Case Study: Fareway Stores

Fareway is a fast-growing, employee-owned grocery retailer operating more than 130 stores across the Midwest. As the organization expanded, the challenge wasn’t execution or ambition, it was keeping performance aligned as complexity increased.

Each new store added pressure to legacy systems that weren’t built to scale with the business. Critical reporting slowed. Visibility broke down. Teams spent time troubleshooting systems instead of managing categories, promotions and margin.

Growth was moving faster than performance could keep up.

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.

The challenge:

When systems break, decision-making breaks with them

As Fareway added stores, their existing analytics environment repeatedly failed under the weight of new data. Store launches triggered system crashes, data delays and manual workarounds.

More importantly, teams lost confidence in their ability to understand performance consistently across departments, categories and locations.

Without a reliable foundation:

Category teams struggled to compare performance across stores
Insights arrived too late to influence action
IT became a bottleneck for everyday business questions
Growth introduced risk instead of momentum

Fareway didn’t need more reports. They needed a better way to manage performance as the organization evolved.

The decision:

Build a shared foundation for category performance

Fareway partnered with Salient to rework how performance data supported day-to-day decision-making.

The focus wasn’t on replacing tools. It was on creating a shared, stable foundation that allowed category leaders to:

Explore performance at the department, sub-department and category level
Ask deeper questions without waiting on IT
Maintain consistency as stores and data volumes increased
Support growth without sacrificing control or clarity

Salient worked closely with Fareway’s Category Management team to align the system around how decisions are actually made, not how data happened to be stored.

**A true working partnership**

The rollout began with deep collaboration between Salient and Fareway’s category leadership. Together, the teams defined:

The business questions that mattered most
The scenarios category managers needed to evaluate
The performance measures that should guide action

That partnership extended beyond the initial implementation.

As we continue to look at different goals that we have, Salient has been a partner that we've brought along with us in saying, okay. How can we measure that? We all talk about our numbers and how we wanna get more granular, or I wanna look at them differently. I can go in and look at department, and then I wanna say, okay, that's great, but what is driving a specific change? And I want the ability to be able to continue to drill down. As we started, you know, giving them real business scenarios where we felt we had a lot of challenges, the answer always was, I understand what you're saying. Here is what our solution is. We can accomplish that. We first rolled out to our category management team and teams in the office. They were able real time very quickly to to see the value that it added. They they could get answers quickly. It has allowed them to look at promotional activity. It has allowed them to to notice trends in the market. It has allowed them to utilize salient, the you know, even if it's graph form to show, have the conversations with our stores. Because we've had such a positive experience in working with Salient in our area, we're looking at it throughout our entire company.

The impact:

Stability, speed and confidence at scale

With a dependable performance foundation in place, Fareway’s teams gained the ability to work dynamically with their data instead of reacting to static outputs.

Category managers could break performance down naturally — by department, category or store — and understand what was changing and why.

The decision:

Build a shared foundation for category performance

Fareway partnered with Salient to rework how performance data supported day-to-day decision-making.

The focus wasn’t on replacing tools. It was on creating a shared, stable foundation that allowed category leaders to:

Explore performance at the department, sub-department and category level
Ask deeper questions without waiting on IT
Maintain consistency as stores and data volumes increased
Support growth without sacrificing control or clarity

Salient worked closely with Fareway’s Category Management team to align the system around how decisions are actually made, not how data happened to be stored.

As a result:

New store growth no longer disrupted reporting or visibility
Teams spent less time troubleshooting and more time managing performance
Promotions and category performance could be evaluated with context
Decision-making moved closer to the people responsible for outcomes

I think the biggest operational efficiency that Salient has given us is it allows our teams to very quickly on the fly, drill into the data and find answers. Weekly meetings that we have with to discuss promotional strategy, as we have discussions, we can quickly tailor the reports and drill into the data to get the answers that people will ask during those meetings. One of our challenges with our old platform was the amount of data that we were throwing at it. Things simple as opening a new store would crash that system, would create, data lag. We were unable to have line of sight to retail sales in our various retail locations. We had an antiquated tool, very difficult to add additional data to that platform. Always going back to our IT department to get answers and insights. We certainly have access to a lot of what we didn't have before. Salient, it's very quick. It doesn't lag. It doesn't slow us up when we try to go find an answer.

“It’s very easy to break it down in many different metrics, from a department to a sub-department to even a category level.”

Nick Greb, Category Data Analyst, Fareway Stores

Supporting better decisions closer to the work

For Fareway, performance improvement wasn’t about adding more data. It was about giving the right people a clear, consistent way to understand performance even as the business grew in complexity.

“Salient has been a true partner in helping us get speed to market, to our store managers and staff at the store level, exactly how we want it.”

Bret Wiltse, Executive VP of Merchandising, Fareway Stores

Salient has been a true partner in helping us get that speed to market to our store managers and our staff at at store level, just how we want it to be. One of the best features we found in Salient is not only can we look at data in a spreadsheet form or a static form, but we can be dynamic with it and really examine all of our promotions to what went in a basket along with that promotion. How did it generate overall traffic? Were we able to get an additional item in? Were we able to make a customer have an a different choice, allow them to see something else that maybe they didn't think of us for? And so we can really look at what those basket affinities are and build better promotions to target more of our customers.