2022-Manufacturing-Startups-Spoiler-Alert

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Emily Malina. I'm a graduate of the MBA program at MIT, so great to be back on campus. I'm also co-founder and President of Spoiler Alert.

We focus on eliminating waste within the food, beverage, and consumer goods industries. We do that by partnering with manufacturers to manage excess inventory and help them more effectively sell it to value channel customers and non-profit organizations.

Why we do this is because excess is inevitable. If the last two years have taught us anything, it's that demand planning and forecasting are hard. On top of that, products are discontinued, seasons and packaging change, supply chain teams are left holding the bag with excess short dated and obsolete inventory. Of course, when there's excess the goal is to sell as much of it as possible. Common strategies are discounting, promotions, liquidation. When done well, inventory is moved quickly and discounts are minimized.

The reality is, within large manufacturing organizations there are a lot of stakeholders that are involved in this process, from sales and supply chain to finance and fulfillment. We find manual interventions, approval processes, and legacy systems slow things down. Slow moving inventory has a number of consequences, especially when we're talking about perishable inventory. It impacts the price at which it can be sold, as well as the ability to sell that inventory at all. This results in some pretty shocking industry stats.

Within large food and beverage manufacturers, less than half of distressed in excess inventory ends up being sold, and that which is sold is transacted well below cost of goods. Enter Spoiler Alert, we are the industry operating system for B2B liquidation sales. We work with large global brands, Kraft-Heinz, Nestle, Mondelez, Campbell's, and help them to more effectively sell this excess inventory into the value channel. For the brands, this is helping them sell inventory faster at greater value and greater volume, and for their retail partners this means more shelf life, earlier access to inventory, and a better customer experience.

How we do this is by introducing a number of workflow automation tools that our customers love. We eliminate a lot of the manual steps from the end-to-end process from identifying this distressed inventory, straight through order generation. And we introduce intelligence where it matters, such as setting pricing as well as optimizing freight.

To boil it down from a tech standpoint there's three key steps to the process. First is that manufacturers are able to automatically flag distressed inventory and send it to Spoiler Alert, indicating which customers are able to access which products. Second, buyers are able to determine the optimal assortment for their purchases, identifying the products they want, the quantity, and at what price. And the third, which is where the magic happens, is that supply chain teams within manufacturing organizations are able to determine the optimal allocation of that excess inventory from a profitability standpoint, a freight standpoint, and also a customer relationship standpoint.

So that's how it works, what's the impact? Well the 75% decrease in the time to market is a lot of what makes. This possible by eliminating a lot of the delays in identifying this inventory and flagging it for customers, the brands that we work with are able to sell significantly more of this excess inventory than prior to working with Spoiler Alert. You'll see here an average of 50% increase in the revenue generated from these types of programs.

And to make this a little bit more real, a snapshot of our latest case study with Danone. They're one of the largest food and beverage manufacturers in the world. They specialize in dairy and other highly perishable plant-based products. And relative to before working with Spoiler Alert, they were able to decrease the time spent on these types of sales by close to 70% and increase sell through by 33%. They increase the engagement with their existing customer base. They supplemented that with additional channels to expand distribution, and ultimately send a lot less product to landfill. Now Danone is a certified B Corp. They have, like many of their peers, public zero-waste commitments, so this has become a core part of their operations and mission critical for their supply chain team.

We at Spoiler Alert, also a mission-oriented company. This is why we love doing what we do. We have a lot of other case studies on our website about our work with Kraft-Heinz, Campbell's Soup, and others, definitely recommend you check them out. And in terms of what we're looking for, always eager to start conversations with additional manufacturers within food and beverage consumer goods. We'd love to have the opportunity to speak with you later today. Thank you.