From Orchard to Aisle: Stemilt Gains Daily Retail Visibility with Shelfgram

Stemilt, a leading Washington-based apple and cherry grower, sought a more efficient and comprehensive way to monitor their product's presence and performance at retail. Recognizing the limitations of traditional store visits and the need for more frequent, real-time insights across their extensive US and Canadian markets, Stemilt adopted Storesight. This partnership enabled their merchandising team to gain crucial visibility into store-level execution, competitive positioning, and pricing strategies, ultimately empowering their sales force and strengthening retailer relationships.

Challenge

• Limited Retail Visibility: Traditional in-person store visits were time-consuming and infrequent, making it difficult to gain consistent, real-time insights into product display, pricing, and competitive activity across a vast geographic area.

• Inefficient Data Collection: Previous methods involved manual photo-taking and dictation into phones, leading to clunky data organization and delayed reporting to internal teams.

• Seasonal Product Challenges: The seasonal nature of apples and cherries required agile monitoring of promotions and displays, a task difficult to manage with limited field presence.

• Competitive Intelligence Gaps: Understanding competitor merchandising, packaging, and pricing in real-time was a significant challenge without a consistent visual data source.

Solution

• Implemented Storesight for Daily Store Monitoring: Stemilt integrated Storesight to receive almost daily photos and data from retail locations, vastly increasing their real-time visibility.

• Leveraged Visuals for Merchandising Insights: The team used Storesight photos to analyze their product's shelf allocation, display quality, and presence of their unique "ladybug" stickers on apples and branded packaging.

• Combined Storesight with Sales Data (Nielsen): Storesight's visual data was coupled with Nielsen (POS and shipment) data to identify discrepancies between expected sales and actual retail conditions, such as pricing issues.

• Enabled Proactive Competitive Analysis: Storesight allowed Stemilt to monitor competitor products, displays, and pricing, providing valuable insights for their sales and marketing strategies.

Results

• Significant Time and Travel Savings: Reduced the need for extensive travel, enabling the merchandising manager to accomplish in hours what previously took days, leading to considerable cost savings.

• Enhanced Pricing Accuracy and Profitability: Identified and addressed instances where retailers were incorrectly pricing Stemilt produce (e.g., granny smith apples priced too high), facilitating corrective actions that likely improved sales and margins.

• Improved Competitive Awareness: Gained real-time insights into competitor shelf space, product mixing, and unique identifiers (like the "cheat code" on Cosmic Crisp stickers), empowering the sales team with actionable competitive intelligence.

• Strengthened Retailer Conversations: Equipped the Stemilt team with concrete visual evidence from stores, fostering more informed and impactful conversations with retail partners about merchandising and promotional strategies.