Case Study: Mother's Market

Case Study: Mother’s Market & Kitchen

Mother’s Market & Kitchen is a specialty organic grocery and foodservice retailer built on quality, community and care. But behind the scenes, leadership faced a familiar challenge: critical business information lived across too many systems, arrived too late and required too much manual effort to be useful.

The result wasn’t a lack of effort. It was a lack of understanding.

“It was just so frustrating operating blindly.”

Chuck Kirk, Chief Financial Officer, Mother's Market & Kitchen

The challenge:

Answers took days and stalled decision making

Before partnering with Salient, Mother’s Market relied on disconnected systems and manual processes to answer everyday business questions.

Sales, margin, inventory and labor data lived in different places. Pulling a complete picture meant:

Logging into individual POS systems store by store
Manually compiling spreadsheets
Waiting days, sometimes a full week, for analysis

“When I first started, we were usually waiting a week or for someone to do a manual analysis.”

Chris Williams, Chief Merchandising Officer, Mother's Market & Kitchen

That delay made it difficult to manage proactively, especially at the store and department level where decisions have immediate impact.

The turning point:

Integrating performance into the entire business

Leadership recognized that improvement required more than faster reports. It required a way to unify the business, including sales, inventory, labor and accounting, into a shared operational view.

“Seeing all the disparate systems we had created, I wanted to tie the components together.”

Wayne Miller, Chief Information Officer, Mother's Market & Kitchen

The goal wasn’t to centralize decision-making. It was to give each role, from store managers to finance to inventory, the ability to see what mattered and act on it.

♪ ♪ CHUCK KIRK: When I started at Mothers, there was no data. Literally, no data. CHRIS WILLIAMS: We were usually waiting for a week, or waiting for, you know, someone to do some manual analysis, and so, it really just slowed things down for sure, and in often many cases, it wasn't even possible because we didn't have the data organized, or we didn't have the dashboards built. CHUCK: It was just so frustrating operating blindly. VANESSA SHELTON: To check all the stores, I would have to go into each individual POS system for each store, and collect all the data, and then either put it on an Excel sheet or something like that, or do it manually. ERIC KATZ: In the past, we'd have to run individual movement reports on all items, which is obviously very time consuming, and requires an additional person doing that, where now everything's done just at the click of a button. CHUCK: We started using Salient and on a daily basis now, I can drill down on sales, I can drill down on margin, all the way to the item level, and see trends this year versus last year, the prior year, and that's really how we manage the business, is we use this data. VANESSA: Now, I've learned to do it really quickly in Salient where all nine stores are together, and I can do it in five minutes now, and I can get all of our sales for the past however long I want. WAYNE MILLER: Seeing the disparate systems that I had created or helped create in this environment, I wanted to try to tie together the different components. Each individual part, they all work well, but you only get a small view of what you're seeing, and it takes a lot of protracted effort to go through and condense that information into something useful, like Excel. But if you've ever been in an experience within Excel or getting that data in and then subsequently massaging it, the event happens, months later, you get the detail. You can't react to it, because it's now out of time. So I needed to find a solution that was not cookie-cutter in a sense that it works only for one thing, but that was more constructed in a way that was ready-made, largely, in a retail environment, or for a retail environment. When I happened onto Salient, I was, "Wow, this is a great thing." CHRIS: With, you know, ten stores and five major departments, even though that sounds relatively simple, it's still 50 points of data to look at, and Salient quickly highlights what's going on, what's up, what's down, and what we can action in the future days and weeks ahead. CHUCK: We have developed just some great reports that look at 13-week trends, and we take -- we start with sales, and then drill down on sales, and we also look at gross margin by department and, you know, it's just been very helpful, and us reacting to what's going on out there with the business. RACHEL BASMACIYAN: One of the reports that we use is to drill into one of the departments that we find is maybe overstocked, and look for opportunities to reduce our inventory without sacrificing sales. So there are reports in there that we have built, and not only do we use the data to kind of find out where we are as far as the company, but we also push those reports out to the stores,and let the department managers for those sections know, here are some items that you might wanna take some action on. Maybe, we can reduce some inventory, sales aren't really where they should be on these particular items, or maybe sales are even better than we thought, and maybe you wanna bump up some inventory. ERIC: We delve into the numbers every day, and if there is a specific item that's down, we might notice that it's an item we were out of stock on, or we may make phone calls to our distributors to increase supply of it. CHUCK: We have never been able to manage shrink or look at shrink because we didn't have the detail to do then, proactively. Now, we can do that measurement, and we say, hey, our produce shrink, for instance, is high, relative to the industry, so we're gonna go out and try and develop procedures and standard operating procedures to deal with shrink, and we're doing that with produce, and we're doing that with food services, which are high shrink areas. We knew we had a problem, but we didn't know how bad it was, and whether we needed to deal with it; now, we know we do. CHRIS: Retail people are often looking at sales dollars, or sales units, or margin dollars, or margin percent, and it's always a debate of which one's most important. It's hard to look at all four, simultaneously, but one of the things we've been able to do with Salient was to create a top ten, whether it's by item or by brand, across all those metrics at once, and it shows us, might end up being 30 items, but it shows which ones are top ten in sales, top ten in margin, and that way, you can kind of quickly see a lot of measurements at once. In Excel, you'd have to sort just sales, and look at your top items, and then just margin, look at your top items. Here, we're able to look at a lot of metrics at once, and make a more informed decision. WAYNE: Everybody thinks, hey, You know, the margins are doing good, you're looking at -- you're making money, your sales are this, your costs are that, you see it in a P&L and you go, okay. When you look at the transactional information, you go, wow. We're selling coffee for less than we're paying for it? You know, that one item, how do you know that one item out of 45,000 items? Unless you're looking for it, you don't know. This tool was like, oh, look at that, because we can see that rather rapidly. RACHEL: I see that there's some sort of issue going on with the inventory, and then I go to Salient to pull the data to prove my point, or disprove my point, and then sometimes, just creating dashboards, it will give me an indication of something that's going on that I had no idea was happening. CHUCK: Someone asks me a question and I, just hop on and, okay, is it sales related? I'll get into sales, is it gross margin related? I'll get into gross margin. Five, ten minutes later, I have an answer. CHRIS: While the daily reporting is great, the ad hoc reporting to kind of solve problems or look into new initiatives is equally as important. WAYNE: Can you get your data the way that you want it? Can you see what you're trying to see? Do you even know what you're looking for? Sometimes, you don't know what you're looking for. And through the ad hoc side, you're looking and -- you know, you go down this rabbit hole, and it's like, wow. ERIC: It's definitely brought a whole new layer to our business to ensure we're finding out information that we never saw before. We're 41 years into our company, and we've had a lot more visibility into things, and really make decisions that improve our service to our guests. CHRIS: For us, it's just been prioritizing, knowing what moves our business, what are the best items, the best brands, and really focusing on that, versus sometimes focusing on what is perceived as an issue or what is causing an issue. WAYNE: So Salient provides the tool for me to be able to deliver to my employees the ability to look at information in a variety of ways. Something that I didn't see the traditional, normal P&Ls, dollars information, margins. Or otherwise, from another angle that says, "Hey, I didn't see that before; I need to take a look at this." You should really look at Salient, because the Salient product will get you there faster. ♪ ♪

Day-to-day impact:

Managing the business in the moment

For store and operations teams, the change was immediate.

“In the past, we’d have to run individual movement reports on all items,” said Eric Katz, Costa Mesa Store Manager. “Now everything is done at the click of a button.”

Tasks that once took hours or required an extra person, now took minutes.

“With all nine stores together, I can pull sales information in five minutes,” said Vanessa Shelton, Foodservice Coordinator.

More importantly, teams stopped reacting after the fact and started managing in the moment.

“On a daily basis I can drill down on sales and margin to the item level and see trends year over year,” said CFO Chuck Kirk. “That’s really how we manage the business.”

Discovering what you didn’t know to ask

“Sometimes you know exactly what you want to see,” said Miller. “Other times you don’t. And when you explore, you uncover things you didn’t expect.”

That ability to investigate, rather than just review, changed how teams approached performance.

For Inventory Project Manager Rachel Basmaciyan, it meant proactively identifying overstock, shortages and inefficiencies across stores every day.

Transforming shrink into a management discipline

One of the most tangible shifts came in how Mother’s Market approached shrink.

“We had never been able to manage shrink because we didn’t have the detail,” said Kirk. “Now we can measure it, compare it and act.”

Instead of accepting shrink as an unavoidable cost, leadership could identify where it exceeded benchmarks and establish standard operating procedures to address it.

That shift, from assumption to measurement to action, became a blueprint for continuous improvement across the business.

The outcome:

Guesswork replaced by confidence

For Mother’s Market, improvement didn’t come from more dashboards or more reports. It came from:

Faster access to trustworthy information
Less manual work and fewer handoffs
Better questions, asked earlier
Clear ownership at every level

“Now everything is done at the click of a button,” Katz said, “but the real change was what that enabled: confidence, accountability and momentum.”