Scout · For retailers
Scout for grocery, convenience & specialty retailers
Run your back office and your pricebook on Scout, or point it at the systems you already have. Either way you get category, pricing and store performance on your own POS rather than on a generic panel — plus custom engagements from the team that built it.
Brand-side CPG? See our CPG brand practice →
What the product does
Before the consulting, the software. Most retailers start here.
The back office itself
Scout can hold the pricebook and item file, reconcile distributor invoices against the cost on file, and carry inventory — across every store, not one at a time. Groups that already run PDI, Retail360 or CStoreOffice keep them and use Scout on top; groups tired of maintaining one item file per site move onto Scout instead.
One item file, many stores
The problem past a handful of sites is not maintaining the item file, it is working out which of them is right. Same item at three costs, retail that never followed a cost change, a pack size updated in four stores and missed in seven. Scout makes those visible instead of averaging them into a group margin number that is confidently wrong.
Category, pricing and store performance
Category and assortment reads on your own POS, price and margin analysis, promo lift, and store-to-store comparison by banner and region. Built on your transactions rather than a syndicated panel, which is why the numbers survive a buyer meeting.
Where it stops: Scout does not raise or transmit purchase orders, hold an order guide, or carry supplier EDI, and it does not schedule labour or publish planograms. Those stay in your purchasing, workforce and space-planning systems.
What Scout connects to
Your point of sale and back office, the distributors you buy from, and the panels you benchmark against — read together rather than one export at a time.
Back office and point of sale
PDI Technologies · Petrosoft Retail360 · CStoreOffice
The systems a store already runs on. Scout reads the item file, the invoice history and the register export, then works across every site at once — which is the view a single-store back office was never built to give. Where you would rather not run one at all, Scout can hold the item file itself. More on these sources.
Distributors and wholesalers
KeHE · UNFI · C&S
Order books, cost catalogs and shipment history, pulled on a schedule rather than downloaded by hand. Cost changes and pack-size changes land as events you can see, instead of as a surprise on an invoice. More on these sources.
Retailer portals
Walmart · Kroger 84.51 · Whole Foods · Target · Publix · Costco · Sprouts · Wegmans
Each portal ships its own reports, its own column names and its own definition of a week. Scout harmonizes them so a number means the same thing across all of them. More on these sources.
Syndicated panels
SPINS · NielsenIQ · Circana
Panel data alongside first-party numbers rather than instead of them, so a category read and your own sell-through sit in the same view. More on these sources.
Whatever you already have
Spreadsheets · CSV and Excel exports · ERP and accounting
The exports nobody has gotten around to automating yet. A spreadsheet is a first-class source in Scout, which matters because it is usually the only place some of the data exists.
The list keeps growing, and it is not a menu you are limited to. If your data comes out of a system that is not named here, that is a normal onboarding conversation rather than a blocker.
Where engagements typically focus
Starting points, not a menu. We scope to the question that actually matters to your team.
Vendor scorecards
Standardized performance reads on every supplier: sell-through, on-shelf availability, promo ROI, trade-funded vs unfunded growth. The conversation buyers want to have, with the numbers ready.
Category performance across banners
Sliceable views of category, sub-category, and segment performance by banner, region, store cluster, and time. Find the winners worth replicating and the laggards worth a hard look before the next reset.
Promo effectiveness from the buy side
Was the trade-funded promo actually incremental, or were you paying for purchases that would have happened anyway? Separate true lift from baseline, retention from one-time loading, and price-pack from headline-promo.
Basket & cross-merch analysis
Which items co-purchase, which sections lift each other, and where end-cap placements are actually moving the basket. Built on your loyalty and POS data, not generic syndicated panels.
How we engage
Three shapes, depending on where you are.
2–4 weeks · custom-scoped
AI Strategy Audit
Map your category-management stack, surface the highest-leverage AI opportunities, and deliver a prioritized roadmap. Audit pays for itself in clarity even if the build never starts.
4–10 weeks · custom-scoped
Custom Analytics Build
Design and ship the workflow the audit identified: vendor scorecard automation, category dashboards, or promo effectiveness models. Built on Scout against your POS, loyalty, and supplier data.
Ongoing · custom-scoped
Embedded Data Team
Embedded analyst + engineer pod that runs as an extension of your category and merchandising teams. Ad-hoc analyses, line-review prep, and the buildouts that never make it off the someday list.
Why work with us
Retail-native, not a generic AI shop
We've built Scout against the data that actually runs grocery and convenience. We speak basket-level loyalty, ACV, NACS categories, syndicated panels, and we know which questions a category manager actually asks at the start of a planogram review or a c-store reset.
Working software, not slideware
Every engagement ships something operable: a vendor scorecard, a category dashboard, a promo evaluator. The kind of work your team actually uses on Monday morning. We don't deliver a deck and disappear.
Your data, your IP
Engagements ship on Scout with documentation and a handoff session. Your analysts can extend, modify, or rebuild anything we deliver. We don't lock work behind opaque IP.
What customers say
Less time wrangling, more time deciding
“Scout cut our category review prep time significantly and armed us with competitive insights that would not have been surfaced in our standard data review process.”
Director of Sales· Heirloom Coffee Roasters“This has shown me so many things about my stores I did not know before. Stocking a few products that were selling well in some locations and not carried at all in others has lifted our revenue by more than 2%.”
Owner, regional grocery retailer “We used to spend the week before every category review pulling numbers by hand. Now most of the deck is written before we sit down.”
Category manager, natural foods brand “I asked a question the way I would ask a person, and got the answer with the rows behind it. My team stopped waiting on me to run reports.”
VP of Sales, snack brand
Tell us what you’re working on
A 30-minute conversation to scope fit. Pick a time that works for you.