How KraftHeinz used Evidence for High-Frequency Demand Forecasting
How the third-largest food and beverage company in North America developed high-frequency demand forecasting across key market segments using Huq’s insights platform.
The Need
The Kraft Heinz Company is the third- largest food and beverage company in North America and the fifth-largest food and beverage company in the world, with eight $1 billion+ brands. With that scale of manufacturing and supply operations at stake, the company needs an accurate and detailed understanding of demand in its key markets and how that changes over time.
This intelligence allows KraftHeinz to plan efficiently and to minimise waste – especially as some of its products are perishable. Reuben Ayley, Head of Food Service Finance (International), plays a central role in this decision- making and came to Huq looking for solutions to help the company forecast demand across specific channels internationally, on a near-realtime basis.
The Solution
A large proportion of KraftHeinz’s Foodservice products are distributed and sold through bars, hotels, cafes and restaurants. In all of these places, the level of demand is determined by the customer footfall volume across those outlets. Huq’s global mobility data comes ready-enriched with place attributes, including place types. This makes it uniquely positioned to disambiguate trends across different types of outlet – or channels – and geographic markets.
Huq’s Customer Success and Engineering teams supported KraftHeinz during an initial discovery phase, helping them to structure outputs in the way that represented greatest value to them and made them readily actionable. Together they worked to group Huq’s native outlet types to match KraftHeinz’s own internal taxonomy, and experimented with different update intervals and aggregations to produce the most effective set of results.
Once the form and structure were agreed and verified on both sides, Huq scheduled a regular feed to deliver updates to Reuben’s team via an interactive dashboard.
The Results
Having access to in-store customer trends insights at this frequency and definition was a first for the International Finance team at KraftHeinz. It helped the company to plan their manufacturing and supply operations by accurately anticipating demand across different channels in markets ranging from Japan to the US to France. This new sensitivity to changing levels of demand has become a benchmark for planning internally. It is especially important now as the global market treads a path between pandemics, rising costs and changes in disposable income.
Evidence is crucial for KraftHeinz
Reuben Ayley, Head of Food Service Finance (International) said –
This data enables us to gain insight into a crucial aspect of our business that would otherwise not be possible. Using it enables us to anticipate demand and create more robust planning.”
Verifying In-store Footfall Accuracy Using Sales Performance Results
This article shows how mobility data can be used to accurately predict net sales results for consumer- driven businesses like Walmart, the leading US big box retailer.
The Objective
The goal is to extract results from Huq Industries’ Footfall and Dwell-time modules that are highly correlated with the net sales figures published by Walmart in its quarterly trading updates. This output can then be incorporated into downstream models and systems to inform research for analysts and investors.
Step by Step Guide
Step 1: Get Walmart net sales data
Walmart publishes its net sales data within its quarterly trading updates, which can be found on its Investor Relations webpage. Note that for the purposes of this analysis, use is made only of the ‘Walmart US’ net sales segment.
Step 2: Find Walmart store visits
Huq’s event-level mobility data serves as a proxy for consumer demand across Walmart’s US stores. This event-level data is pre-enriched by Huq Industries in a process that extends raw geo-spatial data to include point of interest (POI) attributes such as business name, type and location.
Extracting Walmart visit data is therefore made easy by filtering on the raw place name (place_name), the standardised name (brand_name), or indeed by ignoring the POI attributes and using the WiFi SSID observed by the mobile device (impression_ssid) to match Walmart-specific patterns.
Step 3: Extract Walmart store visits
One way to quantify demand across the Walmart estate using Huq’s enriched geo-spatial data would be to count the number of distinct mobile devices (ie. panelists) present at Walmart each day. This approach can be useful in many analyses but after much experimentation there is a second strategy that produces results that more closely reflects behavioural nuance – and this is related to dwell.
During the same enrichment process that supplies the point-of-interest attributes, an estimate of dwell is also calculated and added to the resource. These properties can be accessed and manipulated via the columns impression_dwell_lower_bounds and impression_dwell_upper_bounds, which represent the upper and lower estimate for visit duration. These are calculated using the cumulative elapsed time calculated by continuous observations of a mobile device in the same place.
For the purposes of this study however, it is beneficial to develop a measurement of dwell that is less strict. The strategy used in this exercise groups observations into visits where they occur within 65 minutes of each other – without requiring them to be continuous per se.
Step 4: Test and training datasets
Walmart provides seventeen quarters of historical results via its investor portal. These are split into two sets; one to use for our training set and the other to test our output against. The training set helps us to select the optimal combination of parameters from the signal candidates described in Step 6. How this is evaluated is explored in Step 7.
The first twelve rows are chosen for training, and the remaining five are retained for testing. Separating them chronologically avoids test information leaking into the training process and causing lookahead bias.
Step 5: Define rough signal form
At this point take the training set from Step 4 then prepare it by eliminating behavioural outliers and concretely defining our measure of ‘dwell’.
i. Preparing the data
It is very common to find elements of noise within a dataset, and Huq’s enriched ‘Events’ feed is no exception. Some characteristics may be derived from interference at the sensor level; some artefacts may be behavioural and completely natural. As our demand metric relates to dwell, it is necessary to eliminate data points that show excessively little or large dwell before applying it. Filtering the data in this way excludes facets such as Walmart employees or other false positives derived from the enrichment process. Our chosen strategy filters the detected dwell value by an upper threshold Du , a lower threshold Dl and also determines whether to filter on a daily or per-visit basis, Db.
ii. Transform dwell into ‘demand signal’
Let’s assume that dwell-time and spending money in- store is a non-linear relationship. Specifically, let’s suggest that there is a ‘normal’ level of dwell Bm and a ‘normal’ propensity for Walmart store visitors to spend, Bbase, both of which are constants.
We can then raise Bbase by the difference between the observed dwell value and the ‘normal’ value, Bm. To keep this value from exploding or vanishing, it is expedient to truncate the difference in the range of Ol to Ou before raising the power.
This can be summarised as follows:
iii. Normalise the data for panel growth
The size of Huq’s mobility panel changes over time as the number of apps supplying data increases, and apps’ own audience sizes fluctuate. As this study results in a time-series output, it is imperative to account for these changes in the normalised result so as to accurately represent the real trend. Similarly, it is also important to account for growth in the number of daily measurements observed per device using Huq’s measurement software in order to maintain a consistent view of ‘dwell’.
It may also help to consider how these characteristics vary geographically. The normalisation strategy employed in this exercise works by dividing the ‘demand signal’ observed across Walmart locations by the equivalent metric for the full US panel on equivalent day. This approach may be further improved by normalising on a localised basis to account for regional variations in data coverage, and by pre-filtering the data to remove individual app or panelist outliers.
iv. Respect seasonality in signal generation
Different week parts – weekdays, weekends and public holidays – have significance for in-store retail behaviour, and it is beneficial to recognise this in signal preparation. Accordingly, the normalised output is grouped using this classification, and is supplied to the model independently.
Step 6: Test and training datasets
The many possible combinations of parameters in Step 5 produce a huge number of candidates for signal representation, numbering 750K+. So, which candidate set offers the closest match to Walmart’s net sales values? A simple regression model (see Step 7) allows us to identify the best candidate set.
Step 7: Regression and validation
On the basis that we can expect longer dwell-times to lead to higher net sales results, a suitable model to use in this instance is non-negative least-squares regression as the inductive bias is well suited to this problem.
How do we know which signal output is best suited to net sales prediction? We’ll look for the result with the smallest mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and use ‘leave-one-out cross validation’ to make best use of the limited supply of training data available in Walmart’s quarterly net sales figures archive.
The end result

The Pearson correlation between the output of the regression model and Walmart’s actual net sales figures on the (completely unseen) test set is ρ=0.85, with a MAPE of just 3.8%.
Conclusions
Using this parameter selection strategy it emerged that the optimal preparation steps and parameters are:
(i) remove dwell-time outliers, keeping daily device dwell values in the range of 0 to 160,
(ii) construct ‘demand signal’ by subtracting 30 from the daily dwell figure, and bound to the range of -12 to 60, then raise to the power of 1.03
(iii) normalise by counting 2hr-truncated timestamps across the full US dataset, where devices must have visited a non- residential location
Lastly, aggregate results by day and divide the ‘demand signal’ by this value.
Insight reliability is key
Senior Data Scientist, Large US Asset Manager said –
We have tested Huq’s footfall and dwell-time data in our forecasting models and found that it added significant benefits to the accuracy of our signal.”
Transport
Transport
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Origin-destination matrices are used to plan more effective routes between centres, and to manage collateral risk during road and transport closures. It's critical to the smooth running of operations and keeping traffic flowing.
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Visit Frequency
Use visit frequency to know how often people return to your towns|
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Frequency of visit is a core indicator of success in our centres.
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County Council



Visit Frequency Counting
How often do visitors come back?
Visit Frequency is a monthly measure of how frequently unique visitors return to the place, street or centre you manage.
- Monthly reporting
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- Residents excluded
- Export as PDF/CSV
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Simply trace your places, and go!
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In 2021-22 UK Govt. DHLC made £56 million in funding available to UK councils.
Huq analysed footfall performance for centres UK-wide to rank the greatest winners during that period.
Start measuring visit frequency today!
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Module pricing explained
Platform pricing is simple. Access costs £1,000 + VAT per insight module per place (ie. street, park, mall) per year. We offer volume-based discounts too!
Basic
We're just getting started- 1 Insight module
- 1 Place monitored
- Footfall, Dwell or Catchment
Grow
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- 1 Place monitored
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Scale
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Satisfaction
Place Satisfaction
Discover the key drivers of footfall
What are visitors doing in your town – and what do they feel the need to go elsewhere for? Place Satisfaction insights help learn where to improve.
Satisfaction scoring is the main way we find out what's working - and what's not!
- Economic Development Officer,
Borough Council



What is Satisfaction?
Place Satisfaction measures the share of certain types of activity that residents do locally - and what they travel elsewhere for.
Why use it?
Knowing which aspects of services are succeeding and which ones aren’t offers valuable insights into where local opportunities lie. The Satisfaction module measures success against four key aspects of the local economy - essential and non-essential retail, public services and working practices.
- Share of local activity
- Share of outside activity
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- Zero-hardware solution
- Instant monitoring setup
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- Training & support included
- Year-on-year comparisons
- Used by 50+ UK councils
"Have the new leisure centre increased local leisure visits?
Local Regeneration Manager, Borough Council
"How is our local economy affected by the 15min city scheme?
Transport Insights Manager, District Council
"How accessible do residents find our public services?
Senior Communities Manager, County Council
No hardware. Instant setup. History included out of the box.
Weekly Updates
Monitor performance across the places and centres you manage in near real-time. Use high-frequency insights to plan and react at pace.
4yrs History
Huq provides up to 4yrs of monitoring history for every new location out of the box, making annual comparisons fast and easy.
Instant Setup
Get access to Huq's monitoring platform today! Instant setup. No hardware, cameras or any other infrastructure needed.
UK Coverage
All Huq's place monitoring products are available for any location in the UK and beyond. Any place, any size, anywhere - country wide.
Related products
Often bought together
Explore companion products from our insights platform!
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One-to-one customer success support built in
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- Hands-on user training
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Inverse Catchment
Inverse Catchment
Do you know your town's rivals?
Discover the places that local residents visit and consider why they go there. Use Inverse Catchment to find opportunities to improve your local offering.
Where residents go is a valuable means to track our town's performance.
- Senior Regeneration Manager,
City Council



What is Inverse Catchment?
Inverse Catchment shows where the majority of residents leaving your town travel to when they're going elsewhere.
Why use it?
Different places have different qualities and often that's how they differentiate. Yours might be great for leisure. Another for working. Learn where else residents travel to to assess what's missing in your area. Explore how that differs between catchment sizes and demographic groups.
- Inverse catchment maps
- 20, 50 and 80th percentiles
- Income demographic filters
- Monthly reporting cycle
- 4+ years' history
- Granular date filters
- Available for any town or centre
- Multiple centres supported
- Compare with multiple layers
- Export data as CSV
- Download live reports as PDF
- Hardware free solution
- Instant monitoring
- Full nationwide coverage
- Data accuracy validated
- Training & support included
- Year-on-year comparisons
- Used by 50+ UK councils
"Which other towns do residents travel to?
Economic Development Officer, County Council
"How do weekday / weekend distances compare?
Night-time Economy Manager, Borough Council
"What's the mobility gap across social groups?
Levelling Up Manager, District Council
No hardware. Instant setup. History included out of the box.
Weekly Updates
Monitor performance across the places and centres you manage in near real-time. Use high-frequency insights to plan and react at pace.
4yrs History
Huq provides up to 4yrs of monitoring history for every new location out of the box, making annual comparisons fast and easy.
Instant Setup
Get access to Huq's monitoring platform today! Instant setup. No hardware, cameras or any other infrastructure needed.
UK Coverage
All Huq's place monitoring products are available for any location in the UK and beyond. Any place, any size, anywhere - country wide.
Related products
Often bought together
Explore companion products from our insights platform!
Browse modules ➜



One-to-one customer success support built in
Huq's unique Customer Success offering provides hands-on training and support in reports creation for each and every one of its customers. Learn to interpret, visualise and talk about your data!
- Hands-on user training
- Custom report building
- Expert advice & support
Hourly Footfall
Hourly Footfall
When are we busiest?
Find out when the peak times are for your green spaces, town centres, shopping centres and retail parks. Use Hourly Footfall to track performance.
Knowing when people choose to visit tells us a lot about why they come
- Night Time Economy Manager,
District Council



What is Hourly Footfall?
Hourly Footfall is a measure of the number of unique visitors present at an area split out by hour of day and day of week.
Why use it?
Understanding when people visit informs how best to manage and maintain local spaces. Compare weekdays and weekparts to track trends in commuting patterns, leisure activity and the effect of your interventions. Retailers use Hourly Footfall to help optimise their retail estate portfolios.
- Daily hourly footfall reports
- View trend and daily results
- Get actual and indexed values
- Make year-on-year comparisons
- Any place, any size, anywhere
- Up to 4+ years' data history
- Benchmarking data available
- Full nationwide coverage
- Compare with multiple places
- Income demographic filters
- A zero-hardware solution
- No installation or maintenance
- Export results data as CSV
- Download live reports as PDF
- Fine-grained date filters
- Data accuracy validated
- Training & support included
- Used by 50+ UK councils
"What's the busiest day for footfall locally?
Economic Development Officer, County Council
"What's the optimal time for maintenance?
Parks & Open Spaces Manager, City Council
"When can we expect peak traffic flows?
Transport Planning Manager, District Council
No hardware. Instant setup. History included out of the box.
Frequent Updates
Monitor performance across the places and centres you manage in near real-time. Use high-frequency insights to plan and react at pace.
4yrs History
Huq provides up to 4yrs of monitoring history for every new location out of the box, making annual comparisons fast and easy.
Instant Setup
Get access to Huq's monitoring platform today! Instant setup. No hardware, cameras or any other infrastructure needed.
UK Coverage
All Huq's place monitoring products are available for any location in the UK and beyond. Any place, any size, anywhere - country wide.
Related products
Often bought together
Explore companion products from our insights platform!
Browse modules ➜



One-to-one customer success support built in
Huq's unique Customer Success offering provides hands-on training and support in reports creation for each and every one of its customers. Learn to interpret, visualise and talk about your data!
- Hands-on user training
- Custom report building
- Expert advice & support
Granular Catchment
Granular Catchment
Where do most visitors come from?
Discover where visitors to places travel in from. This precision module offers the ability to quantify how many visitors come from each postcode district. Use Granular Catchment insights to enrich your footfall data!
This granular insight allows us to quantify how many visitors come which postcodes
- Visitor Insights Manager,
National Park Authority



What is Granular Catchment?
Granular Catchment is the first ever product that quantifies number of visitors to specific destinations according to where they travel from.
Why use it?
Use Granular Catchment to understand the impact of accessibility projects - ie. public transport improvements - on local and wider mobility. Explore the impact of events and interventions in terms of town centre appeal. Measure how seasonality affects how tourists visit an area.
- Export data as CSV
- Uses postcode district units
- Footfall insight enrichment
- Understand seasonal trends
- Measure accessibility projects
- Monthly reporting cycle
- Up to 4+ years' history
- Quantify tourism volumes
- Available for any town or centre
- Download live reports as PDF
- Hardware free solution
- Instant monitoring insight
- Full nationwide coverage
- Data accuracy validated
- Training & support included
- Year-on-year comparisons
- Used by 50+ UK councils
"Has increased marketing spend attracted visitors from further away this summer?
Economic Development Officer, County Council
"Since our transport improvements have we seen positive in accessibility?
Senior Transport Planner, County Council
"What's our conversion rate for visitors travelling from this location?
Store Planning Manager, National Multiple Retailer
No hardware. Instant setup. History included out of the box.
Weekly Updates
Monitor performance across the places and centres you manage in near real-time. Use high-frequency insights to plan and react at pace.
4yrs History
Huq provides up to 4yrs of monitoring history for every new location out of the box, making annual comparisons fast and easy.
Instant Setup
Get access to Huq's monitoring platform today! Instant setup. No hardware, cameras or any other infrastructure needed.
UK Coverage
All Huq's place monitoring products are available for any location in the UK and beyond. Any place, any size, anywhere - country wide.
Related products
Often bought together
Explore companion products from our insights platform!



One-to-one customer success support built in
Huq's unique Customer Success offering provides hands-on training and support in reports creation for each and every one of its customers. Learn to interpret, visualise and talk about your data!
- Hands-on user training
- Custom report building
- Expert advice & support
Footfall
Use footfall data to learn how many people visit your towns|
Get the leading footfall counting system built for decision makers in Local Government, BIDs, Retail and Real-estate teams.
Footfall monitoring is the single most important insight we use to manage places
- Head of Economic Development,
County Council



Accurate Footfall Monitoring
How many people are in this place?
Learn how many unique visitors are present in the places you manage, and how that changes with time. Verified people counting methodology. No double counting!
- Daily footfall counts
- No hardware needed
- Available UK-wide
- Any place of any size
- Up to 4+ years' history
- Demographics included
Getting started is easy
Simply trace your places, and go!
Get instant footfall counting data for any place of any shape or size - UK wide. Use our specialist place tracing tools to define the area you want to cover and get accurate results today!



Get the free report
In 2021-22 UK Govt. DHLC made £56 million in funding available to UK councils.
Huq analysed footfall performance for centres UK-wide to rank the greatest winners during that period.
Start measuring footfall traffic today!
Step 1: Get a personal demo
Get a personalised demo with our team of experts
Step 2: Trace your places
Define the areas that you would like footfall data for
Step 3: Get monitoring!
No equipment, no installation. Start monitoring your places today!
Module pricing explained ?♂️
Platform pricing is simple. Access costs £1,000 + VAT per insight module per place (ie. street, park, mall) per year. We offer volume-based discounts too!
Basic
We're just getting started- 1 Insight module
- 1 Place monitored
- Footfall, Dwell or Catchment
Grow
Get deep place insights- 3 Insight modules
- 1 Place monitored
- Basic + Density & Frequency
Scale
For PRO measurement teams- 3 Insight modules
- 3 Places measured
- 360-degree insights
Dwell
Use dwell-time to find how long people spend in your towns|
Get accurate visitor dwell-time insights made for decision makers in Local Government, BIDs, Retail and Real-estate teams.
Dwell-time provides leading indicators on the performance of the local economy
- Head of Economic Development,
County Council



Dwell-time Monitoring
How long do visitors spend in this place?
Dwell-time is a measure of the average time that visitors spend within an area per trip. Get the output in minutes, updated everywhere on a daily basis!
- Daily dwell-time reports
- Results given in minutes
- Organise by day of week
- Group by hour of day
- Over 4 years' history
- Available nationwide!
Getting started is easy
Simply trace your places, and go!
Get instant visitor dwell-time data for any place of any shape or size - UK wide. Use our specialist place tracing tools to define the area you want to cover and get accurate results today!



Get the free report
In 2021-22 UK Govt. DHLC made £56 million in funding available to UK councils.
Huq analysed footfall performance for centres UK-wide to rank the greatest winners during that period.
Start measuring visitor dwell-time today!
Step 1: Get a personal demo
Get a personalised demo with our team of experts
Step 2: Trace your places
Define the areas that you would like dwell-time data for
Step 3: Get monitoring!
No equipment, no installation. Start monitoring your places today!
Module pricing explained
Platform pricing is simple. Access costs £1,000 + VAT per insight module per place (ie. street, park, mall) per year. We offer volume-based discounts too!
Basic
We're just getting started- 1 Insight module
- 1 Place monitored
- Footfall, Dwell or Catchment
Grow
Get deep place insights- 3 Insight modules
- 1 Place monitored
- Basic + Density & Frequency
Scale
For PRO measurement teams- 3 Insight modules
- 3 Places measured
- 360-degree insights