By Veena, from salesBeat. 

Over the last few weeks and months, we’ve been inundated with reports on stock outs at supermarkets around the world. The reasons attributed to these stock outs include Brexit, Covid, lack of HGV drivers, bottlenecks in shipping and so on. None of these reasons explain why some brands are available and some not.

These reasons are cited in almost every major market except for the US. In a recent article, Kraft Heinz has attributed this to soaring demand. Kraft Heinz said in a statement, to ABC News, that it is “seeing an all-time high demand for our brands.

IRI, a market research firm like Nielsens, found that monthly grocery store sales are up 3% from last year and nearly 14% from August 2019. According to them, this comes down to the simple fact that consumers have been eating at home more and out less.

“So many behaviors changed during the pandemic. And that’s kind of what we’re experiencing. There’s a lot more confidence in the kitchen,” Joan Driggs, vice president of content and thought leadership for IRI, told “GMA.” “We have a whole new generation of cooks out there who like it, they get more of exactly what they want, they take great pride in it.

According to a poll undertaken by YouGov in the UK, about whether home cooking would continue post pandemic, 91% of British households expect to cook at home as much or more often than they did during lockdowns.

Since the start of the pandemic, consumer behaviour has changed so much that systems and processes, within grocery retail and FMCG companies, need to be revisited.

Data driven sales intelligence, on consumer behaviour and consumption habits, is becoming increasingly vital in ensuring excellent retail execution for FMCG brands.

Also, Millennials and Gen Z now form a significant percentage of the adult population. The influence that social media and news have on how these 2 generations buy and consume products has still not been factored into how retailers place orders with FMCG brands. (Eg. L’Oreal went out of stock of their infallible range in the US due to their TikTok campaign, Weetabix went out of stock in several stores due to the Heinz beans and Weetabix campaign etc)

The combined impact of the pandemic and the unpredictability of a new generation of consumers has made it vital that sales people have access to a new generation of sales intelligence tools that enable them to ensure excellence in retail execution.

By empowering sales teams with information on what consumers want and retail teams on what consumers are likely to buy in the next 4-6 weeks or even in the next 7 days, not only can companies ensure 100% in-store availability of the brands they sell but also ensure that they are stocked at channels where consumers are most likely to buy them.

Providing timely intelligence on consumer demand helps sales teams and retailers take advantage of opportunistic upsides that are also in line with long term strategy, leading to increased revenues of up to 40%, increase in market share and increased consumer satisfaction scores.

About:

Veena worked for several years within the FMCG industry for companies like PepsiCo and Diageo. Veena co-founded salesBeat with Alex in 2019. Alex has a history in tech start-ups and extensive experience in creating apps. The founders came together at Antler (a start-up generator) in Sweden. When the pandemic started in early 2020, they realised that availability of brands in retail would be impacted in the long term due to changes in habits during the period and launched the platform to eliminate stock-outs in stores.

salesBeat is an AI driven platform that uses micro and macro factors to model consumer buying behaviour and makes predictive recommendations of optimal order volumes for FMCG sales people to discuss with customers, ensuring 100% availability of brands in store, without any overstocking. Currently sales are simply gauged on what was sold last year and do not consider any important factors influencing consumer decision making (temperature (weather), demographics around store locations, traffic and commuting preferences etc) which can change vastly from day to day, let alone over a year.

salesBeat makes precise predictions for 4 to 6 weeks, making it the best sales intelligence platform in the market. See the salesBeat website here: https://www.salesbeat.co

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/food/story/latest-grocery-store-product-shortages-79633706

https://www.premierfoods.co.uk/Media/Latest-News-Stories/News-2021/What’s-cooking-91-of-Brits-intend-to-cook-as-muc.aspx