Veganuary: Data-based decision making for plant-based products

It is Veganuary (again!). Did you know that plant-based food sales rose by £92.5m or 16.3% over the last year [Kantar usage panel 52 w/e 8th August 2021]? Consumer demand in this category is constantly growing.

Launching into Veganuary so soon after Christmas presents a myriad of challenges: space on fixtures for your plant-based brands may have been scaled back during the Golden Quarter to make way for party food, turkeys, and desserts, among others. Therefore, it is critical that you get your fixture space back to normal post-Christmas so your products are available and on sale in all your ranged stores. In addition, ongoing supply chain issues from last year mean that you are likely to be dealing with limited resources. 

Whether you are launching new products or running promotions on existing ones, you will need to make complex decisions if you are to maximise sales. Best-in-class data visualisation and insights from SKUtrak can provide a holistic view of a SKU’s supply chain journey before, during, and after a promotion together with distribution builds for new products. 

Bringing sales into focus

SKUtrak reports on key metrics by store by SKU, allowing you to:

• See promotional performance on day 1 so you can make in-flight changes;
• Track daily store & depot stock levels to ensure your products are available in store for your consumers to buy;
• Identify which stores are low on or out of stock to enable you to work with your retailers to push more stock into those stores;
• See which stores have the highest lost sales. SKUtrak then provides you with insights to understand the reasons behind this so you can take corrective action;
• See rate of sale by region & format at SKU level and highlight where customer demand is highest;
• Track rate of sale, distribution, and stores ranged not selling for any new products launched;
• Analyse sales, promotion uplifts, and SKU performance post-January to support planning for Veganuary 2023.

Having these insights available on a daily basis will enable you to collaborate with retailers, make decisions with confidence, and ultimately drive sales.

Case Study

Quorn wanted to transform the retail data they were already using into a consistent format. SKUtrak collated their data and made it accessible via intuitive dashboards under a single log-in. As a result, Quorn was able to save time [... by] consolidat[ing] the training of colleagues on a single application, regardless of role or retailer. Along with saving time on collating and analysing data, SKUtrak helped Quorn to better understand areas such as their availability and as a result, they have been able to improve collaboration with their retail customers.

“SKUtrak is a one-stop shop for all our retailer data needs. Having the information updated daily means we are aware of how our products are moving through our retailer supply chains. This means we can make decisions with confidence. Currently, SKUtrak is mainly used by our demand planners and national account managers, however, we have ambitions to roll it out to a wider internal audience.” - Ben Cattanach, S&OP Manager, Quorn

Although it requires a lot of collaboration with retailers so soon after the Golden Quarter, Veganuary presents a great opportunity to start the new year strong. With its user-friendly interfaces, data presented at SKU, region, depot, and store level, and stock alerts, SKUtrak can help you provide the products that sustainability-savvy shoppers want.

"On a Monday morning, I am able to know immediately how trading has been over the weekend. I’m not having to wait for someone to extract the data, interpret it and send it to me. The data is also in the same format across all retailers, which is so valuable helping me to compare apples with apples. For example, every retailer's weeks are different, SKUtrak enables me to select calendar months as opposed to retailer weeks. Therefore, I know I can do a straight comparison.” - Darren Robinson, Head of Sales, Meridian

For more insight on effective promotional forecasting, read our eBook: Why is it so hard to forecast volumes for retail promotions, and what can be done?