Vita Coco is giving its NAMs 2.5 days a week back with elm EPOS

2.5 days

of NAM reporting time handed back every week

£22.5k

of NAM time freed up every year*

1 click

to answer store-level questions that used to mean a portal download

The brand: Vita Coco

Vita Coco is the world's leading coconut water brand. Ben joined as Head of UK Retail seven and a half years ago, when coconut water was still new to the UK. Today Vita Coco holds around 70% of a £110-120 million category.

We sat down with Ben to find out how elm EPOS changed the way his team reports.

"We had the data. We just didn't have the time or resource to actually do anything useful with it."

2.5 days a week in retailer portals

Ben: "Before elm, everything was manual. Every Monday the NAMs would pull raw data from each retailer portal, clean it, reformat it and drop it into individual Excel files, then pull everything together into a summary. Go to Retailer A, pull their format, clean the data, update their file, share the report, move on to the next one. Across Tesco, Costco, Sainsbury's and every major grocer, that added up to 2.5 days of the team's week, every single week."

The elm retailer scorecard showing revenue, units, rate of sale and availability by week for a single retailer — The elm retailer scorecard: every metric, week by week, in one view. Illustrative sample data, not Vita Coco's.

Why elm over a custom Power BI build

Ben: "We looked at alternatives, including custom Power BI builds and other data specialists, but there weren't many platforms that could do what elm does, and certainly not as accessibly. A lot of the other options needed a whole load of installing, training and upskilling just to get going. You can give elm to pretty much anyone and they'll work it out quickly.

The team were also genuinely open to feedback and acting on it. New retailers got added and dashboards got deeper, which gave us confidence we were backing the right platform."

One click instead of a morning in portals

Ben: "A question like 'what are the top selling stores in London?' used to mean tracking down a separate portal report, downloading it and cleaning the data. Now it's one click. You go into the store distribution tracker and cut it by retailer, by 52 weeks, 12 weeks, whatever you need. We're answering the questions we need to answer, rather than spending the day finding the data."

Store-level performance in elm, with weekly revenue, units, rank and SKU detail for a single store — Store-level performance with AI analysis on any row. Illustrative sample data, not Vita Coco's.

Worth £22.5k a year in NAM time

Ben: "If you've got five NAMs each spending half a day every Monday pulling EPOS reports, that's 2.5 days of working hours a week. Spread that over 45 or 46 working weeks and it's a fairly chunky amount of time, and with it a fairly chunky amount of salary you can put to use elsewhere."

*Based on five NAMs each saving half a day a week, at a typical NAM salary of £45k.

The chart that gets used every day

Ben: "The yearly sales trend chart is the one we get the most out of day to day. It sounds simple, but it gives a really clean snapshot of how each SKU is trending year over year. It means you can speak fluently in commercial meetings about what you're seeing, where things are heading and why. For a brand with years of sales history, showing that visually in a meeting makes a real difference."

Data the marketing team can read too

Ben: "It's reached well beyond the commercial team. The marketing team knowing how much volume goes through Tesco or Sainsbury's wasn't visible to them before. Now it's in front of them in a visual way anyone can interpret, even without a commercial background. It's upskilled the wider business and given the commercial team more visibility.

It's a great system and one we'll be using for the long term."

"It's transformed the business and the way we report."

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