Company: Crisp

Website: www.gocrisp.com

Technology Snapshot: As the COVID-19 pandemic lingers and food companies continue to struggle with optimizing supply and demand, Crisp has announced the first programmatic commerce platform.

The new Crisp platform will allow food brands and retailers to stay ahead of rapidly evolving consumer behavior, identify potential supply chain disruptions, predict store and online traffic, track inventory and product performance, understand store conditions and replenish both virtual and in-store shelves at speed and scale.

Pre-built integrations to retail portals and BI tools include “connectors” for 80 percent of the top grocery retailers and distributors in the U.S., covering $500B in sales. With unified access to this data, the platform enables food supply chain partners to easily and securely connect data sources to reduce out-of-stocks, minimize waste, evaluate promotions, analyze inventory issues and maximize profitability across the entire supply chain.

Designed to facilitate the free flow of data between tens of thousands of food brands, distributors and retailers, the Crisp platform leverages big data to improve real-time, predictive understanding of demand and supply opportunities and constraints, improve decision making, and allow faster course corrections when needed. Programmatic commerce helps retailers and food brands anticipate what customers need, with implications for fulfillment, inventory management, production, sales, marketing and all other upstream activities.

Built to work on top of, rather than instead of, existing data and technology infrastructure, Crisp is an agile solution that organizations can implement and benefit from immediately. This allows Crisp to work as effectively for emerging specialty and artisan food brands as it does for multi-billion-dollar food brands.

“Prior to Crisp, I was spending at least 10 hours a week pulling reports and comparing 10 spreadsheets on three different monitors. Now, all of the data is pulled together in one spot,” explained Madison Schroeder, senior director of sales at High Road, the fastest growing ice cream manufacturer in the country. “In addition, I’m able to see where we are selling our products, where we need to market, where we need to stock inventory and which flavors are selling in which markets so we can plan our distribution more efficiently.”

Crisp closed a $12M Series A round of funding in July 2020 led by FirstMark Capital, bringing its total funding to $24M, enabling the company to be first-to-market with a programmatic commerce platform for food and beverage.

“A lack of unified data and information-sharing across supply chains dependent on outdated technologies has restricted trade for too long and led to the food shortages we saw throughout 2020,” said Are Traasdahl, CEO and founder of Crisp. “Using a programmatic commerce model, we can bridge the information gaps, improve inventory and distribution to prevent shortages or overages, and help companies be data-ready to meet actual demand during and after the pandemic.”

Crisp will unveil the new platform at the SENPA Natural Industry Alliance SOHO Expo, December 10–13, 2020. For a demo, reach out at www.gocrisp.com.