Nationwide Produce: From Trading Experience to Data-Enabled Trading
Chapter Five Consulting helped Nationwide Produce put commercial intelligence directly into the hands of its traders, delivering a suite of Power BI dashboards in weeks using technology the business already owned.
Client Snapshot
Nationwide Produce PLC is one of the UK's largest, longest-established and most diverse fresh produce companies.
Founded in Lancashire in 1975 and still family-owned and family-run, Nationwide operates across virtually every part of the fresh produce supply chain, growing, grading, packing, trading, importing and exporting fruit and vegetables.
Today, Nationwide Produce:
Nationwide supplies customers across foodservice, catering, processing, wholesale, export and retail.
From turnover of just £2.5 million in 1988 to £204 million today, Nationwide has grown into a significant European fresh produce business while remaining proudly family-owned.
Why They Are Awesome
Nationwide Produce does something deceptively difficult: it helps keep fresh food moving, every single day of the year.
From growing and sourcing to packing, trading, importing, exporting and distribution, the business operates across virtually every part of the fresh produce supply chain, ensuring customers can access the fruit and vegetables they need, whatever the circumstances.
But what makes Nationwide particularly special is that its growth hasn't come at the expense of its identity.
Fifty years after the business was founded, it remains family-owned and family-run, with a culture that puts its people at the heart of the organisation.
And it continues to be ambitious. Nationwide has grown from £2.5 million turnover in 1988 to a record £204 million in FY2024/25, building an international network and serving more than 1,000 customers across Europe along the way.
That combination, entrepreneurial growth, operational complexity, family values and a genuine passion for its people and its produce, made Nationwide Produce a particularly exciting organisation for Chapter Five Consulting to work with.
The Challenge
Fresh produce trading is fast-moving, complex and intensely human.
Yet much of the wholesale industry still operates in much the same way it did two decades ago, relying heavily on phone-based trading, spreadsheets, fragmented information and, critically, the accumulated knowledge of experienced traders.
For Nationwide Produce, that expertise was enormously valuable. But too much of the information needed to support it was difficult to access when it mattered most.
The data was there. The insight wasn't.
Nationwide held significant amounts of commercial data within its underlying systems, but turning that data into meaningful insight was difficult.
Understanding trends in customer buying behaviour, analysing performance across growers and products, or getting a clear view of individual customers and traders often required reports to be manually produced.
Those reports could take days or even weeks to create. By the time they reached the people making decisions, the picture could already have changed.
In a market where products are perishable and trading conditions can change by the hour, yesterday's information has limited value.
Critical knowledge lived with individual traders
Experienced traders knew their customers intimately.
They understood what they typically bought, in what quantities, at what price points and how those behaviours changed over time.
But much of that knowledge sat with the individual.
If a trader was sick, on holiday or otherwise unavailable, another colleague could find it difficult to immediately understand that customer's trading history and pick up the relationship seamlessly.
That created both operational dependency and a barrier to scaling commercial knowledge across the wider trading team.
Every morning starts with a series of decisions
Fresh produce doesn't stand still.
Every day, traders need to balance multiple variables: incoming containers, warehouse stock, shelf life, customer demand, competitor behaviour, weather patterns and delivery logistics.
And from that constantly changing picture, they have to make commercial decisions:
- What price should we offer?
- Which customers should we prioritise?
- Should we push volume or protect margin?
- How should we respond to what the market and our competitors are doing?
Historically, many of those decisions were driven predominantly by experience and intuition.
That expertise remains invaluable. The opportunity wasn't to replace it, it was to augment it.
Modern data and analytics could give Nationwide's traders immediate access to the intelligence hidden within its own data, allowing experienced people to combine their commercial judgement with real-time evidence.
The challenge was to turn years of transactional data into actionable commercial intelligence, putting the right insight into a trader's hands at the moment a decision needed to be made.
What They Needed
Nationwide Produce had a bigger ambition: to begin the journey towards a Digital Trading Platform for Fresh Produce.
But the first step needed to solve a very practical problem.
Traders needed immediate access to the commercial intelligence already sitting within Nationwide's data, presented in a way that helped them make better decisions during the trading day.
Turning data into questions traders could answer
Rather than relying on static reports, traders needed to be able to explore their business dynamically.
They needed to understand trends across growers, products and customers. Which products was a customer buying more of? What had they started buying less of? What had they stopped buying altogether? Where were margins changing? Where might there be an opportunity to start a conversation?
But they also needed to answer questions that couldn't necessarily be predicted in advance.
Imagine a trader has blueberries that need to move quickly.
Instead of searching through spreadsheets or relying entirely on memory, they should be able to ask: Which of my existing customers regularly buys products that blueberries would complement? Who should I call first?
That ability to slice and interrogate the data at a point in time could turn information into action.
Choosing the right technology, not the most exciting one
The initial thinking was to build an AI-enabled tool that would allow traders to interact with the data.
As we explored the requirement, however, Chapter Five challenged whether AI was actually necessary for the first stage of the journey.
The immediate business need could be solved much more simply.
Nationwide already had access to Microsoft Power BI through its existing Microsoft technology estate. By using interactive dashboards rather than developing a bespoke AI solution, we could deliver the required capability using familiar technology, avoid unnecessary additional software cost and reduce the development timeline to a matter of weeks.
It also created a practical first step towards the longer-term digital trading ambition, allowing Nationwide to learn from how traders actually used data before investing in more sophisticated capabilities.
More intelligence. More time to trade.
The goal wasn't to turn traders into data analysts.
It was the opposite.
By reducing the time spent searching for information, manipulating spreadsheets and trying to piece together historic trading patterns, Nationwide could give its traders more time to do what they do best: talk to customers, understand the market and trade.
Better access to information could also enable individual traders to effectively manage a broader customer base and trade across multiple product categories without becoming dependent on having years of historic knowledge committed to memory.
The ambition was simple: put useful commercial intelligence directly into the hands of traders, quickly, practically and without over-engineering the solution.
Our Approach
Chapter Five Consulting started with the business, not the technology.
Our objective wasn't simply to build dashboards. It was to understand where better information could create commercial value and then put that intelligence into traders' hands as quickly as possible.
Starting with the value levers
We began by bringing the business together to identify the key levers across procurement, sales and logistics that drive shareholder and stakeholder value.
From there, we explored where better analytics could strengthen those levers.
This gave the work a clear commercial foundation. Rather than starting with "What reports can we build?", we started with "What decisions could we improve?"
Those value levers became an important thread throughout the project, connecting the underlying data and dashboards back to tangible business outcomes.
Learning how traders really trade
We worked closely with Nationwide's directors, sales leads and traders to understand the realities of the trading desk.
Through interviews and working sessions, we explored the questions traders asked most frequently, the challenges they encountered and the information they relied on when making decisions.
Alongside this, we reviewed the existing CRM system and underlying data model, mapped data lineage and assessed how information would need to flow into and refresh within the dashboards.
We also identified opportunities to improve the performance of underlying database queries, helping create a stronger technical foundation for the analytics.
Prototype early. Learn quickly.
We deliberately avoided disappearing for months to build a finished solution.
Instead, we adopted a rapid prototyping approach designed to put something tangible in front of traders as early as possible.
An initial set of Power BI dashboards was developed and taken through a prototype walkthrough before being released to traders for hands-on review.
Their feedback then fed directly into the next iteration.
This allowed us to test not only whether the dashboards technically worked, but whether the information was presented in a way that made intuitive commercial sense to the people who would actually use it.
Each iteration added greater depth, including the ability to compare performance against previous years, other products and other buyers and sellers.
The result was a solution shaped with traders rather than simply delivered to them.
Teaching people to find the opportunity
Adoption required more than showing traders where to click.
We developed a series of "How do I?" videos that demonstrated how to use the dashboards through real commercial questions and scenarios.
Crucially, these weren't simply system tutorials.
The guidance linked insights back to the value levers identified at the start of the project, helping traders understand how to interpret what they were seeing, where to look for opportunities and how to turn information into commercial action.
The aim was to develop data intuition, not just dashboard proficiency.
Keeping delivery focused
Throughout the work, we established clear governance, delivery milestones and weekly leadership updates.
This kept decisions moving, maintained alignment between business and technology stakeholders and ensured the project remained focused on delivering usable capability quickly.
By combining commercial insight, trader experience, data expertise and rapid prototyping, Chapter Five turned the project from a technology idea into a practical trading tool, built around the decisions that create value for Nationwide every day.
What Changed
The dashboards changed the relationship between Nationwide's traders and their data.
Information that had previously required spreadsheets, paper reports or a request for someone to produce an analysis was now available on demand, using the latest data, from a trader's laptop, phone or iPad.
No waiting for reports. No paper printouts. No information already out of date by the time it arrived.
Instead, traders could explore the business themselves and move from "What happened?" to "What should I do about it?"
Seeing where value is being created
For the first time, traders could immediately see performance across the three sides of a trade.
They could identify their:
- Top-performing products by sales volume, price or margin
- Top-performing customers by volume purchased, price or margin
- Top-performing growers and suppliers by volume sold, cost or price
And rather than seeing a snapshot in isolation, traders could compare performance year on year and identify the trends behind the numbers.
That created a much richer understanding of what was driving commercial performance and where attention could create the greatest value.
From reporting to exploring
The Sales Overview gave Nationwide a holistic view of company sales performance.
But traders could go much further.
The Trade Analysis capability allowed them to interrogate patterns and trends by drilling into products, customers, buyers and sellers.
Instead of receiving a predetermined report, traders could follow the data.
If something looked unusual, they could investigate it. If a trend was emerging, they could explore what was driving it. If an opportunity appeared, they could identify the customers or products behind it.
That enabled a much more proactive approach to selling.
Finding the next sales opportunity
Product performance analytics gave traders a new way to understand their portfolio.
Products could be viewed through a Boston Matrix-style analysis, helping distinguish high-growth, high-performing products from those with lower growth and performance.
Traders could see which products were trending upwards and identify potential "low-hanging fruit", opportunities where greater focus could help increase sales.
Customer buying patterns could also reveal products a customer was buying less of, products they had stopped purchasing altogether and adjacent product categories they weren't currently buying.
That created a different starting point for a sales conversation.
Instead of simply asking a customer what they needed, a trader could arrive with evidence of where the next opportunity might be.
Stronger conversations with suppliers
The Supplier Profile brought live commercial information into conversations with growers and suppliers.
Traders could sit down with a supplier with a clear view of historic volumes, costs, selling prices and performance trends.
That meant negotiations could be grounded in evidence rather than fragmented historic information, supporting richer discussions around future volumes, pricing and margin.
Stronger conversations with customers
The Customer Profile did the same on the other side of the trade.
Traders could review live customer data before or during a conversation, understand purchasing patterns and identify changes in behaviour.
They could see opportunities to increase volumes on existing products or introduce complementary product lines that the customer wasn't currently buying.
They could also begin to understand how external factors were influencing purchasing behaviour, creating better-informed and more relevant customer conversations.
Greater control of margin
Better visibility also strengthened Nationwide's ability to actively manage margin.
Rather than looking only at the margin on an individual transaction, traders could understand performance across products and over time.
Visibility of blended margin targets created the opportunity to optimise margin at product level throughout the year, helping traders understand where there was room to be more competitive and where margin needed to be protected.
From waiting for information to acting on it
Perhaps the biggest change wasn't a dashboard.
It was behavioural.
Nationwide began moving away from a culture where people requested reports and waited days for information towards one where traders could access, interrogate and act on data themselves.
That meant better-informed decisions in conversations with colleagues, customers and suppliers, and more time spent using information rather than trying to find it.
Most importantly, the technology didn't replace the instinct and experience of Nationwide's traders.
It made that expertise more powerful.
Experience still drove the conversation. But now it had data sitting alongside it.
The Impact
Nationwide Produce took its first practical step towards a Digital Trading Platform for Fresh Produce, putting commercial intelligence directly into the hands of its traders.
The biggest change was speed.
Information that previously had to be requested, extracted and turned into reports could now be accessed through dashboards refreshed every hour.
Traders no longer had to wait days or weeks to understand what was happening. They could see it for themselves and act.
Impact at a glance
From hindsight to insight
Previously, answering a new commercial question could mean requesting a report, extracting information and waiting for it to be analysed.
Now, around 50 traders could interrogate 2.5 years of trading history themselves, with the underlying data refreshed every hour.
Seven interactive dashboards turned millions of individual records into usable views of sales, customers, suppliers, products, buyers, sellers, volume, price and margin.
That meant commercial questions could be explored when they mattered, during the trading day.
More time for trading
The objective was never to create more analysis for traders to do.
It was to reduce it.
By making information immediately accessible and easier to interpret, traders could spend less time searching through information and more time having valuable conversations with customers and suppliers.
The dashboards provided a common source of commercial intelligence that could support a wider customer portfolio, identify opportunities across product categories and reduce reliance on knowledge held by individual traders.
A foundation for digital trading
Importantly, Nationwide achieved this without starting with a large, expensive technology programme.
What began as an idea for a bespoke AI solution became a working analytics capability delivered in weeks, using technology Nationwide already owned.
That allowed the business to put new capability into traders' hands quickly, learn from real-world usage and establish a foundation from which more sophisticated digital trading capabilities could develop over time.
50 traders. 4.7 million records. Seven dashboards. Data refreshed every hour.
A first practical step from traditional produce trading towards data-enabled trading.
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