Technomic Drives 7x Cost Savings With GoodData

Partnering with GoodData to ignite customer decision-making

Technomic delivers on their customers’ need for customizable, adaptable data analytics. By working with GoodData to tailor their Ignite offering, they’ve helped customers make better, faster decisions and access critical market insights during a tumultuous past year.

Bernadette Noone serves as VP for Technomic and oversees the company’s online platforms to drive increased value to customers, among other strategic responsibilities. The organization has a 55 years reputation of expertise in providing leading foodservice customers with key research, insights, and strategic consulting support to drive decision-making and bottom-line results. Today their customers include a diverse range of both food and beverage suppliers as well as restaurant operators.

In 2009, the team recognized a need for a new, data-centric product offering. The product, now called Ignite Consumer, would use Technomic’s unmatched consumer survey data to deliver brand metrics analytics to leading national restaurant operators. The potential for customer value was clear, but what was less clear was how to make it a reality. Like so many organizations looking to invest in business intelligence, one of the first critical decisions is buy or build.

“Our first step was to see if there was a platform out there that had everything we needed, or if we would have to build it custom,” Noone said. To determine this, Noone and the Technomic team wrote out a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves. This included the ability to have their customers create their own custom dashboards. Another necessity was ease-of-use. It had to be simple enough for Technomic’s product team to quickly adjust and tailor analytics for their clients instead of requiring a technical team for management.

“Based on that, we looked at multiple options, and GoodData met that criteria in both of those instances and, of course, offered much more beyond that in terms of what we were looking for,” Noone said. “We ultimately decided GoodData was the best partner and that working together made more sense than building it on our own.”

Importantly, this decision also came with massive cost savings. According to Noone, building in-house would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and would result in fewer capabilities.

In the end, partnering with GoodData came with 7x cost savings compared to building inhouse and a wider range of capabilities.

Bringing consumer insights to life with business intelligence

In 2017, Technomic introduced Ignite to the world, designed to give foodservice customers 360-degree visibility into the micro and macro trends shaping their industry. The platform includes industry and financial insight, menu trends, and consumer brand tracking.

GoodData is a part of what powers the Ignite Consumer product, which tracks more than 60 different consumer attributes and behaviors to provide accurate, up-to-date benchmarking of guest satisfaction, restaurant operator performance, and more. Technomic’s customers can tap into the product to make better, more informed decisions about their brand strategy.

Early on, customers were eager to customize the data offering for their needs. GoodData’s easy-to-use interface made it possible for Technomic’s product team to react quickly to these requests and ensure every user got the most value out of the offering.

“It was a brand new product at the time, so we were always learning about how the customers really wanted to utilize it and what would make it most valuable for them,” Noone said. “The ability for people on my team who are not developers and engineers to be able to manipulate, add data, create additional dashboards … that allowed us to make updates really fast in response to customer needs.”

With Ignite Consumer, restaurant operators are able to tap into GoodData-powered analytics to better understand their brand performance over time as well as compared to competitors. This includes valuable insight into how their brand ranks against competitors by region and other attributes like service, atmosphere, value, convenience, and more.

Managing capacity and forecasting demand during COVID-19

The global pandemic impacted the US in earnest at the end of Q1 2020, and foodservice was one of the industries hit hardest. Suppliers and restaurant operators innovated quickly to not just weather the storm, but also to meet consumer needs in a whole new way. Data played a major role for many brands.

According to Noone, the company saw a “big uptick” in customer demand for regional, marketlevel data as opposed to national data. Technomic’s team quickly adapted to deliver the regionspecific data customers requested. “It’s all very market-based and extremely local in terms of what our customers are able to do for restaurant capacity because of government restrictions,” Noone said.

Looking ahead, Technomic’s team sees continued potential for providing more granular data to clients to expand their brand insights offering and roll out new customer insights faster and more often.

“We have some data within surveys that we’ve been underutilizing,” Noone said. “We’re planning to build those out with additional analytics elements, such as [customer order information].”

“We’re also focused on publishing data more quickly for clients even when it might not be the full sample. We want to determine how to give more frequent updates and deliver data value ongoing,” Noone added.