Kettle & Fire's explosive growth made it the category captain of bone broth, but it also presented a challenge as the brand shot past $100 million in annual revenue: more SKUs, more stores, and more moving parts to manage.
Distribution centers stop delivering SKUs due to unreported inventory shortages. Stores forget to execute endcaps. Products fall off the shelf for a myriad of reasons.
When a mission critical issue quietly begins somewhere among hundreds of retailers and distribution centers, how do you catch and solve it within hours, instead of weeks or months? All without having to spend big on third-party merchandisers or an army of account managers?
We knew there was a ton of low hanging fruit in addressing stock-out issues at a few of our retail partners. But our challenge was how to navigate this given our limited visibility and budget at the time.
So when another brand recommended Treater's retail growth agent to start solving issues and driving incremental wins across the board, the Kettle & Fire team was skeptical: tasking an AI agent with managing retail territory felt like a big jump from using ChatGPT to help make decks or summarize sales data.
But the upside was immense, and the Kettle & Fire team gave Treater a shot. Within 6 days of signing on with Treater, Kettle & Fire's retail sales data was integrated into Treater's platform, outreach began, and stores began responding enthusiastically to outreach about a newly launched SKU.
Working with the Treater team was a game changer. We not only got real-time monitoring and void detection but their team went above and beyond to proactively identify ROI-driving opportunities at the store-level.
Stores reported everything from "This item landed a couple of weeks ago and I am excited to try it. We have already reordered a couple of times" to "We haven't received it yet. I ordered it today, it should be in tonight."
Within 30 days, 92 stores started selling the new SKU for the first time — a 23% increase.
Kettle & Fire's full lineup, fully stocked and on shelf at retail.
There is no shortage of industry data available. The challenge is analyzing that data and taking specific action to grow both our and our retail partners' mutual business. Utilizing Treater turns an otherwise arduous, manual, multi-hour task into a 10 minute 'campaign kickoff' Slack message.
That initial project turned into a long-term partnership as Kettle & Fire leveraged Treater's growth agent to scale its retail business as successfully as possible. There were plenty more wins to come.
Treater's machine learning models began studying daily, store-level, SKU-level sales trends alongside actual qualitative feedback from store teams to begin identifying not just voids with high-confidence, but also stores that would greatly benefit from ordering extra inventory ahead of promotional events.
The best part? No store visits, expensive merchandising projects, or micromanagement needed. Every day, Treater automatically reached out to those store teams with store-specific sales data to help convince them that a win-win opportunity was at hand.
Keeping Kettle & Fire on shelf and in stock means it lands in more carts — and more kitchens.
One hour, a store team leader would check in with Treater to say "The counts being wrong is why it has not been selling lately. I've corrected this and placed an order for two cases… Thank you for always being on top of things when it comes to product movement!" after Treater's agent gently alerted the location that a fast-moving SKU — and a great sales driver for the store — had suddenly stopped selling and might be worth a look.
The next hour, Kettle & Fire would see that the Treater agent had thanked a store for driving a 96% sales increase during the previous promo, as they prepared for the next promotion. In fact, the store didn't even realize they were performing so well: "Thanks for the great news! Kettle & Fire has been on end cap and fully stocked! I will make sure to keep the stock in order."
Supporting thousands of stores at scale with white glove service drove huge dividends: when stores agreed to order a specific SKU because of a recommendation made by Treater, sales for those respective SKU-Store combos grew 25% more than all other SKU/store combos over all time. Put another way: coaching stores on the best ways to sell Kettle & Fire has gone a long way.
With all that said, deploying Treater across Kettle & Fire's retail footprint had another huge benefit. Treater began escalating critical, high-level issues across an increasingly complex retail landscape. And this proved extremely crucial for managing distributors where data visibility into deliveries and DC stock levels wasn't always possible — and so the best source of truth on fulfillment success was often actual store feedback on whether deliveries were consistent.
Indeed, across the first year of use, Treater identified and escalated 73 total incidents of delivery issues for specific regions and SKUs, each time with actual evidence backed up by qualitative store feedback and real-time data analysis. Some of these incidents were expected, and others came as a total surprise — allowing the Kettle & Fire team to intervene and solve them within hours, instead of finding out about the revenue gap months later.
Treater's ability to keep its proverbial finger on the pulse and turn multiple anecdotes from specific retail/distributor geographies into quantitative analysis we can take to our buyers is invaluable. We leveraged these insights to reverse an accidental discontinuation immediately.
