Crisp: Solving food waste one ‘byte’ at a time with Google Cloud
About Crisp
Crisp connects and analyzes retail data across the supply chain to empower brands, distributors, and retailers with real-time, actionable insights that keep shelves stocked, reduce waste, and increase profitability. Crisp works with more than 300 brands and is on a mission to solve global food waste with better data.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usGoogle Cloud helps Crisp focus on solving food waste by making it easy to scale, serve, and understand what’s happening in the food supply chain.
Google Cloud results
- Saves customers hours every week from extracting and analyzing data with customized dashboards on Looker
- A robust analytics pipeline accurately indicates product inventory in real-time, supporting smarter marketing investments and supply chain efficiency
- Easily scales and expands data capabilities to accommodate new customers without requiring infrastructure and process changes
Data extraction goes from months to minutes
If you’ve ever gone to a store and found the shelf empty of a product you wanted, or if you have seen an overabundance of a particular product in-store, then you're already familiar with supply chain challenges. Crisp is on a mission to solve this with a particular interest in reducing food waste. The company helps retailers, distributors, and manufacturers to share supply chain data with each other so their businesses can run more effectively. In the food supply chain, increased efficiency means reduced food waste and fresher products.
Crisp helps customers identify where waste is and supports them by addressing it in a data-driven way, because many retailers cannot accurately detect their stock. For example, a retailer's inventory system may say a certain number of cases of olive oil exist but, actually, one of the cases was dropped during delivery and several bottles shattered so the accurate number is less than that listed by the inventory system.
"We chose Google Cloud as our cloud provider before we even started building anything. We knew what we wanted to do and it was easy for us to figure out the de-facto way to do that on Google Cloud."
—Dag Liodden, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, CrispMany inventory systems are unable to detect those sorts of anomalies because they aren't able to track real-time data. Some stores also use a manual inventory process with spreadsheets, which is labor-intensive and not scalable. Others have custom-built systems that are unable to integrate with other systems.
Crisp solves these inventory challenges by providing an automation layer that is up-to-date, integrates various data inputs, and uses AI to analyze data to drive better outcomes, not only for retailers, but also for distributors and manufacturers.
To accomplish this, Crisp needs a reliable, consistent, easy-to-use solution capable of handling large amounts of data from various locations, which is exactly what it found in Google Cloud. "We chose Google Cloud as our cloud provider before we even started building anything. We knew what we wanted to do and it was easy for us to figure out the de-facto way to do that on Google Cloud," says Dag Liodden, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Crisp.
Reducing data processing time with Google Kubernetes Engine
When Liodden and his co-founder Are Traasdahl were starting Crisp, they knew they wanted ease of use, and weren't interested in a gigantic application running on a virtual machine. They wanted a cluster of machines to be unified into a single pool of computing resources. So they chose Google Kubernetes Engine and now Crisp can shorten the time required to process data for its customers. Typically, the timeline needed to kickoff a custom data pipeline project could take up to 18 months. This entails planning, standing up a team, assessing technologies, building and deploying. Now, an extract, transform, load (ETL) process where data is inserted into an output data container is done in literally minutes with cloud-native data sharing.
Google Kubernetes Engine has also given Crisp the ability to provide developers with test environments. If a front-end developer wants to work on the user experience, they don't have to run any other services on their laptop. They can use just the code they're working on and not interfere with any other developers' projects. The developers each have their own copy of Crisp's entire infrastructure running in Google Kubernetes Engine that they can spin up or down as needed.
Managing large amounts of data with BigQuery
Crisp works with 300 brands and more than 1,000 data pipelines. To handle all that data, BigQuery is Crisp's preferred data warehouse solution. "BigQuery is an incredibly robust and mature solution that addresses many of our needs. It's an amazing enabler for its data processing volumes and also all the capabilities that it supports. It's the heart of our data platform," Liodden says.
Because of its computing capacity, Crisp saves its customers hours every week they would otherwise spend on finding, pulling, cleaning, and visualizing data. For example, with the ability to easily integrate disparate data sources through Crisp into BigQuery, Hormel Foods now has full visibility into what is happening at the physical shelf in real-time, using data to inform its retail customers about potential out-of-stock issues and aid in the reduction of food waste.
BigQuery allows Crisp to become almost infinitely scalable because the solution accommodates anything from trivial to significant amounts of data without requiring Crisp to change its technology stack. In other words: Crisp has grown from zero to having more than 300 customers in a few years without requiring any significant changes to its infrastructure or the way it manages data.
Crisp uses Looker to programmatically create and deploy new analytics as well as visualizations into its platform. Crisp customers are able to view Looker's customized dashboards and make actionable decisions about their inventory. Data warehouses are specific to each individual customer and Crisp decides which datasets will be used by Looker for rendering and providing visualization based on each user. "The Looker templating engine makes it very easy to apply sophisticated authorization logic on the fly," says Liodden.
"BigQuery is an incredibly robust and mature solution that addresses many of our needs. It’s an amazing enabler for its data processing volumes and also all the capabilities that it supports. It's the heart of our data platform."
—Dag Liodden, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, CrispSupporting digital marketing with actionable data
Crisp is adding more data sources to its platform, which helps its customers receive a deeper and more complete picture of all the supply chain aspects that affect their business. In doing so, Crisp is helping its customers optimize the running of their operations and their digital marketing.
Supply chain data is influencing where Crisp's customers spend their media dollars so if there's too much of a certain product, a retailer will run ads promoting its sale. And if inventory is running low, the retailer can redirect shoppers to a similar product instead. For example, one brand with an annual revenue of $31M saw an improved profit margin of $181,000 within months of using Crisp.
Crisp is not only supporting its customers but also helping smooth out supply chain management to avoid disruptive issues for end users by creating more demand when there’s a surplus, and reducing demand when there's product scarcity.
"Sustained change can only happen if there is also a financial benefit for our customers. Lost sales because of out-of-stock situations or waste due to over-stock means lost profit," Liodden says. "If our customers succeed, then together we also contribute to solving the world's food waste problems. Google Cloud enables us to act on our company’s mission and we’re excited for what the future will bring."
"If our customers succeed, then together we also contribute to solving the world’s food waste problems. Google Cloud enables us to act on our company’s mission and we’re excited for what the future will bring."
—Dag Liodden, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, CrispTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Crisp
Crisp connects and analyzes retail data across the supply chain to empower brands, distributors, and retailers with real-time, actionable insights that keep shelves stocked, reduce waste, and increase profitability. Crisp works with more than 300 brands and is on a mission to solve global food waste with better data.