Launching a specialty beverage into Whole Foods is hard enough when you need to stay on top of one distributor. But staying on top of 27 different distributors — all of which are local, direct store delivery players — takes the challenge to a whole another level. Twenty seven distributors often means 27 times more problems to solve every week!
That was why Ghia brought in Treater to help execute their launch into Whole Foods stores across the country in 2025. Within days of deploying Treater, the value was clear.
Right off the bat, a number of Whole Foods stores reported that one of Ghia’s 4 launch SKUs weren’t loaded into their scan guns for ordering. Treater escalated each of these store-level incidents to Ghia’s sales team immediately, allowing Ghia to rapidly resolve the problem. Treater then returned to every store that hadn’t yet ordered this SKU to ensure it would now make its way to the shelf, bumping Ghia’s sales across Whole Foods.
Being able to execute on promotional opportunities quickly and efficiently is crucial to both Ghia's strategic growth, and our relationship with our retailer partners. Issues inevitably happen, but prompt resolution is the key to not falling short of expectations. Treater's attention to detail and hands-on approach to store-level communication allowed us to identify the issue and resolve it with minimal effort, ensuring that our promotional execution was still highly successful.
With each week that passed, Treater identified and captured more and more revenue opportunities.
When stores slowed down their ordering of Ghia beverages because they weren’t sure if they could order individual cans or 4-packs, Treater was right there to explain to every store that only the 4-packs were available for order. When beverage order writers asked if Ghia could make sure that certain shipments definitely arrived at their store by a particular day, Treater was right there to loop in distributor reps to make sure exactly that happened.
Even better, when the first Whole Foods stores to launch Ghia began seeing phenomenal sales, Treater was intelligent enough to begin sharing the news with other nearby Whole Foods stores, all to help convince stores that setting up placements of the new Ghia SKUs would be well worth it.
Which is to say that Treater is much more than a platform that just focuses on problems: it finds opportunities just as effortlessly.
When a Whole Foods reported that they were selling Ghia so quickly that they had to condense their off-shelf display until they received more stock, Treater immediately notified Ghia of the situation via Slack — and knew exactly which distributor to ping to make sure the store was replenished ASAP.
The benefits even extended to demos. This went beyond a system for checking in with stores to make sure they knew to stock up for demos: As Treater cultivated warm relationships with beverage teams across the country, team leads began providing live feedback on how every activation went. And, perhaps most importantly, which activations were worth rapidly repeating to maximize sales!
Treater gives us the kind of qualitative, anecdotal feedback from stores that’s nearly impossible to get without boots on the ground everywhere. The insight not only helps us catch issues but also identify opportunities to lean in and drive sales in ways we wouldn’t have anticipated or known otherwise. And, hearing a store gush about our products is incredible validation that keeps our team going!
