Ask HN: Working with CPG Retail Data
Over the past several years I’ve worked at a mid-size company and moved from a basic analyst role to wearing several data hats. Mostly taking on data engineering and business intelligence tasks. The hot thing right now is Power BI reporting, so I build out data pipelines, create data models, and design Power BI reports. This has lead to a lot of career success at my company, but lately I’ve been more and more frustrated by the seemingly antiquated data practices in the CPG industry.
My company is a bit unique in that we are not a single retailer or manufacturer. We work with CPG brands and retailers across the entire country. This means we rely heavily on syndicated retail data from providers like Circana (merger between IRI and The NPD Group) and NielsenIQ (NIQ). They get retail scan data from almost every CPG retailer in the country. Except some retailers are exclusive to one platform, so you’ll never have a complete picture without both.
However, Circana and NIQ do not make it easy to extract what I consider medium-size data. Everything is a portal with data presented across various “dashboards” and rudimentary no-code report creator web apps. The minute you ask about an API or data transfer service they wonder why you would ever want to leave their platform. And when you do convince your company to purchase large data extract access or similar (why do we need that when we have “analysts” who can extract hundreds of small data pieces through the web portal?), you find out it’s incredibly fragile, inflexible, slow, and unreliable. The pricing for access is never transparent either.
In some cases, I can access a retailers’ data directly (for the manufacturers my company works with) though their web portal and reverse engineer an API. But that’s typically a limited data set and more supply chain focused.
Has anyone developed a successful data strategy in the CPG realm? Is there an opportunity here to solve these problems? Are these normal problems in tech/other industries?