From seed to shelf: optimising fresh produce assortments around the globe with data

Rijk Zwaan is one of the largest vegetable breeding and seed production companies in the world. The innovative company is constantly looking for new ways in getting their healthy products to consumers across the globe. In their partnership program, they are actively collaborating with retailers to drive fresh produce consumption and create a win-win situation.?

Perhaps THE most important activity in Rijk Zwaan’s partnership program, is sharing essential information with its partners. A retailer’s goal is to compose the optimal fresh produce assortment that gets the consumer to the store. However, their wide product range makes it extra challenging to keep an eye on all the changing fresh produce trends around them.?

As a global seed producer, Rijk Zwaan is at the start of the supply chain, which provides a better position to keep track of all the developments in the market. It is in the breeder’s own interest that retailers offer the best products that stimulate the consumption of fruits and vegetables. Answering questions like: “What kind of lettuce is trending in salad bowls in the UK?” allows Rijk Zwaan to give partners an edge and simultaneously drive the consumption of healthy salads.

The value of retail insights at scale

In order to help Rijk Zwaan with this challenge, PEAX implemented their retail insights application. The application is responsible for gathering a large set of online retail data on a frequent basis. This dataset is actively linked to the crops and varieties that Rijk Zwaan offers to the market. It allows Rijk Zwaan to identify changing trends and new retail opportunities in a much faster and frequent way.

For example, a changing trend is observed in the UK retail market towards different leaf types in salad bowls. This trend could be of direct importance for future breeding priorities at Rijk Zwaan. Moreover, as the UK is a leading convenience country, this trend could also transfer to other markets. Rijk Zwaan can anticipate early and advise growers, processors and retailers in other countries and markets of this new opportunity.?

Or, imagine a situation where Rijk Zwaan finds out that pink tomatoes (yes, those exist) increase in popularity in China, and are sold at a premium. That would give them a very good reason to collaborate with retailers in the country to market this product actively to consumers.?

At Rijk Zwaan, these retail insights are most valuable in combination with the expert knowledge of their market specialists. In a global market, there is too much going on to keep up with everything. Direct access to a pool of retail insights allows the team to identify the most important developments quickly. It gives them an edge over the traditional way of market monitoring, where market specialists had to visit every retailer physically to gather retail insights. Besides, retail reports from Nielsen, GfK and other providers require a substantial investment, while they don’t give enough detail in product information. Making decisions backed by accurate data without having to visit a single store, is what adds direct value to the business.?

Measuring the impact

An important part of the project is measuring the impact of the solution that is delivered. This in order to learn from the implementation and to prove the value that data & AI can bring to every business. In line with this objective, several project KPIs were collaboratively selected at the start of the project. Business value, data quality and data accuracy were selected as the most important factors to measure the success.?

This summer, the market specialists at Rijk Zwaan started using the data provided by the application. Soon, PEAX and Rijk Zwaan will evaluate the project KPIs together to quantify the impact it delivers. Exciting times for both parties, where they look forward to communicating positive results and further upscaling.