Crisp’s Data Is Sweet for RxSugar

RxSugar produces natural, plant-based sweeteners and syrups that are on the shelves of more than 12,000 stores in all 50 states.

The Atlanta-based company, which was formed in 2019, hasn’t just taken off at physical retail locations; it’s offered through dozens of e-commerce channels, on TV’s QVC, and through partners like LifeTime Fitness, which uses its products in all of its cafes. And in March, it was featured on e-commerce membership platform Thrive Market’s Instagram Stories, which has more than 85,000 followers.

Company founder and CEO Steve Hanley has embraced an omnichannel strategy, but that means more data from disparate information sets. For consistent data, he knew he needed to organize all of his company’s channels into one coherent strategy.

RxSugar has relied on Crisp for the past few years to provide its retail data and analytics. Crisp’s cloud-based software ingests raw data from retailer and distributor portals and transforms it into clean, organized data ready for storage, modeling, and reporting. The data is presented in a dashboard, enabling companies like RxSugar to share it across departments to help manage sales and marketing activities, inventory levels, promotions, pricing, discounting, and category performance. Crisp’s outbound connectors feed that data into RxSugar’s business intelligence, CRM, planning tools, and other information systems.

“The big advantage that [Crisp] provides is going from a sea of data to data you can see,” Hanley says. “They’ve added new features—user interfaces and user experience components—and have added in new connectors.

“It’s important for us because we are only a five-person company,” Hanley continues. “We don’t have the people to leverage the data. But what we do have is the might of Crisp that allows us to synthesize all of these results from the nation’s largest providers, such as Walmart, Walgreen’s, Rite Aid, CVS, Publix, Albertson’s, Kroger, etc. Think about a small team being able to see the entire breadth of our sales.”

Hanley points out that Crisp’s sales data provides intelligence to help RxSugar further grow sales and reach. With the Crisp data, RxSugar can demonstrate the benefits of its allulose-based products to grocers/retailers looking to sell an alternative to sugar.

RxSugar first brought Crisp online in the second half of 2021, and that deployment led to significant growth in sales, store penetration, and product availability.

Since expanding with Crisp, RxSugar launched the RxSugar Organic Vanilla Syrup product line; expanded its presence at retailers and distributors like Hannaford, Walmart, Sprout’s, and UNFI; and increased sales at some locations by more than 100 percent.

“It’s almost like we get off cheap with their subscription fee,” Hanley says of Crisp. “I can see, for example, how maple syrup is performing [with customers] across multiple distributors, across multiple retailers, and then drill down by region, by store, or pricing. That’s better than speculating on how we’re doing with a particular SKU, with a particular retailer, in a particular region, or at a particular price point. It allows us a single dashboard to go in and have the full range of information. It provides the value of insight of what’s working and what’s not.”

As RxSugar grows, Hanley is looking to grow his company’s relationship with Crisp, adding more connectors and other capabilities. “Right now we are only using Crisp for a handful of certain paradigms,” he says.

The Payoff

Since expanding its relationships with Crisp, RxSugar has seen the following results: 

• sales at Sprouts have grown by more than 100 percent;
• sales at UNFI have grown by 104 percent; and
• sales at Walmart have grown by 60 percent.