How Crisp Helps Nestlé USA Boost Visibility and Efficiency

Nestlé USA is a key division of the global Nestlé corporation and works with distributors like United Natural Foods (UNFI) to get its products into retail stores across the country. 

However, the business has traditionally faced significant challenges in tracking its expansive product portfolio.

The answer was to adopt the UNFI Insights platform, powered by Crisp, which provides seamless access to comprehensive sales, inventory and trade spend data.

UNFI Insights was able to realign UNFI’s broad data with Nestlé USA’s internal reporting conventions, filtering out irrelevant items and supporting Nestlé USA’s bid to focus on its leading products. 

Nestlé USA shifts data management approach

Before adopting UNFI Insights, Nestlé USA used an automated system to pull UNFI reports into an enterprise data repository, but the siloed information required additional modelling to extract key insights and often contained critical gaps. 

An additional hurdle was that Nestlé’s UNFI vendor number encompassed data from other Nestlé organisations, like Nestlé Coffee Partners and Nestlé Health Sciences. This meant the team had to sift through hundreds of additional brands and product SKUs to locate the insights specific to their division.

Nestlé USA’s adoption of UNFI Insights last year marked a significant shift in its data management approach and quickly solved persistent problems, like missing store location details. 

By properly organising this data to match Nestlé's internal structure, each sales team could access the specific information they needed, reducing the need for special data requests and helped teams work more efficiently.

Next, a master data management process – made simple by the Crisp platform –filtered out irrelevant products, such as those from Nestlé Coffee Partners and Nestlé Health Sciences, while boosting Nestlé USA’s ‘Bulletproof the Core’ programme, which focuses sales efforts on the top 20% of products that drive 80% of total sales.

“Well-organised data is essential in supply chain analytics,” comments Hugo Lopez, Director of Nestlé USA for UNFI.

“Leveraging Crisp’s UNFI Insights to monitor inventory in real time, collaborate and share data across the entire supply chain provided seamless communication that enhanced our operations and made us even more effective.

“Aligning the UNFI data with our product hierarchy is one of the greatest enhancements we've made recently. The platform presents data in an understandable way that continues to help us win across 1,500+ SKUs.”

Crisp fuels clear visibility for Nestlé USA

Today, with UNFI Insights, Nestlé enjoys clean, easy-to-understand reports on each of its 1,500 SKUs, including weeks of supply-on-hand, year-over-year distribution, real-time visual heat maps for sales and inventory tracking and much more. 

Ultimately, working with Crisp has fuelled clear visibility for Nestlé USA’s US$300m UNFI business segment.

Barry Bradley, Head of Supply Chain at Crisp, adds: “We work with thousands of CPG brands that face challenges with managing their expansive product portfolio across retail locations. By breaking down data silos and accessing SKU level sales and inventory information, brands can unlock new insights to improve manufacturing, distribution and inventory management.

“Nestlé USA began utilising the UNFI Insights platform powered by Crisp in 2023 to resolve long-standing issues with incomplete store-level data. We’re excited to see how they leverage reliable reporting on more than 1,500 SKUs across their $300m UNFI business segment to support sales and inventory tracking.” 

Check out the latest edition of Supply Chain Digital and sign up to our global conference series – Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE 2025. 

Supply Chain Digital is a BizClik brand.