Retailers selling or sharing customer data isn’t new, but Kroger Co. is going a step further by giving brand marketers unprecedented access to independently dive into its trove of household purchase data.

The just-launched Collaborative Cloud goes beyond curated reports Kroger’s 84.51° data and analytics unit has historically sold. It lets brands' data scientists answer their own questions and create their own projects, providing aggregated, anonymized access to shopping data collected via Kroger loyalty programs from nearly half of U.S. households—around 60 million—said Patrick Kelly, VP of product at 84.51°.

Retailer data sharing historically has been about finding ways suppliers can grow business within the retailer supplying the data. But brands can use the Collaborative Cloud to build programs broadly, including with other retailers, Kelly acknowledged in an interview.

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Brian Archey, senior director of data science and analytics for Conagra Brands, has been an early user of Collaborative Cloud since last year, before the pandemic. He said it’s played a key role in helping the marketer of Healthy Choice, Reddi Whip, Hunt’s and other brands spot pandemic-related trends, forecast demand, and then develop plans for holding onto consumers won during the pandemic.

Among trends Collaborative Cloud let Conagra discover were relationships between purchases across categories, Archey said. So the company discovered the same people buying more pizza rolls were also buying more ranch dressing, apparently to dip the pizza rolls. That set up cross-marketing opportunities.

Collaborative Cloud worked seamlessly with Conagra’s analytics systems and provided “immense flexibility,” Archey said. “Compared to similar solutions we’ve explored, the Collaborative Cloud leads the pack.”

The geographical information, he said, is “something we can’t get anywhere else, and that allows for a whole range of experiments.”

Other retailers have similar data, or could, he said, but Kroger has the advantage of a national footprint and a platform that’s been “very easy to integrate and complementing our own technology stack.”

Kroger is the second-largest U.S. grocery retailer behind Walmart, with more than a dozen chains including City Market, Food 4 Less, King Soopers and Ralphs. 

Kroger has been “open to exploring things that I think have traditionally made people uneasy” in data sharing, Archey said. “There’s information we can’t see and shouldn’t,” he added, but 84.51° has realized it can anonymize households and allow regional data segmentation to let marketers develop meaningful aggregated insights.

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There is an 84.51° “data concierge” available to work with marketers that don’t have their own data science teams, but the Collaborative Cloud was built with the understanding that many marketers have teams fully capable of working independently, Kelly said.

Like 84.51°’s prior Stratum system, Collaborative Cloud is available on a subscription basis, Kelly said. But while Stratum was about building “curated insights at scale” for marketers, the new system recognizes that marketer technical teams have their own ideas, he said.

“Technical users don’t want to log into a web-based platform and pull down reports,” Kelly said. “They build science. They build code. They build their own [intellectual property], and the Collaborative Cloud is designed for that user. You can build your own IP and collaborate with 84.51° to ensure the data science is a competitive advantage for your organization.”

While it’s fully compliant with privacy safeguards, Collaborative Cloud is being developed to let marketers match their first-party consumer IDs with Kroger households in a “clean room” where any sensitive data is “completely masked,” Kelly said. That’s a capability Conagra has begun to use, Archey said.

Kroger is fully aware that opening its data in this way could let brands build business well beyond its stores, including at other retailers, Kelly said. “We’re proud of the fact that we have the best data asset around for understanding shoppers within U.S. grocery retail. There are myriad use cases we’re already starting to see with our clients to make decisions across the U.S. and not specific to any one retailer.”