Cerebelly's Whole Foods sales were growing fast. Unfortunately, so were their out-of-stocks.
For months, the sales team at Cerebelly had struggled to find a cost-effective solution for those voids: human reps could get the job done… but they can only visit a store every few weeks, each store visit is pricey, and they can't guarantee ROI. The stores they visit may, it turns out, be totally fine and require no assistance.
We knew from the data and photos we had in-stock issues in Whole Foods, but hiring a traditional merchandising firm was not in the budget as an early stage brand.
Then Jodie met the Treater team, which was just rolling out a new system that would automatically detect out-of-stocks through ongoing sales data — and then actually talk to those same stores about solving the voids. And she saw an opportunity to extinguish Cerbelly's longstanding void challenge without burning through her budget too quickly.
On day 1 of Cerebelly's trial with Treater, the platform analyzed Cerebelly's historic sales trends for each of their 24 SKUs, at each individual Whole Foods store, and immediately identified hundreds of voids to resolve. That same day, Treater began talking to hundreds of grocery teams at Whole Foods stores to help them spot the voids and ensure they had a chance to fill them before the weekend.
That next Sunday, Cerebelly's UNFI's insights portal updated with the past week's sales — and a flood of orders appeared from Whole Foods stores that had worked with Treater on solving the voids. Thousands of dollars of revenue had already been driven.
I really wish more brands would check in like this, it really helps!
And in one week, Treater had already paid for itself.
My initial thought was how are they going to do this remotely. But putting myself in the store team member's shoes made me realize the power of Treater researching an issue, like an out-of-stock, and then pinging the store team with an efficient, win-win solution for our brand and their store — versus a merchandising rep standing in front of them, without much or any context on the store sales data, asking them to generally help.
What's more, one use case led to another as the benefits of cultivating warm, collaborative relationships with Whole Foods store teams across the country started capturing more revenue opportunities.
Stores didn't just want help spotting voids: they wanted data-driven recommendations on how much product to order up for new Prime deals, live updates on whether to expect promo allocations to arrive from corporate, and a reliable representative from Cerebelly who could rapidly resolve any higher-level distributor issues their store faced.
And so Treater upgraded its knowledge base to be able to speak to all of these important topics that stores wanted help on — just in time for beginning a long-term deal with Cerebelly, as well as preparing for a major August promotion in Whole Foods that would require endcap execution in all 525 stores across the country.
Two weeks ahead of the promotion, Treater began checking in with Whole Foods grocery teams in case they had any questions or concerns about the activation. In no time, ~80% of stores began reporting that their corporate retail execution plan didn't have Cerebelly's SKUs planned for any promo endcaps.
Treater notified Cerebelly's sales team via Slack the second a store first reported this issue. Within a day, Treater synthesized a request to fix the retail execution plan, backed up with thoughtful context from store-level conversations, that Cerebelly could share with Whole Foods corporate.
Cerebelly indeed escalated the issue to Whole Foods corporate, where the problem was resolved within several hours. In turn, Treater notified every affected Whole Foods store across the country that they were now cleared to set up the Cerebelly endcap.
Stores were thrilled to see the issue resolved so quickly after reporting.
Even better? Cerebelly then had their best sales week of all time in Whole Foods.
And with their Whole Foods business continuing to accelerate, the Cerebelly team has embraced Treater as an autonomous coworker on their sales team, working on their behalf with natural, conventional, and big box stores across the country to tirelessly capture as many opportunities as possible.
