How Franprix implemented PricingHUB in just three months to automate pricing optimization, improve pricing agility, and protect margins across more than 1,000 stores in an inflationary environment.
“With hundreds of stores, thousands of products, and several price ranges, our biggest challenge was to determine which data to integrate into the tool... This was essential work to ensure that we could get the most out of the platform, and PricingHUB provided us with all their expertise to help us achieve this goal.”
Franprix is a major French food retailer with more than 1,000 stores, including approximately 600 franchise locations whose operators have significant freedom to set their own prices. Generating approximately €1.4 billion in annual revenue, the company operates across several pricing zones and manages a large assortment of products across its store network.
Its decentralized operating model creates significant pricing complexity. Differences between store locations, price ranges, franchise models, competitive environments, and the availability of electronic shelf labels mean that Franprix needs to manage pricing decisions at a highly granular level while maintaining consistency across the wider business.
“PricingHUB was implemented in only 3 months. As with any data project, the success of a pricing initiative depends on 4 key factors: reliability, automation, granularity, and actionability. What is crucial to us: getting the data to speak for itself to make the best decisions!”
With hundreds of stores, thousands of products, multiple pricing zones, and franchisees able to set their own prices, managing pricing at Franprix had become increasingly complex. The company’s five-person pricing team was responsible for validating both purchase and selling prices, but the internal tools and manual processes it had traditionally relied upon were beginning to reach their limits.
At the same time, rising inflation made speed and precision even more important. While overall inflation was significant, food inflation could reach more than 15%, resulting in frequent supplier negotiations and constant changes to purchase prices — sometimes applied retroactively. Franprix needed a way to quickly understand how those changes would affect margins and determine how and where selling prices should be adjusted.
Data presented another challenge. Franprix needed to decide which stores, products, pricing ranges, purchase prices, competitive benchmarks, and other variables should feed its pricing model. That required strong data governance as well as close collaboration between the Pricing, IT, and BI teams.
Franprix needed a centralized and reliable pricing platform that could automate these processes, simulate different pricing strategies at both a macro and micro level, and give its team the granularity required to protect margins without sacrificing pricing agility.
“Automating the price optimization process with PricingHUB has given us the ability to maintain control on our margins and remain agile in an inflationary environment. The tool also helps us gain productivity and efficiency.”
Franprix partnered with PricingHUB to build a more automated and data-driven approach to pricing. PricingHUB worked closely with the company’s Pricing, IT, and BI teams to define the appropriate data model, integrate historical and daily data, and establish the rules and scenarios that would underpin pricing decisions.
The platform enables Franprix to optimize prices based on different business objectives and rules across its store network. The team can group selling prices by location, pricing range, and affiliation type; calculate transfer prices; apply customized rounding rules; and define relationships between products to maintain pricing consistency.
PricingHUB also provides a Commercial Impact Simulator at warehouse, store, and company level, allowing the pricing team to compare scenarios and understand their potential business impact before implementing changes. Competitive pricing and purchase-price data can be continuously refreshed, while PricingHUB’s Price Priority Score helps Franprix prioritize which price changes should be implemented first — particularly valuable in stores that still rely on paper rather than electronic price labels.
This combination of centralized data, automation, and simulation gives Franprix the ability to respond more quickly to changing costs and competitive conditions while maintaining control over its broader pricing strategy.
PricingHUB was implemented at Franprix in just three months, giving the pricing team a centralized source of truth for internal and external pricing data.
Since implementation, Franprix has been able to apply increasingly granular pricing strategies across its product portfolio while reducing the burden of processes that had become too complex to manage manually. Teams can monitor KPIs through PricingHUB dashboards, introduce additional product categories according to business priorities, and operate the platform independently as part of their day-to-day pricing practices.
Most importantly, automation has helped Franprix react more quickly to changes in purchase prices, competitive pricing, and consumer price sensitivity. In an environment where food inflation can create significant and frequent cost fluctuations, this gives the business greater agility and control over margins while improving the productivity and efficiency of its pricing team.
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