Kinetic12 plans to bring MenuData research into foodservice consulting

Kinetic12 plans to bring MenuData’s menu, flavor and pricing research into its foodservice consulting, adding information for decisions about products, customers and how to reach them. It announced the partnership October 9.

Kinetic12 supplies the consulting expertise; MenuData provides the food and beverage intelligence platform. The agreement covers category and product-portfolio planning, customer and market-segment planning, and routes to market. Kinetic12 says the work will span chain restaurants, convenience-store foodservice and noncommercial foodservice.

The firm says category work will consider emerging flavors, formats and menu concepts, while route-to-market planning will pair pricing and trend information with its operator and manufacturer relationships.

For restaurant operators, the connection is upstream: the partnership is intended to inform the research and planning behind supplier decisions.

Following a menu signal#

MenuData describes Saffron, its research agent, as a tool that accepts a business question in ordinary language, then cross-references menus, ingredients, prices, social activity and market information. Its stated output is a ranked recommendation, filtered by how widely something appears, its growth, consistency across markets and relevance to the question. The service also describes comparing foodservice, retail and convenience channels.

The company’s homepage describes moving from a national trend to a city, an operator, a menu item or a gap in an account’s offering. For a distributor, it presents research into which local operators’ menus might fit a particular food. For an operator, the described tasks include comparing competitor menus and pricing.

The integration page extends that workflow into business software: MenuData says its information can sit in Salesforce account records and opportunities, while structured data can connect to Snowflake for custom analysis. Those descriptions show how menu and market information could move into account records and data systems used for a supplier’s own analysis.

From market research to a local plan#

Kinetic12’s distributor case study describes a planning assignment for a major foodservice distributor seeking new customers in particular markets. The undated account does not identify MenuData as a source.

The firm says it first compared market share by customer segment across the selected geographies, adding census, economic and local consumer information. That work exposed differences in both the operator landscape and the distributor’s sales approach.

Customer targets were chosen using the type of operation, proximity to a warehouse, concentration of operators and potential sales. Kinetic12 also examined whether each warehouse was ready to serve those prospects, assessing its product mix, pricing, marketing support and delivery-route capacity.

Local managers then helped turn the findings into an action plan. According to Kinetic12, each market finished with its own target customers, acquisition goals and next steps, including needed corporate support. Goals covered each market and its individual sales representatives. The assignment linked the question of who might buy with the practical question of whether the distributor could serve them.

Research becomes an account plan#

Kinetic12’s undated manufacturer cases describe gathering customer feedback and building account plans. In one anonymous assignment, the firm says it interviewed national-account and distributor customers, including potential customers, and researched competing suppliers.

The interviews explored what customers valued in sales support, supply chain, innovation and marketing. Kinetic12 then compared the manufacturer and its competitors against those expectations. The resulting report combined customer comments, performance comparisons, perceptions of competitors and recommended actions.

Here the evidence came from customers describing supplier support, including what frustrated them. Kinetic12 says the client responded with changes that included culinary and insights resources for key accounts, more consistent supply-chain reporting and updated sales training.

In another case on the same page, the firm worked with a manufacturer’s sales and training leaders to build templates for emerging, strategic and transactional accounts. Training used real customer examples to turn findings into initiatives. Kinetic12 describes the output as concrete account plans that could be combined to allocate resources and coordinate priorities across departments.

The announced partnership would put MenuData’s research into this kind of planning work, alongside Kinetic12’s consulting processes and customer relationships.