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Bio&Me makes good gut health deliciously easy, powered by plants and backed by science. They believe that people and microbes thrive on variety and deliciously good food which is why they pack their granolas, porridges, mueslis and yoghurts with gut friendly goodness.
With a total of 25 SKUs, Bio&Me has successfully launched into the majority of major retailers including Tesco, Ocado, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Holland & Barrett.
Here we talk to Jon Walsh, CEO and co-founder of Bio&Me, about how they use elm to better understand their business and ensure they hit retailer targets.
DIFFICULTY PRIORITISING
In a fast-moving business it’s normal to have lots of spinning plates and it’s very easy to get caught up in the everyday and forget to focus on the details.
For many challenger brands with growing retail distribution, data analysis is a pretty time-consuming and daunting task and therefore can be pushed to the bottom of the pile.
“Inevitably every retailer has a slightly different system and a slightly different way of measuring things. When we started out in the retail space, the data was manageable because we only had one system and one simple spreadsheet to deal with. As we grew, tracking our rate of sales and our distribution became harder to manage and we were in danger of forgetting to focus on the fundamentals.”
UNDERSTANDING YOUR BUSINESS
With growing retail distribution, the Bio&Me team understood the importance of staying on top of the details. With growth comes greater pressure from retailers to scale and keep track of stores that are underperforming.
“If you want to win in retail, you need to look at your sales data everyday to understand how it might influence your sales performance and that’s what elm enables you to do. Before spending money on anything else, like buying expensive Nielsen data or ROI data, you have to look at your own numbers.”
A TRUSTED DATA SOURCE
“Aside from checking our daily rate of sales, the thing we find the most useful about the data platform is being able to track our sales over a certain time period. Every time we approach a retailer with our elm data, it is always exactly the same information as what they have. That is seriously not to be underestimated because that is the key to data.”
LOOKING INTO THE DETAIL
“Having this trusted data source allows us to focus on the details with confidence. There is a function on the platform that allows us to look at individual store data. If there is a store for example that has forgotten to order, elm automatically generates a list of actions that enables us to react appropriately and prevent a drop in sales.
Going down to individual store level detail is partly where you win and lose. Without looking at the details, you don’t know if you are in danger of dropping 10% or 20% of sales and that could so easily be the difference between success and failure. If you are given a ROS target, you have to hit it.
We can also use the store data to help us when it comes to ranging. For existing listings we can effectively look at the data to assess new flavour launches and how they might perform best in certain stores. A couple of the retailers we work with are geographically concentrated and so we can demonstrate trends in certain regions based on the data we gather from elm.”
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