Ahold USA thus becomes the latest food retailer to focus on exploiting the vast reservoir of data at its disposal.

"We were data-rich but data-underutilized," said Tim Rohrbaugh. "So we are moving to leverage the data and analytics to improve execution from vendor to consumer."

Ahold USA will transfer more than 51 data feeds to suppliers via Retail Solutions Inc., Mountain View, Calif. All 773 Ahold USA stores "” which operate under the Stop & Shop, Giant-Landover, Giant-Carlisle and Martin's banners "” will participate in the initiative. Rohrbaugh declined to name specific vendors, or the total number, participating in the program.

Rohrbaugh described a three-stage rollout of the vendor collaboration initiative. In the initial "crawl" stage, Ahold USA will begin to develop collaborative forecasting with vendors and "utilize quick hits to increase the adoption rate," he said. Next, the retailer will implement collaborative forecasting and pursue assortment clustering, shelf optimization and flow optimization. In stage three, "we want to leverage our shared asset base and enable optimization across the whole value chain."

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