AUSTIN, MINN. — Through a new partnership with open-data retail platform specialist Crisp, Hormel Foods has significantly increased its ability to track its e-commerce sales and share growth.

Using the Crisp platform, Hormel can share and leverage historical and real-time data insights in Google Cloud from leading retailers, helping to further improve business performance for its retail customers, according to the company.

With Crisp, Hormel Foods can now easily access and share real-time delivery, retail, supply chain, manufacturing and inventory data, empowering their teams to be proactive in talking to buyers about inventory issues or shipments that have been delayed using the latest available information, said Leslie Lee, vice president of digital experience at Hormel.

“We have made great strides in our analytics in a short period of time so our teams can more easily obtain and understand our e-commerce sales data,” Lee said. “We’ve built data lakes and business models to help us analyze this data and today we are in a really solid place of being able to know what our e-commerce sales and share growth looks like and where they’re coming from.”

Hormel’s partnership with Crisp, Lee added, enables Hormel to focus on strategic analytics instead of spending time building and managing data. Crisp has become an extension of Hormel’s IT team as an expert in the different retail platforms the company works with, which allows Hormel to provide the best experience for its retail customers.

With the ability to easily integrate disparate data sources through Crisp into Google BigQuery, Hormel now has full visibility into what is happening at the physical shelf in real-time, using data to inform its retail customers about potential out-of-stock issues and aid in the reduction of food waste.

“Crisp has proven to be a great partner,” said Mark Vaupel, vice president of IT services at Hormel. “Their data sharing tools allow our data engineering team to streamline the integration pipeline into our data lake through Google’s data cloud. This lets our team focus their time and efforts toward more strategic analysis that brings insights and value to our company and our customers.”