About Sainsbury's
Sainsbury’s is one of the UK’s largest and longest-established retailers, serving millions of customers through over 1,400 stores nationwide. As the second-largest supermarket chain in the UK, Sainsbury’s operates across multiple categories including fresh food, grocery, household goods, baby products, and pet supplies, with a significant focus on own-brand products and sustainable sourcing practices.
With significant commodity exposures across the supply chain, Sainsbury’s faces complex challenges in managing price volatility and ensuring competitive pricing for customers while maintaining strong, collaborative supplier relationships. The company’s commitment to sustainability and ethical sourcing adds additional layers of complexity to their procurement strategy.
Challenges
Sainsbury’s commodity team faced mounting pressure as volatile markets collided with limited data usability:
- Hard-to-digest insight from their previous provider slowed action and required constant translation.
- For colleagues without a deep commodity background, it can be challenging to identify which signals are most relevant and where to access them
- A largely reactive procurement approach, operating as a “price taker.”
- Communication bottlenecks as the commodity team had to contextualise data before anyone could act.
The Impact
These challenges were limiting the commodity team’s ability to optimize their sourcing strategy:
- Slower decision-making processes in supplier negotiations
- Missing opportunities to capture market deflation in real-time
- Weaker position when challenging suppliers on pricing
- Commodity expertise tied up explaining data instead of driving strategy.
- Difficulty embedding commodity management to certain buying areas.
Citrus signals: Making sense of a surging market
Expana didn’t just make existing categories clearer, it unlocked new ones.
When Sainsbury’s identified orange juice, a significant and fast-moving category of exposure, no one in the team had a background in it. Yet using Expana, the team could immediately explain the price spike: a citrus disease outbreak in Brazil.
“Expana added valuable context behind the price movements, helping us understand the drivers more quickly and confidently”
The platform turned the team from specialists in a few commodities to capability-builders across many. And critically, it helped prevent potential cost risk.
Solution
- Expana provided Sainsbury’s with an enhancement in how existing capabilities are accessed and applied:
- A far more intuitive and user-friendly interface, delivering easily digestible insight that both specialists and non-experts can use immediately.
- It is possible to use the platform almost immediately without background experience of the commodity team.
- Streamlined access to raw data and APIs, enabling the team to build bespoke models for different categories more efficiently.
- Clear, accessible market analysis and commentary, improving the usability of insights that were previously available but less easy to work with.
- A genuinely collaborative partnership – from custom pricing ingestion to direct analyst access.
Quantifiable Results
- Delivered significant cost efficiencies in recent raw material negotiations, outperforming market benchmarks year-to-date in various commodity areas.
- Faster decision cycles: “Definitely faster than we would have been able to do this previously.”
- Expanded capability into new categories such as orange juice – a major exposure previously lacking internal expertise.
Overcoming data accessibility challenges
Sainsbury’s commodity team faced a significant challenge in communicating market insights across the organization. The team struggled to provide clear, actionable information that stakeholders could easily understand and act upon.
“Getting clear and concise information across to stakeholders was our biggest challenge,” explains Duncan Murray, Commodity Manager at Sainsbury’s. “Our buyers manage a wide range of priorities, so I aim to provide commodity insights in a way that makes it easy to identify what’s most relevant.”
The situation was further complicated by their previous data providers, which delivered similar information but in a format that was difficult to digest and required extensive translation before it could be shared with buying teams.
Transforming data usability and decision-making
With Expana, Sainsbury’s has strengthened its approach to commodity risk management, adding speed and clarity to decision-making. The platform’s intuitive design streamlines data interpretation, allowing the team to focus on strategic actions rather than manual analysis.
“The biggest advantage of Expana is its usability – the data is clear, accessible, and easy to work with,” Murray explains. “It’s designed so that even those without deep commodity expertise can navigate it effectively, while our team leverages its full potential for advanced insights.”
This accessibility has proven valuable beyond the commodity team. Colleagues in strategic sourcing can quickly identify pressure points on ingredients and commodities, supporting informed conversations and collaborative planning.
Image source: Sainsbury’s
Driving proactive supplier relationships
A key advantage has been the alignment between Sainsbury’s and their suppliers around common data sources. Many suppliers also use Expana, creating a shared foundation for negotiations and enabling more collaborative partnerships.
“We can reference the same benchmark prices, making negotiations much more collaborative,” Murray explains. “It’s helping us foster a more collaborative, partnership-driven approach with many of our suppliers.”
Image source: Sainsbury’s
Business impact
The transformation has delivered measurable results across Sainsbury’s commodity portfolio. Through continuous strategic buying and proactive risk management across the commodity landscape, we’ve delivered significant cost efficiencies, achieving results ahead of market benchmarks year-to-date in a number of commodity areas.
This isn’t just better data – it’s measurable commercial value.
Beyond the measurable wins, the platform has also shifted how the commodity team defines success. Without formal P&L, the team is actively shaping new ways to measure their impact – from improving processes, to expanding exposures under management.
“Expanding our influence of support is the metric that pulls everything together – Expana supports our credibility in doing that.”
Image source: Sainsbury’s
A partnership approach to success
Beyond the platform capabilities, Sainsbury’s values the collaborative relationship with the Expana team, which has included customizing specific data feeds based on their requirements.
“If I compare Expana to our previous data provider, it’s night and day in terms of the working relationship,” Murray reflects. “The team is really collaborative and responsive – always willing to help and take time to understand our specific needs.”
Future-proofing strategy
Looking ahead, Sainsbury’s sees Expana as enabling a fundamental shift in approach.
“Expana supports our ability to turn insight into actionable foresight, strengthening how we challenge suppliers and enabling more collaborative, partnership-driven relationships.”
This transformation is helping ensure that Sainsbury’s decisions are both commercially sound and aligned with their sustainability commitments, supporting their position as one of the UK’s leading retailers.
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