What You Need to Know about Food Storage and Data-Analytics: Think Amazon’d

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As Hurricane Frances was barreling across the Caribbean threatening a direct hit on Florida’s Atlantic coast in 2004, “Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons…predictive technology,” reported the New York Times.

“A week ahead of the storm’s landfall, Linda M. Dillmans, Wal-Mart’s chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes’ worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart’s data warehouse, she felt that the company could ‘start predicting what’s going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen,’ as she put it,” according to the article.

In the book Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett, data-driven prediction might have been useful in this scenario, they explain, not to predict an increase in bottled water sales—but to discover patterns that were not obvious.

“…the experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products—and not just the usual flashlights. ‘We didn’t know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane,’ Ms. Dillman said. ‘And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer.’”

Why is this important? Because grocery stores can survive for three-days before a network disruption creates havoc. And that may be moving to even fewer days as the industry gets Amazon’d.

Data analytics, with real time inventory management (my phrase) has perhaps made our food supply more vulnerable as it’s stored in fulfilment centers, not in local stores. Storage is a cost the industry may not be able to afford; leaving even less room for error.

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E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com

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