Enabling THIS to turn data into action

The brand: THIS

THIS is a young brand on a mission to put the world’s livestock into retirement through the creation of hyper-realistic meat alternatives that could fool any meat eater. The company was formed in 2019 and already has a £12 million turnover. With the opening of its £2m R&D centre in London, THIS has big plans to stay at the leading edge of the plant-based sector.

Emily Mathers, National Account Executive, explains how elm is helping THIS to share data across the business and create actionable insights.

The problem

NAVIGATING A DATA MINEFIELD

“The retailer portals themselves are all very different. The data you get from Tesco is nowhere near the same data that you get for Sainsbury’s, and so on. If you don’t know the platforms well, it can be a bit of a minefield to understand exactly what each of the metrics are and what they mean. They’ve got their own three-letter acronyms. Having one solution for this would allow us to scale our data needs inline with our business’ growth rates.”

“We needed to consolidate data and have it in a readable, usable format.”

LACKING CRITICAL DATA

“Before elm, we were stocked with all the big retailers and we’d have to download data from the relevant retailer portals and pop the data into a spreadsheet one by one every week. It was a time consuming but necessary process that meant we were lacking in time for the more important part – actioning the data.”

The solution

“Senior leaders across sales and finance were involved in the decision-making process. We chose elm as it was a competitively priced way to consolidate our sales data.”

MAKING DATA ACCESSIBLE

“elm impacts a lot of areas of our business. Their easy-to-navigate platform is used predominantly by the sales team to see week-on-week sales and by the finance team to check promotional spending and to support them with the month-end process. We have instant access to everything we could need, but if anyone has a niche question, the elm team is super quick to help out. You never feel like you’re going to have to chase them.”

Providing immediate insight

“elm is a very quick way for me to track sales data for the wider sales team. In a few clicks, I can see exactly how many units we’ve sold per week, how much revenue we’ve done per week and our rate of sale across any customer, through all time.”

Charts made for sharing

“There are a lot of graphs and charts that you can pull out and use in retailer presentations. And everything was ready to go as soon as we signed up. It’s so much easier than finding the data and making a chart in Excel.

elm helps you understand the data you’ve got at your disposal. elm loaded historical data back as far as we needed, so I’ve always been able to use elm’s graphs to illustrate sales growth year-on-year. It’s helpful to have graphs and charts at your fingertips as the data looks credible and so clear.”

The results

“elm is a one-stop-shop for sales data, supply data and finance. It saves a lot of time as all your data is there for you.”

ACTIONING DATA

“We are looking at potential field team resource for the future, and elm will really help with navigating that, as the tool provides weekly smart actions automatically, making it completely simple to know what tasks the team should take every week. You can clearly see if a store has stock and they’re not selling anything or if they’ve not sold anything in the last number of weeks. If you’ve got several stores in an area that haven’t sold anything for a few weeks, you can go in and find out why that is.

Having that information at the touch of a button is incredibly helpful.”

OPTIMISED PROMOTIONAL SPENDING

“We’re now focussing internally on what we’re spending on promotions and what that return on investment looks like. elm’s promotional analysis tool gives us a good idea of how deep an investment we need to propose to retailers in order to optimise our revenue generation on promotion.”

“elm serves a real purpose for all of us. It gives us the data and the insight we need every week.”

To learn more about getting started with elm today, email [email protected] or signup below.