The Branded Pantry

by: John Pryslak, Prime Consulting

While current, accurate and complete product information data is the foundation of any Health & Wellness program, any competitive advantage is NOT contained in the data itself, but rather in how the program (Guiding Stars, ONQI etc.) is designed and communicated to the consumer.

That said, a lack of current, accurate and complete product information data will be the Achilles heel for a retailer’s Health & Wellness program.  Imagine a program where individual products are rated against a defined and proprietary set of nutritional criteria and assigned a rating based on how good they are for you (not TOO hard to imagine since several such programs are already in place).  The overall nutritional worth of any item is communicated through a shelf tag that essentially tells the consumer if a product is “safe” to eat, or if they should consult their doctor before ingesting.

The health and wellness effort represents an altruistic endeavor on the part of a retailer to help consumers purchase the most nutritionally dense foods for their money.  Unfortunately, the reality that underlies this system is flawed since most of the available data used for these systems is not designed for Health & Wellness in general much less any single rating scale.

Prime Consulting and PMcohave been studying the processes around the collection of Product Information Master-file data and the impact on data quality.   As explained in earlier blogs we have identified four primary areas in the current product introduction/revision process where product information quality leakage occurs.   One of those four and perhaps the biggest single contributor to the poor state of data quality is the disconnect between the product on which the data is collected and the actual product on the shelf.   

We have found that over 50% of products that are revised in some way ( ingredients changes, nutritional modifications,  product weight, size or serving size changes, package changes and graphics changes) do not go through any sort of formal identification process between trading partners and therefore generally do not come into contact with any of the processes that would cause those product data changes to be captured.   These changes occur everyday and many changes and slight modifications to the original product specifications may well have happened since the product was first introduced and the label details recorded.    

Take for example the case of a nationally distributed cereal brand available in every grocery store today.  Since cereal is sold in varying package sizes, we’ve seen multiple UPCs for the same brand. That’s common.  What is unexpected is to find completely different nutritional information across the UPCs for this brand. Which nutritional record is correct for this brand?  Theoretically speaking, all of the records are – or were – correct at the time of capture.  A reformulation of a product that does not result in a UPC change may go unnoticed at the UPC level.  However, at the shelf, the story is much more dramatic and much more noticeable.  The cereal brand can gets a “green shelf tag” or a ”good rating” in a 10oz box and a “red shelf tag” or a “neutral” rating in a 14oz box.  This difference can be caused by the data which was precisely correct from a technical collection standpoint, but the 14oz box data was collected a year earlier than the 10 oz box and reflects the corret information on that old box, which is no longer on the shelf.  This probably causes a little confusion among consumers that the Health and Wellness program is designed to aid.