Whole Foods Market Case Study

Datassential enables the Whole Foods Market Exclusive Brands team to identify trending products, gather insights about their consumers, and validate product launch decisions.

Whole Foods Market is the nation’s largest natural and organic grocer, operating 505 stores across the U.S. The Whole Foods Market Exclusive Brands team is responsible for the development and launch of the 365 by Whole Foods Market branded products.

The trend identification process for the Whole Foods Market Exclusive Brands team was manual and extremely arduous, with the team seeking out restaurant websites to look at menus and isolate trends, and then validate them through Pinterest, Instagram, and other social media platforms. The process was very labor intensive and time-consuming for their small team, and the hunting and gathering approach took up a lot of bandwidth that needed to be spent on developing and launching trend-forward and innovative products.

Whole Foods’ trend identification process was extremely manual and labor intensive

The team needed the right data to inform trend-forward, innovative products

The hunting and gathering approach took too much bandwidth

“Datassential allows us to launch products that really resonate with our customers and keep them coming back for more.”

– Rachel Bukowski, Senior Team Leader, R&D Exclusive Brands, Whole Foods Market

THE SWITCH

With access to Datassential’s tools, the Whole Foods Market team is able to quickly identify trending foods, ingredients, styles of cooking and more, and also validate their placement on the trend lifecycle to understand how to appropriately time product launches. The team heavily relies on Datassential’s consumer preferences data to understand how well Whole Foods’ consumers know a trend, if they’ve tried it, and if they like it. Datassential’s insights allow the team to make data-driven decisions much faster than they previously were able, and provides direction around whether or not to launch a product and timing for the launch, plus the ability to launch products that are generally more risky than traditional “filling the whitespace” items.

Datassential tools enable the team to quickly identify trending products

Consumer preferences data further validates product launch decisions

Product launches, and launch timing, is now guided by the right data

THE IMPACT

Datassential insights arm the Whole Foods Market team with the utmost credibility and real-world data to back up their hunches and the previously manual and very labor-intensive trend identification process. Now, the team is able to present their leadership with very sound menu- and consumer-based data, which is exactly what they need to bring future-proofed products through the ideation and development cycles and on to the shelf, and subsequently be very successful with their consumers. The Datassential partnership allows the Whole Foods Market team to launch products that really resonate with their customers, and keep them coming back for more.