Case Study: Goya Foods

Goya Foods is the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the United States and a category leader in Latin American foods and condiments. With national distribution and deep roots in local communities, Goya’s performance depends on how well teams understand and respond to the nuances of each market they serve.

For Goya, growth wasn’t the challenge. Ensuring store-level execution reflected real customer demand was.

The challenge:

National scale, local complexity

Goya operates across highly diverse markets where customer preferences can change from one neighborhood to the next, sometimes from one store to the next.

Leadership recognized that centralized summaries weren’t enough to support that reality. Sales managers, brokers and field teams needed the ability to:

Understand performance at the customer, item and store level
Adapt assortments to local demographics and buying behavior
Act quickly in-market without waiting on analysts or static reports

The goal wasn’t more data. It was better decision-making, closer to the shelf.

The decision:

Provide and clarity and accountability to the field

Goya partnered with Salient to support a shift toward a more distributed, data-informed operating model — one that enabled local teams to act with confidence while maintaining alignment across the business.

“Goya is in the process of transforming into a data-driven culture of continuous improvement.”

John Amisano, CEO, Salient

For Goya, that transformation started with sales enablement at the operational level, putting insight directly into the hands of the people responsible for execution.

(calm music) - Literally, when I wake up in the morning, it's one of the first apps I open on my phone. It's really become a solution, almost at all levels of the organization. - Salient goes, literally, from our senior executive manager all the way down to the guy who's in the store, taking the order. It's all levels of our data, so it's basically who we sell to, what we sell 'em, when did we sell it. One of the things we feel fundamental about in this business is being able to push decision rights as close to the consumer as possible. The only way that you can effectively do that as a company, is that, if each of these local operators has a solution that can help them make those decisions effectively. The salesman has it at his fingertips, at a outlet level, so that they can quickly just pull up numbers on the fly. They don't have to rely on a manager to pull numbers for 'em. They got the outlet level information right here in the store without having to rely on anybody else, down to the package level. - Our goal is to power the end user. We don't just limit it to salespeople. We open it up to all the different groups that want to use it, so, it can be from accounting to warehouse, to all the different people, for even tax people who use it. The mobile app really made a big difference on that, a change in it so that everybody has access to it. Very rarely do a lot of our key account people, even stay in the office, so instead of having them to interact with a computer, they're able to access it now through their tablets, and their smartphones, through the dashboards, and that's really been a game changer for us, because wherever they're at, they're able to see what's going on, and they figure out how to sell something from that data. - For my organization, it cuts both ways. it's the high level dashboarding, but then we take it all the way down and use it for outlet level, product specific performance and validation. So, we're using it to really track volume, revenue, margin. - We were able to show customers our brands, our packages are outselling the competition. Any time you can do that and have data, volume numbers, margin numbers, and then back that up, it was always a win for us, and instead of just, "Hey, I wanna sell Coca-Cola's," I wanna grow your business, and this is how I can do it. - The field users that we see engaging with the solution regularly, consistently out-perform their peers. they know more about their customers and the state of their business overall, and they are far more effective in what they do, and having that fact-based value added dialogue with their customers. - The business review is probably the most impactful day-to-day scope. Green lights and red lights is one snapshot on the screen, that says, "hey, I look and I see it down, and I see open spark or an open still, and then, if the customer wants to see why, we can drill into that, and go deeper. Being able to go in and kinda create a partnership to tell 'em that this is what we wanna, this is what we do for you business, this is why we do it for you business. - Our ability to make better decisions faster has improved with the solution. The biggest thing that stands out for me, with Salient, is its stability, its speed, and its ability to scale is its stability, its speed, and its ability to scale with our business as we have scaled. - We're a three and a half billion dollar company now. The biggest change with Salient grew with us as we grew, right? So we used to have, started out with 18 sales centers in 2014, and now we're at 54 sales centers, and so, it just really grew. We grew three and a half times our size, So our transactions grew that same level. - The support and engagement and interaction has been world-class. Any time we need something, we pick up the phone and call, and they answer. - It's been a long-term relationship, for us. Once we got to know Salient, it, we've had the same people, and the same reps that we've talked to over the years. So it's really a collaboration. - I don't know what life was like before Salient, because it's been a part of our organization as long as I have, but I don't know how they managed their business without it.

A fast start positioned for performance

With hundreds of sales team members and brokers across the Northeast, onboarding and adoption were critical. The priority wasn’t just speed — it was ensuring the system reflected how the business actually works.

Salient worked closely with Goya teams to:
Define common, real-world sales scenarios
Build guided analyses that were immediately usable in the field
Ensure mobile access supported in-store decision-making
Deliver training and feedback loops from day one

From integration through deployment, the full rollout was completed in under 90 days — without disrupting the business.

Building a catalyst for change

While the technical rollout was fast, the broader impact was organizational.

“The 90 days of implementation went smoothly, but this is really a culture shift,” said Joe Antoniotti, Sales Research Manager at Goya. “Salient has been that first step. They’re actively helping us build what we need for the future — whether that’s sales, finance, marketing or leadership.”

Performance insight became a shared asset, not a centralized function.

Understanding customers at the neighborhood level

Winning at shelf requires precision. Goya’s teams needed to understand not just what was selling, but why they were selling it – by customer segment, store and demographic profile.

“One of the things we can do is bring in demographics by store,” said Luis Saenz, Director of DSD at Goya. “We can look at categories, SKUs, stores and days, and we’re a lot smarter because of it.”

This shift allowed brokers and area managers, the people who know their customers best, to tailor execution based on real demand signals, not assumptions.

The outcome:

Strong execution, confident decisions

By aligning performance insight with how decisions are made in the field, Goya strengthened its ability to:

Tailor assortments by neighborhood and customer profile
Identify gaps and opportunities at the store level
Support brokers and sales teams with actionable context
Maintain alignment across sales, marketing and leadership

For Goya, performance improvement didn’t mean standardizing away local nuance. It meant giving local teams the information needed to act and the accountability to deliver.