Dive Brief:

• United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI) launched a new open data platform called UNFI Insights, designed to provide suppliers with insight on sales, inventory and dedication data, according to a Tuesday announcement. 
• Retail data technology company Crisp powers the platform and created it in partnership with UNFI. Insights offered by the platform are meant to strengthen suppliers’ marketing and merchandising efforts. 
• The platform rollout comes at a turbulent time for UNFI, as the company has gone through layoffs and a restructuring and has seen sharp drops in profitability during the first half of 2023.

Dive Insight:

The information provided through the new platform aims to enable companies to monitor their brands’ UNFI sales and inventory levels on their own retail sales channels as well as use UNFI data within their own tools, such as Excel and Tableau, in addition to cloud-based tools like those offered by Google and Microsoft, the press release noted.

Through the MyUNFI.com supplier portal, suppliers can access the platform’s insights, which include store and category recommendations, fill rates, voids and food waste dashboards

“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 Executive Vice President of Supplier Services John Raiche said in the announcement. 

UNFI Insights also builds on two of the company’s food waste reduction values by providing an actionable spoilage dashboard that monitors short-dated inventory, helping brands see products nearing their expiration date, per the announcement. 

The UNFI Insights platform expands its Crisp partnership that goes back to summer 2021.

The new platform aims to add value to UNFI’s CPG services following the company’s numerous setbacks throughout the first half of 2023.

In early March, UNFI reported its net income and earnings per diluted share both dropped over 70% in its second-quarter earnings report. The company did not see any improvement by June when its third-quarter earnings results showed both metrics plummeted more than 89% compared to the same period in 2022.