Campbell Soup: Customer Product Switching Behavior in the Presence of Out-of-Stocks

Capstone Team: Madhuri Saraswathy Kumar, Michael Feinstein, Sushrut Prabhakar

Due to COVID, supply chain constraints and increased demand have caused frequent OOS occurrences for many food manufacturers. Campbell Soup Company (Campbell’s) wants to better understand customers’ product switching behavior in the occurrence of a particular product going out of stock (OOS). This project studied anonymized data on the daily sales of 100 products from 100 stores across eight states spanning four years.

The data was aggregated into weekly sales at store level for each product and the count of daily out-of-stock occurrences were summed up for the week. Time Series Analyses and Regression were used for modeling.

Results showed that the sales of 96 products were influenced by the stockout of at least one other product either positively or negatively. We have recommended Campbell’s use this model to study the customer behavior pattern further in the context of non-anonymized data when using this model to make business decisions.