Q&A: Ben Lewis, Chief Revenue Officer, Salitix LTD
Salitix are the only dedicated profit recovery auditor serving the grocery supply base. Working exclusively for suppliers – they have been instrumental in creating the conditions where a supplier can submit a claim to a Retailer for a contract error and for it to be repaid without any commercial friction or noise.
Ben is responsible for new business development at Salitix with a long shadow in profit recovery having been involved in Salitix’s set up back in 2011 and previously worked as profit recovery auditor for Tesco.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I worked as a reinsurance broker in the Lloyd’s capital market way back, before starting out in profit recovery in 2007.
What does your company do? What is your USP?
Our USP is easy: frictionless profit recovery – we do this because we are experts in identifying, quantifying, presenting and negotiating errors that occur during the normal course of business between suppliers and retailers who promote their brands to increase sales/volume/visibility in the grocery retailers.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
Getting a retailer to pay money back to a supplier is no longer special – its standard practice thanks to Salitix and GSCOP. But this was not always the case! GSCOP and the principles of fair trading have made a big difference to the types of behaviour that a Retailer will exhibit to any supplier, allowing a service provider like Salitix to develop a service that sees Retailers repay funding investment paid in error.
A perception that a supplier cannot, fairly, challenge their Retail partner does still exist in some quarters, but the reality is that with established audit protocols and ways of working, errors can be identified and recovered where due – a process that mirrors the ‘goods for resale audit’ that Retailers perform to identify errors which they ask their suppliers to pay after the event has long passed.
In this day an age, any margin left of the table is costly and unwelcome – where a service like the one that Salitix provides guarantees that both parties have parity and accuracy (plus insight) into their trading and its real worth, which is invaluable for any business looking to maximize the value of those investments and improve their quality over time.
What advantage does it add?
It maximises profit and enhances insight
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
We measure success in pounds and pence recovered; in systemic issues identified and rectified – and it looks like something that our customers hardly see or notice, because we work quietly and independently of the commercial channels and outside of the existing trading period. We mean our USP!
How are retailers using data to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like?
Retailers have a data advantage because it’s their systems that control the sales data and this is then commercialised and sold back to suppliers for the purpose of gaining insight into prospective trading. Historic data is captured by default by the retailers and stored and then used to reconcile, whereas many suppliers do not have robust methodologies for capturing and storing historic trading information/data. How many suppliers have an email data retention policy that would make it easy to see every email a NAM who left the business 3 years ago had sent?
This creates a genuine asymmetry between the businesses, where a Retailer can reconcile its trading with great accuracy, whereas the supplier cannot. Understanding this and its cost, is a first step to valuing sales data, emails and promotional activity as a valuable resource that should be properly accounted for in the hustle and bustle of day to day trading. Whereas the focus tends to be on the here and now, and what next – with little thought given to what happens to old trading deals once everyone has moved on… it can be a very costly oversight.
Are there other companies you partner with?
No, albeit we do have relationships with some GSCOP trainers like Retail Mind and we like SKUTrak and use their data sets sometimes where available – but its not a partnership.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2026?
Inflation, uncertainty, supply chain fragility, technology as disruptor, but poorly understood or utilised with unintended consequences everywhere… for suppliers to take their profit seriously, understand all their leverage points and be relentless and professional in how they challenge and interrogate their trading which should include hiring an expert profit recovery auditor to reconcile historic trading opportunity – a rare, genuine new opportunity for most!
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
By being visible and making sure the market understand our service and its value…
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
Greater optimisation of technology to enable to become even more efficient at capturing, storing and processing data; potential expansion into overseas markets; more recoveries for more suppliers everywhere!
Any final thoughts?
Hire Salitix if you care about profitability and accuracy.
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To find out how Salitix LTD can help your retail operation, visit them online here or connect with Ben here.
