25 Feb How CarrefourSA Benefited from Implementing Trusty

Summary

This case study addresses the challenges our customer CarrefourSA (Carrefour Turkey) faced and how using Trusty helped them overcome these challenges.

CarrefourSA is one of the largest retail chains in Turkey. During 2020, CarrefourSA has heavily invested in supporting and inspecting local producers to provide sustainable, safe, high-quality, and fresh locally produced fruits and vegetables to its customers under its private label brand.

By implementing Trusty, CarrefourSA managed to prove and promote the qualities of its private label products, improved its pioneering innovator image, attracted nationwide attention, and achieved over a 6% increase in their fresh fruit & vegetables category sales.

Challenge

With over 750 stores, CarrefourSA is one of the largest grocery retail chains in Turkey. CarrefourSA is widely popular among consumers for its focus on providing high-quality products at affordable prices. However, the company’s revenues significantly decreased in 2020 because of the effects of the global pandemic, the shift in consumer behavior towards online grocer shopping, and the shift in shoppers’ choices towards discounters due to the country’s worsening economic situation.

CarrefourSA took some countermeasure to preserve its position in the market. Firstly, they invested in online deliveries to adapt to the new consumer habit. However, it still needed to differentiate from the already successful online grocery delivery companies. Moreover, its other physical store-based competitors were also improving their value propositions, further increasing the competition.

CarrefourSA started its own campaigns to differentiate. Their first campaign was “Dogrusu CarrefourSA’da” (Right Choice at CarrefourSA) to procure high-quality, fresh, safe, and sustainably sourced products from responsible local producers and deliver them to consumers under its private label brand at affordable prices. To make this possible, CarrefourSA collaborated with government bodies on supporting farmers with high-quality locally produced seeds and inspecting all processes to ensure compliance to the highest standards.

CarrefourSA needed a food transparency solution to facilitate and expedite the inspections as well as to prove and promote their superior processes and product quality to the consumers to boost the benefits it will receive from this campaign.

Solution

Trusty by ForFarming is a platform that transforms data from production and procurement processes of fresh produce into beautiful consumer-facing communications. It proves the quality, safety, sustainability, and freshness of products to consumers; and helps retailers engage their customers, earn their trust, and increase brand value.

CarrefourSA directly works with many small-scale producers for their private-label products. CarrefourSA and ForFarming started this project by implementing transparency infrastructure to some of these small-scale producers that produce premium fruits and vegetables and registering them on Trusty.  Meanwhile, ForFarming and CarrefourSA identified unique steps to record and display to consumers from each operation for all products within the project scope and ForFarming designed customized landing pages for CarrefourSA. Afterward, CarrefourSA delegated an employee to oversee the producers utilizing Trusty, and ForFarming assisted CarrefourSA employees, decision-makers, and the producers with onboarding. After all, parties are onboarded, the producers started to log their operations on Trusty inspected by CarrefourSA employees. Finally, when all processes are complete, CarrefourSA employees checked the consumer landing pages and printed the respective QR codes for each batch after packaging. ForFarming provided 7/24 support to all parties. CarrefourSA customers were able to scan these QR codes before and after purchasing to view how, where, and by whom each batch was produced.  CarrefourSA further utilized food transparency by marketing the transparent products as premium, and strategically allocating the placement of those products in isles to increase their sales in other premium products too.

Results

By using Trusty, CarrefourSA proved and promoted its investments in sustainable sourcing and supporting local producers. This strengthened CarrefourSA’s image as a brand that benefits local farmers and the national economy, cares about the wellbeing of its customers, is responsible and sustainable. CarrefourSA also managed to justify higher prices for its private label products by providing food transparency as an additional value proposition and boosting the sales of its other premium-priced products due to isle placement.

Within a few months of application, CarrefourSA has seen a large benefit in terms of brand image, media coverage, and sales in the fruit and vegetable category, and decided to expand the scale of the project to most of their private label fresh fruit and vegetable products. At the end of the first year, CarrefourSA managed to improve the total revenue from their fruits & vegetables category by over 6%. CarrefourSA also received several awards for this initiative including Altın Yaka, the internal best practices award of CarrefourSA’s parent company, Sabancı Holding, as well as the Sustainable Business Awards in Turkey.