What is MULO — and what SPINS' MULO+ adds

MULO — the Multi-Outlet syndicated data aggregate

The board deck has one line for the quarterly sales number: "$16M in MULO+." An investor asks what MULO+ is. Most analysts reach for a definition. That's the wrong starting point — the more useful answer is what MULO+ is not measuring, because for a natural brand the omissions matter as much as what's inside.

MULO stands for Multi-Outlet. It's a syndicated retail channel definition originated by IRI (now Circana) and adopted across the industry as the standard "broad measured retail" cut. It includes:

• Food / Grocery — supermarkets and grocery chains (Kroger, Albertsons, Publix, H-E-B, etc.)
• Drug — drug chains (CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid)
• Mass merchandisers + Walmart — broken out as its own meaningful slice given Walmart's category dominance
• Club — warehouse clubs (Sam's Club, BJ's). Costco notably does not report to syndicators, so it's effectively absent from MULO even though club is included as a channel.
• Dollar — dollar chains (Dollar General, Family Dollar)
• Military DECA — military commissaries

In total, MULO covers roughly 104,000 retail locations across these channels. It's the wide standard cut that excludes natural channel, specialty, convenience, and e-commerce.

If a brand is reading "we did $X in MULO last quarter," that's the sales number across all of those formats combined.

What MULO is missing

MULO was designed to cover the conventional retail mainstream. Three material gaps for natural/specialty/wellness brands:

1. Whole Foods coverage in syndicated data is fragmented. Whole Foods doesn't report to SPINS at all; Circana includes Whole Foods as part of its conventional grocery universe; NielsenIQ projects Whole Foods sales via panel data and other external sources. This means "Whole Foods sales" is a different number depending on which syndicator you ask.
2. The natural and specialty channel (Sprouts, Natural Grocers, independent natural co-ops, specialty retailers) is entirely absent from MULO.
3. E-commerce, convenience, and regional independents outside the covered chains are also absent.

For a wellness brand whose business runs through natural retailers, a standard MULO read can show a small, slow-growing number that bears no resemblance to the actual business. This is why pure MULO data is the wrong lens for natural-channel brands — the data isn't wrong, it's just not measuring where the brand sells.

What MULO+ adds to standard SPINS MULO coverage

MULO+ is SPINS' extension of standard MULO. The composition is explicit:

MULO+ = SNE (Specialty/Natural Enhanced) + MULO (powered by IRI / Circana)

The natural side (SNE) covers SPINS' own Natural Enhanced channel — roughly 1,800 full-format stores with $2M+ in annual sales and ≥40% of UPC-coded sales from natural/organic/specialty products. The conventional side (MULO) is delivered through SPINS' partnership with Circana, which licenses the underlying conventional data.

What MULO+ does not directly add is Whole Foods. Because Whole Foods doesn't report to SPINS or to the IRI/Circana scanner stream the way other grocers do, MULO+ does not give you a clean Whole Foods read. Brands that need Whole Foods accuracy layer in Circana direct-grocery coverage or NielsenIQ panel projections separately.

When to use MULO vs. MULO+ vs. Natural

A practical decision rule:

• Pure MULO: brand's business is entirely in conventional grocery / drug / mass / club / dollar. No natural channel exposure. Reading MULO via Circana gives the cleanest comparable number against major-brand peers.
• MULO+: brand's business spans conventional and natural — most emerging health-and-wellness brands sit here. MULO+ is the right default summary metric, with the caveat that Whole Foods isn't cleanly inside it.
• Natural channel only: brand's business is concentrated in natural and specialty (typical for early-stage wellness brands). The Natural channel cut is the right primary read.

A common pattern: emerging brands start with Natural-only, graduate to MULO+ as conventional retailers pick them up, and eventually report MULO numbers alongside MULO+ as conventional becomes the larger share.

A worked example: reading the MULO number in a board deck

A functional beverage brand has annual revenue of approximately $18M. Their SPINS data breaks out as follows for the trailing 52 weeks:

The board deck wants a single number. Options:

• "$16M in MULO+" — covers 89% of the business and is the industry-standard broad-channel summary. Correct but undercounts Whole Foods.
• "$9.2M in Natural Channel" — accurate for the natural surface but ignores 49% of the business. Misleads any board member who knows the brand is in Kroger and Target.
• "$18M total" — needs a footnote that the Whole Foods estimate comes from Circana, not SPINS, and that $2M is the brand's internal estimate from Whole Foods sell-through data.

The right answer for a board deck is MULO+ as the primary number with a footnote that Whole Foods adds an estimated additional ~$2M outside the MULO+ panel. This is honest about the data seams and avoids the trap of either overclaiming (counting Whole Foods inside MULO+ when it's not really there) or underclaiming (ignoring Whole Foods entirely).

Where MULO/MULO+ get misused

1. Apples-to-oranges across syndicators. Circana's MULO, NielsenIQ's xAOC (their analogous broad-channel cut), and SPINS' MULO+ are not exactly the same universe. A brand reporting "MULO sales up 8%" using Circana data is not directly comparable to a peer reporting MULO+ sales using SPINS data — the denominator and the included retailer list differ. Whole Foods alone explains a chunk of the difference (in Circana's MULO, absent from SPINS' MULO+).

If a competitor uses Circana MULO and your brand uses SPINS MULO+, the share-of-market comparison will be skewed. The Circana universe is larger (includes Whole Foods); the SPINS universe is deeper on natural attributes. Neither is wrong — they're just different measurement surfaces.

2. Treating MULO+ as "all retail." It isn't. MULO+ excludes e-commerce (mostly), pure convenience-store retail, regional grocery chains that don't license POS, Costco, and the long tail of independent specialty retailers below SPINS' coverage threshold. For brands with significant DTC, Amazon, or Costco revenue, the MULO+ number can understate total business by a wide margin.

A natural pet-food brand with strong Chewy.com and Amazon sales can easily have 20–30% of total revenue outside MULO+. When the board asks "how big is the category," the MULO+ number answers a different question than "how big is the category including digital." Being explicit about what's inside and outside the measurement surface is table stakes for any category-level analysis.

The MULO evolution: IRI, Circana, and what changed

MULO as a channel definition originated with IRI. When IRI and NPD Group merged in August 2022 to form Circana, the underlying MULO data and methodology didn't change immediately — Circana maintained backward compatibility for existing customers. SPINS' MULO+ still uses the Circana conventional-data layer through the same underlying partnership.

What did change: Circana's product naming and portal interface. If you're looking at historical SPINS MULO+ data and trying to reconcile it with Circana reports, the definition of "MULO" should be consistent across the transition, but confirm with your SPINS rep if you're doing multi-year comparisons that span the August 2022 merger date. Some category definitions and retailer inclusions were updated alongside the branding transition.

The Costco gap inside MULO and MULO+

Costco is the highest-profile retailer that sits entirely outside the syndicated measurement surface. Despite being included in the "club" channel definition that MULO covers conceptually, Costco doesn't license its scanner data to any of the three major syndicators. The practical implication: MULO numbers exclude Costco entirely, even when the brand has Costco distribution.

For wellness and natural brands, Costco can be a meaningful 10–25% of total revenue once a brand graduates into club. A board deck that reports "$16M in MULO+" for a brand doing $3M at Costco is materially understating the business — and unlike the Whole Foods gap (which Circana partially closes via its grocery coverage), there is no syndicated proxy for Costco. Costco's own sell-through reports to suppliers, available through Costco's buyer-facing systems, are the only source of weekly Costco sales data for a brand.

The same gap applies, at smaller scale, to:

• Trader Joe's — never licensed scanner data; categorized inside MULO conceptually but invisible in any syndicated measurement.
• ALDI — similar policy historically; recent reports suggest some limited data partnerships are emerging, but coverage remains thin enough that ALDI revenue is best treated as outside MULO for planning purposes.
• Most regional independents and the long tail of mom-and-pop retail — too small per-store to license individually, and absent from MULO even when collectively they represent meaningful category share in specific markets.

When sizing total brand revenue against MULO+, the rule of thumb is to assume 5–20% of true brand revenue sits outside the measurement surface — more for brands strong in Costco, Trader Joe's, regional chains, or DTC; less for brands concentrated in the conventional mainstream. A brand doing $40M total may report $33M in MULO+ and have the $7M gap mostly in Costco and Amazon — which is a diagnostic, not a problem, as long as the board deck names the gap.

Doing this in Scout

Scout reports against the channel cuts present in your SPINS extracts — the same Natural / MULO / MULO+ slices SPINS publishes — in one analytical surface, so the choice of denominator is explicit in the dashboard rather than buried in the report's defaults. For brands genuinely spanning channels, this avoids the "which number do I show the board" confusion that comes from having three valid answers in three different files. The board deck question — "what's our MULO+ total" — is a read, not a derivation.

Summary + further reading

• MULO is the conventional grocery + drug + mass + club + dollar aggregate, an industry-standard cut originally defined by IRI/Circana.
• MULO+ is SPINS' extension that adds the SNE (Specialty/Natural Enhanced) channel onto MULO, with the conventional side powered by Circana data.
• Whole Foods sits outside SPINS coverage entirely; for Whole Foods reads, brands layer in Circana or NielsenIQ panel projections.
• Cross-syndicator MULO comparisons (Circana MULO vs. SPINS MULO+) aren't directly apples-to-apples — denominator and retailer-list differences matter, especially for Whole Foods.

Related: What is SPINS data? · Syndicated vs. panel data