Fareway Testimonial Video
“Not only does the solution provide information needed to make better decisions, the Salient team understands the questions we are asking and why getting answers to those questions matters to our business. In addition to understanding our business, they possess a robust platform, capable of delivering timely, granular-level information on an impressively large scale.“
Andrea Chase, Vice President – Category Management, Fareway
Salient gives us the information quickly, real time, and being able to share that, you know, with with our stores, which is where all the action happens. We can quickly identify what is happening in the market and how we are performing against the market as well. And I see our role as providing them with as much data as we possibly can to help them make great decisions at the store level. May twelfth nineteen thirty eight, Paul s Beckwith and Freddie Bitt started Fairway Stores in Boone, Iowa. Since then, we have matured to a seven state, hundred and forty store chain. We are a fourth generation family owned business. We believe in treating our employees right. We believe in customer service. We believe in quality. We understand at Fairway that our customers are the main pillar of our business. We have to understand them and are becoming more and more complex. We have to be good stewards of trying to figure out what they want, when they want it. We're competing against some of the largest retailers in the world in this space. It's about being nimble, quick to recognize customer trends, and being able to use your data as a competitive advantage. What I found with Salient is that when I presented, when I was honest about it and and went to Salient and said this this is our concern. We have these these data points. We don't have these other data points. They understood and they said, you know what? We have a solution and here's how we're going to accomplish that. Right now at Fairway, one of our top priorities is engaging with the customer and delivering what the customer wants, and that starts with a strategy that is top down. And so how do we take something that comes from a strategic level, of upper management engaged with all of our suppliers and translate that all the way to our management staff and our full time staff and our part time staff in our stores so they can execute that plan. We get that done through data. That's why when we look for a great partner, to translate that data for us, we found Salan. Forget your worries about how clean your data is. It was the biggest thing that stopped us from our journey. Finding a partner that helped us get over our own fears is probably the best advice I could give. When it comes to analyzing, transactional data, something that's very important to us is our basket transactions and and what's happening inside of our baskets that are going out the door. You know, if I purchase milk, what else is gonna be in that basket? And building promotions around what's in that basket, we can duplicate that promotion, across time and really start seeing trends. I have a specific example of, you know, our meat department where they were able to show that there was an item that when we ran ran it on a hot deal, that it didn't actually cannibalize the entire category. And being able to show that, to show the actual data and be able to show it in graph form because it's quick and it's easy for our managers to see really helped not only sell it to them, but, you know, allows us to, you know, continue to grow our sales. Salient worked, with our implementation team, hand in hand, which was people that had full time jobs doing other things with Fairway. They were quick and to the point with what are we trying to deliver, who are we trying to deliver it to, and then how do we customize it to every different business partner and stakeholder that needs to view that data. Some people might need to have a more narrow dashboard, so we're not giving them all of these metrics to break down, and we can really customize what they're seeing to make a great decision when it comes to coming up with solutions, that will directly impact our customers. What will be interesting is how do we continue to involve social media metrics and different things into our data to figure out what the customer is going to want before they know what they want. Obviously, things continue to evolve. We want more. That that's always the driving factor is we wanna know more about our business. I think Salient has the opportunity to give us additional insights into our entire operation, whether that be warehouse data, trucking metrics, all of the things that involve our distribution model. That's where I think we can truly glean out some cost effective savings and some of that stuff as we continue to analyze the data and the efficiencies. If anybody else is looking and on this journey to find a partner, find somebody that they feel, you know, understands them, understands their business, for Fairway, Salient was that partner. Salient has brought a partnership to the table that allows us to compile all the information that we need to expand, prioritize after we mine that data, and they're sitting at the table through this entire process. So when we figure out where to put our investment dollars, we know we've made a good decision based on good information with a good partner.

