foods to share and leverage historical and real-time data insights from leading retail partners in Google Cloud, helping to further improve business performance for its retail customers.

“(Crisp’s) data sharing tools allow our data engineering team to streamline the integration pipeline into our data lake through Google’s data cloud,” said Mark Vaupel, vice president of IT services at Hormel Foods. “This lets our team focus their time and efforts toward more strategic analysis that brings insights and value to our company and our customers.”

With the ability to easily integrate disparate data sources through Crisp into Google BigQuery, Hormel Foods now has full visibility into what is happening at the physical shelf in real-time, using data to inform its retail customers about potential out-of-stock issues and aid in the reduction of food waste.

“We have made great strides in our analytics in a short period of time so our teams can more easily obtain and understand our e-commerce sales data,” said Leslie Lee, vice president, digital experience at Hormel Foods. “We've built data lakes and business models to help us analyze this data, and today we are in a really solid place of being able to know what our e-commerce sales and share growth looks like and where they're coming from. Our partnership with Crisp enables our teams to focus on strategic analytics instead of spending time building and managing data. Crisp has become an extension of our IT team as an expert in the different retail platforms we work with and this solution allows us to provide the best experience for our retail customers.”

The Crisp platform inputs data into the Google Cloud Platform system much faster than traditional scraping tools or manually loading data, Lee said, adding that, “It's the difference between having access to data that was updated the day prior versus using data from the previous week.”

Data gathered can be used to further tailor Hormel’s retail-focused marketing efforts such as couponing and limited-time offers by enabling the company to incorporate more data sets from different resources to help inform decisions by identifying what has worked best, Lee said.

“Our merchandising efforts will be more informed because promotional data is combined with digital shelf impacts in the same platform,” she said. “Using several different data sources combined in GCP allows for faster insights and for our Digital Experience Group to create recommendations at scale. We are now better able to inform the retailer of what will help move their business and category performance forward and help the end consumer be better served in their shopping experience.”

Crisp founder and CEO Are Traasdahl said Hormel Foods’ incorporating  real-time supply chain and retail sales insights will allow Hormel’s distribution and marketing efforts to be responsive to retailers’ — and consumers’ — needs.

“Collaboration between leading brands such as Hormel Foods and their retail partners as well as technology partners such as Google Cloud is key to reducing food waste, improving their profitability and increasing end-customer satisfaction,” Traasdahl said.

Lee said using Crisp also will allow Hormel Foods to improve its upstream marketing efforts in areas such as new product development.

“This new process will give us access to data faster and in one location, so we can make decisions and pivot immediately after a new product launch,” she said. “Additionally, we can use the different data sets to give better context on product performance.”