Intercept - ~5% revenue back for CPG companies

tl;dr: Intercept helps retail brands organize and auto-dispute invalid retailer fees, recouping ~5% of revenue. We consolidate these fees across various retailer portals and emails, flag the ones that should be investigated, and automate the manual processes associated with disputing them.

The Problem

A retail brand typically experiences a reduction of about 15% in expected revenue due to fees from the retailer, and this figure can escalate to over 50% if the brand fails to effectively manage them. Examples of these fees include shipping damaged products, packing incorrect quantities, or arriving at the retailer late. However, many of these fees are invalid and are commonly investigated and disputed by teams within these companies. Disputing these fees is a highly manual, time-consuming, and opaque process, posing significant operational challenges for the brand.

The typical dispute process is done in 3 steps:

• Aggregate: The brand will aggregate and classify their deductions inside of a spreadsheet, often using a home-grown dictionary to make sense of each of the deduction codes.
• Investigate: any deductions that are high enough in value will be investigated. This often requires requesting more information via email from various parties.
• Dispute: file disputes with the retailer or distributor and keep following up (and following up, and following up, and following up) until it’s resolved.

The Solution

Intercept automates this process entirely. It ingests data from many different retailers and places it all in one platform, allowing the brand to:

• Visualize their fee data organized in one place. This includes fees from food distributors such as UNFI and KeHE, and retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Amazon
• Understand where (and why) they’re losing money with weekly insights
• Auto-dispute the invalid fees

Meet the team

Sasha started her career in the food industry analyzing McDonald’s shopper data before working in supply chain business intelligence at Wayfair. Jordan grew up raising and trading cattle in Idaho, then moved on to building software at Flexport and Waymo. We’re both passionate about food, supply chain, and supporting other entrepreneurs operating in the physical world.

Asks

• If you know any CPG brands, we’d love to chat with them - please intro them to us at founders@tryintercept.com.
• If you own or work at a CPG brand and you’d like to mitigate your deductions, book a call with us here.