The Challenge
Lack of Clear Site Selection Strategy Despite Success
Our client is an established and trusted grocery chain, with almost 200 locations nationwide. Despite their long history and success in the industry, their growth had always been organic and thus they had never implemented a clear site selection strategy.
As a result, their stores exist across a wide spectrum of locales: busy downtowns, sparse suburbs, free-standing buildings, strip malls, and all manners of demographic makeups.
They had worked with other technology companies in the past but the models those consultants produced failed due to how vastly different the store locations were from each other in sales performance, customer profiles, regional population density, and many other variables.
The organic nature of their expansion seemed to break all of the conventional ways of modeling sites and predicting revenue.
But what past consultants saw as an insurmountable problem, the Yuzu team saw as a possible advantage.
The Opportunity
Leverage Past Growth to Guide Future Expansion
Seeking to refine their site selection approach moving forward, the health food chain consulted with our team at YuzuData and we quickly realized there was immense untapped value in these seemingly scattered stores.
Each location represented a real-world experiment into performance across drastically different site types.
The Solution
Uncover Optimal Sites through Geospatial Analytics
Leveraging robust geospatial data and machine learning algorithms, our team set out to uncover actionable insights hidden within decades of organic expansion. We integrated over 300 distinct spatial features, customer profiles, foot traffic patterns, drive time calculations, and other key location factors for every single store. Applying machine learning clustering techniques, we categorized their nearly 200 stores into groups of similar locations based on these attributes.
Armed with these category profiles, our client gained concrete perspective into which types of areas, settings, and conditions have historically delivered success for their business.
These analytics reports provided optimal site selection guidance rooted in tangible evidence from their own operations, rather than theoretical models or assumptions.
As the engagement progressed, the health food chain asked us to build functionality enabling any proposed location to be instantly benchmarked against existing stores. Thus we built a solution that allowed end-users to input a prospective address and receive an automated analysis of the five most comparable current locations. This capability delivers an invaluable head start in evaluating new real estate based on hard-earned knowledge.
The Outcome
Data-Driven Expansion Fueled by Past Experiments
Through bespoke geospatial analytics, we empowered this trusted health food brand to make data-driven site selection decisions aligned with their own unique DNA and history.
The insights we uncovered and system we built provide an enduring competitive advantage for strategic expansion moving forward.
Their hard-earned understanding of sites from decades of organic expansion now fuels targeted and profitable growth in the future.