Most CPG field reps are still routing their weeks on gut feel, geography, and whoever called them last. That's a liability — especially now that Canada's Grocery Code of Conduct is fully in effect and documented store-level performance is becoming a hard currency in supplier-retailer negotiations.
If you're not using store-level sales data to decide which accounts get your time, you're optimizing your territory for comfort, not results.
Why Store-Level Data Beats Aggregate Reports Every Time
Regional or national sell-through numbers tell you what already happened. Store-level data tells you where to show up tomorrow.
The difference matters because velocity is almost never uniform. One banner might show solid turns for your SKU nationally, but three stores in a specific grocery district are dragging the average down — stockouts, poor placement, a competing product eating your facings. You won't see that in a regional rollup. You will see it the moment you break data down to the door level.
This is especially true in Ontario grocery, where the Grocery Code of Conduct — now fully in force with Loblaw, Walmart, Metro, Empire, and Costco all registered — has made shelf performance documentation central to supplier conversations. Industry analysis has projected that non-compliance or poor performance tracking could cost CPGs up to 7% of annual sales through shelf reallocation and reduced promotional slots. Your field rep's store visit log is no longer just an activity record. It's evidence.
How to Actually Read the Data Before You Build Your Route
The first question to answer before you set your weekly route: which stores are underperforming relative to their velocity potential?
Start by segmenting your store list into three buckets:
At-risk accounts — stores where your product is listed but turns are below category average. These need a rep on-site to diagnose the issue: Is it a shelf placement problem? Out-of-stock? Facing compressed by a competitor? These visits have the highest recovery value.
Gap accounts — stores in your territory where your SKU should be ranged but isn't moving at all, or where you have distribution gaps entirely. These are your growth calls.
Performing accounts — stores where velocity is strong and shelf conditions are stable. These still need maintenance visits, but at a lower cadence than the first two buckets.
This three-tier model sounds simple because it is. The hard part is having clean, current data at the store level to populate it accurately — and updating it frequently enough that you're not routing on last quarter's picture.
Using LCBO Sale of Data for Alcohol Territory Planning
For alcohol brands selling through the LCBO, the Sale of Data (SOD) program is your primary input for store-level velocity. The LCBO recently separated convenience-store shipment data into its own distinct channel within SOD reporting — a meaningful upgrade that gives brands more granular visibility into where product is actually moving versus just where it's listed.
With LCBO FY2025-26 performance assessments beginning June 2025 against published SKU-level revenue targets, this is not an academic exercise. Products missing velocity targets face delisting in a market the LCBO itself describes as highly competitive. If you're managing an LCBO-listed SKU, your SOD data should be informing exactly which stores get rep attention before the next assessment cycle closes.
Pull your SOD data by store, sort by velocity against category benchmark, and flag any account in the bottom quartile. Those are your priority calls — not your best relationships, not the stores closest to the highway.
Turning Data into a Repeatable Routing Process
Data-informed territory planning fails when it's a one-time exercise. The reps who consistently outperform are the ones who've built a weekly rhythm: pull data, triage accounts, set the route, go, capture what you find on-site, repeat.
Capturing what you find is the part that most teams skip. A rep visits an at-risk account, fixes a facing issue, confirms stock — and files nothing. The next rep visits three weeks later and starts from zero. That information loop is where territory performance leaks.
GreenPaths is built to close that loop. Reps can log daily shelf conditions and gap sightings directly from the store floor, and those observations feed back into manager dashboards so the next routing decision is made on current ground truth, not assumptions. Route intelligence in the platform surfaces which accounts haven't been visited recently and flags stores with logged issues still unresolved — so your territory prioritization isn't just data-informed at the start of the week, it compounds over time.
The Competitive Argument for Getting This Right Now
The brands that treat field time as a scarce resource — and protect it accordingly — are the ones that hold shelf in a consolidating retail environment. Canadian grocery is tightening. LCBO performance reviews are real. Cannabis retail is growing but so is SKU competition across 1,780-plus Ontario stores.
The reps who show up with a clear read on which accounts need them most will outlast the reps who show up because the account is on the way.
If you want to see how GreenPaths helps CPG field teams turn store-level data into smarter route decisions and close the feedback loop from visit back to planning, book a demo at greenpaths.ca.