TraceGains Solutions
Retail Industry

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The Future of Food Retail is Here

Grocery and c-store sales, which grew only 3% in 2019, surged 11.5% in 2020. The pandemic brought a financial windfall to food retailers, but it also accelerated the fragmentation of retail channels and exposed significant operational and supply chain challenges. Ready or not, the future of food retail is here. And savvy retailers are using surplus profits to retool, doubling down on delivering ideal customer experiences in preparation for a wildly unpredictable and challenging market.

Private Label Brands Drive Growth
The Boston Consulting Group reported that private labels now account for 18% of the US grocery market. According to Statista, private label sales of food & beverage products increased by 12.3% in 2020. Another report by private label consultancy Dayman shows that more than half of consumers choose stores based on private label selections. With consumer attitudes toward private label products improving, grocers and c-stores cannot afford to consider them as a single category. Retailers should consider private labels an ideal way to create long-term loyal customers, differentiate their stores, and define their brands.

Meal Kits Find Success
But food-at-home isn’t only about in-store and online grocery sales. Grand View Research forecasts the meal kit sector will grow to $19.9 billion by 2027, fostered in part by “increased awareness regarding hygienic food” and “increased traction in 2020 owing to the spread of COVID-19.”

 

"TraceGains reduced the time it takes to maintain accurate product documentation. We’ve decreased onboarding time for both suppliers and internal teams, and we’ve realized a significant reduction in the lead time for specification approval. With TraceGains, we have visibility into the status of each approval step and can collaborate directly with our suppliers.”

- Elizabeth Wolniakowski,
   Director of Technical Delivery Americas,
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What Macro Trends are Impacting Food Retail?

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Conscious Consumption
Consumers want more variety, safety, and social responsibility from grocery retailers and food brands. Conscious consumption is on the rise, encompassing sustainability, health, authenticity, organic, human rights, buying local, animal welfare, ethical business practices, and more.

Supply Chain Disruption
Globalization has made it harder to identify bad actors in the supply chain and assure food safety, quality, and traceability. Economic adulteration, fraud, and incidents like pesticides and heavy metals can occur without warning causing delays and hefty penalties. These issues can harm consumers and cause permanent brand damage.

Share of Wallet
Grocers and meal kit delivery services got a major boost from consumer meal dollars when the pandemic shuttered restaurants and increased at-home cooking. But as the pandemic winds down, more people get vaccinated, and communities reopen, restaurants will reclaim a share of meal dollars.

TraceGains Networked Solutions for Retail

We've heard from many grocery and c-store private label and meal kit teams that product development, supplier management, and regulatory compliance oversite are labor-intensive and slow. We wanted to make it easier. We built networked solutions designed to advance team collaboration, accelerate research and development, streamline supplier and ingredient selection, and automate compliance.

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Streamline and automate the management of supplier qualification, documents, and relationships.

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Offer a robust sourcing directory for ingredients, items, packaging, and service providers.

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Highlight risk by supplier, item, and geography, identifying the most critical threats.

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Allow teams to create, update, and publish raw material and finished goods specifications, formulas, and recipes while collaborating with suppliers and co-manufacturers on a networked platform.

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Enable rapid digital recipe prototyping using real ingredient and supplier data to achieve ideal product criteria faster.

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Deliver a unified view of products, data, and processes across the business and throughout the supply chain, no matter how complex or dispersed.

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Provide the best source for food and CPG regulatory, safety, incident, and fraud information.

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Ensure businesses are always audit-ready, cutting audit preparation time from weeks to hours.

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Power configurable dashboards and reports for allergen, organic, country of origin, nutrition, risk, and other data.

Solve Your Supply Chain Challenges

Powerful Sourcing Directory
With 35,000 supplier locations, 300,000 items, and 2M+ documents to expedite qualification, you can source ingredients, cleaning and sanitizing products, packaging, and more. Search by country of origin, organic, non-GMO, kosher, and more.

Automated Workflows and Alerts
New suppliers are automatically reminded to submit all required documentation (e.g., annual audits, FDA facility registration number, C-TPAT, kosher, organic, etc.), and automatic alerts are triggered when documents are about to expire.

Configurable Dashboards and Reports
Static documents and information exchange are converted into digital records that can be extracted and transformed into configurable dashboards that allow everyone in the organization to spot issues and track progress at a glance.

Automatic Assessment
Supplier and ingredient performance monitoring against KPI's, automatic scorecarding, material trends and variation, and more so teams can make Informed decisions and effectively reduce supply chain risk.

"Before Supplier Management, we had about four people spending a combined 100 hours a week qualifying and onboarding suppliers. Now, we have one person spending about 20 hours a week on it.”


- Jared Keefer, Director of Safety and Regulatory Compliance

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DataLink for Genesis R&D® Customers

Eliminate Manual Data Entry for Nutritional Labeling
TraceGains and ESHA Research have teamed up to provide shared customers with an innovative solution called DataLink. This solution allows customers running both TraceGains and Genesis R&D® to automatically update supplier ingredient data without having to manually enter amounts by item.

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Plug In. Go Faster.

Ready to upgrade your Compliance, Supplier, and Product Development programs?

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