Case Study Summary
A Canadian manufacturer of branded hummus, dips, salads and tofu, generating more than $100M in annual sales, needed a price increase to recover rising costs and a reset of trade spend that had never been measured for return. Retailers pushed back on a blanket increase. RML rebuilt the price case around the categories where costs had actually risen and reset promotions around true ROI, projected to unlock $5M+ in incremental annual margin.
Challenge
The planned increase lacked a cost story for its primary category. The client entered the engagement with a 5.5% increase in mind across the portfolio, but commodity analysis showed that the key ingredients behind hummus, its largest category, had fallen in cost since the last increase. Retailers had legitimate grounds to reject a blanket increase, and several national banners did.
Promotions were planned regionally and judged only on lift, so the true return on trade spend had never been measured. The portfolio was also over-promoted, even where the brand led the category. At one leading banner in its home market, salads were on promotion 38 weeks of the year, and dips and tofu 32 weeks, training shoppers to wait for a deal.
With the business tracking to miss its fiscal year, leadership accelerated the price increase by roughly three months in June, compressing a ten-week program into a five-week price sprint followed by the promotional work.
Solution
RML ran the price work first, in a five-week sprint, followed by the promotional reset. A commodity cost analysis showed that inputs for dips, tofu and végépaté had risen clearly while key hummus ingredients had fallen, giving the client a credible basis to shift the increase away from hummus. As major banners challenged the increase, RML modeled alternatives in real time, such as holding hummus flat while taking a higher increase on dips, tofu and végépaté, and the final position was negotiated banner by banner: one national banner accepted the full 5.5%, another accepted 10.1% on non-hummus categories, a third accepted 5.5% on non-hummus categories, and a fourth accepted 3% across the portfolio.
For trade promotion, RML replaced lift with true promotional ROI as the decision metric, found that front-page flyer events consistently outperformed everyday low price and in-store events, and rebuilt the 2027 calendars for nine banners with fewer promotional weeks, deeper events around key occasions and better spacing between them. Because the optimal calendars grew client margin faster than retailer revenue, RML also built a Scenario B for every banner, in which the retailer’s margin grew in step with retail sales, giving the sales team a ready fallback in negotiations.
Result
Despite multiple rounds of retailer pushback, the price increase was implemented at the client’s major retail banners. Rebuilt around categories with a defensible cost story, it was modeled to deliver approximately $2.9M in incremental annual gross margin, nearly 10% above the no-increase baseline. Total revenue was projected to decline slightly as volume adjusted, a trade-off the client accepted to protect profitability.
The promotional reset was projected to add a further $2.4M to $3.3M in incremental annual margin across the optimized banner calendars, without increasing trade spend. At one leading banner, the optimized plan was projected to grow retail sales by 11.9% and retailer margin by 10.6%. Beyond the financial impact, the engagement left the client with a repeatable pricing and promotion discipline: elasticity models, a banner-level scenario tool, ROI-based promotional guardrails and an in-year tracker. It also surfaced a next step: several national banners lacked the right pack sizes and price points, pointing to a broader price pack architecture exercise.
