Intercept
Helping CPG brands automatically flag and dispute invalid retail fees
Intercept lets CPG brands challenge incorrect charges from retail chains. It ingests all of a brand’s fees across their retailer portals and emails, flags the fees that can be disputed, and automates away the mundane tasks involved in fee disputes. What previously took a team of people is now manageable by a single person.
Active Founders
Sasha Zhang
Sasha is the co-founder and CEO of Intercept. Previously, Sasha helped incubate new SaaS startups at Menlo Labs and built supply chain data products at Wayfair. She studied Economics and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon and received an MBA at Wharton.
Jordan Wick
Jordan is the co-founder and CTO of Intercept. He previously worked on self-driving cars at Waymo, built supply chain technology at Flexport, and studied Computer Science at MIT.
Company Launches
tl;dr: Intercept helps retail brands organize and auto-dispute invalid retailer fees, recouping ~5% of revenue. We consolidate these fees across various retailer portals and emails, flag the ones that should be investigated, and automate the manual processes associated with disputing them.
The Problem
A retail brand typically experiences a reduction of about 15% in expected revenue due to fees from the retailer, and this figure can escalate to over 50% if the brand fails to effectively manage them. Examples of these fees include shipping damaged products, packing incorrect quantities, or arriving at the retailer late. However, many of these fees are invalid and are commonly investigated and disputed by teams within these companies. Disputing these fees is a highly manual, time-consuming, and opaque process, posing significant operational challenges for the brand.
The typical dispute process is done in 3 steps:
- Aggregate: The brand will aggregate and classify their deductions inside of a spreadsheet, often using a home-grown dictionary to make sense of each of the deduction codes.
- Investigate: any deductions that are high enough in value will be investigated. This often requires requesting more information via email from various parties.
- Dispute: file disputes with the retailer or distributor and keep following up (and following up, and following up, and following up) until it’s resolved.
The Solution
Intercept automates this process entirely. It ingests data from many different retailers and places it all in one platform, allowing the brand to:
- Visualize their fee data organized in one place. This includes fees from food distributors such as UNFI and KeHE, and retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Amazon
- Understand where (and why) they’re losing money with weekly insights
- Auto-dispute the invalid fees
Meet the team
Sasha started her career in the food industry analyzing McDonald’s shopper data before working in supply chain business intelligence at Wayfair. Jordan grew up raising and trading cattle in Idaho, then moved on to building software at Flexport and Waymo. We’re both passionate about food, supply chain, and supporting other entrepreneurs operating in the physical world.
Asks
- If you know any CPG brands, we’d love to chat with them - please intro them to us at founders@tryintercept.com.
- If you own or work at a CPG brand and you’d like to mitigate your deductions, book a call with us here.