How Idahoan Foods Turned Trade Into a Strategic Lever by Consolidating onto Confido

About

Idahoan Foods is one of the largest and most established names in the potato category: real potatoes, cleaned, washed, mashed and Fresh Dried™. A major, privately held CPG spanning retail and food service, Idahoan sells across a broad base of national and regional accounts, including Walmart, Kroger, Ahold Delhaize, Albertsons/Safeway, C&S, Dollar General, H-E-B, Meijer, Aldi, and Publix.

After a decade of strong, distribution-led growth, the company brought in new retail sales leadership charged with building the next three-to-five-year strategy and putting real rigor behind how the business is run. Trade spend, one of the largest levers available to any CPG, was near the top of that list. For an established company of Idahoan’s scale, acting on it meant a deliberate move onto modern infrastructure: standardizing cash application, deductions, trade, and forecasting on a single system.

Challenge

A major growth lever no one could actually measure

Trade was one of Idahoan’s biggest expenses, yet also one of the hardest to measure. Historically, much of that spend followed customer requests, without an easy way to see what each dollar returned. As SVP of Retail Sales Jon Murray put it, “within our existing systems, no one had a clear understanding if our trade dollars were efficient or effective.” The discipline he needed to instill was simple: for every dollar of trade spent, there must be a positive ROI or strategic reason to do so, otherwise it should be redeployed elsewhere. 

The systems underneath weren't built to answer those questions. Idahoan's legacy trade management system was operational, but included a patchwork of custom reports and one-off workarounds. There was no TPO component - what was being done, selectively, was manual and excel based. Cash application and deductions ran in one system, reporting lived in a spreadsheet, and the ERP stood alone. None of these systems talked to each other, and the workflows around them were manual. Every new retailer and trade promotion added more manual work than visibility.

Idahoan was not shopping for new software out of desperation - the old system had worked for many years prior to his arrival. What Murray actually wanted was two things at once: (1) one system to run trade as a strategic lever, and (2) a partner with real systems expertise to help the team scale. 

Solution

One connected system, with trade run like the growth driver it is

Confido replaced the patchwork with a single platform spanning cash application, deductions, trade promotion management, and sales forecasting, integrated directly with Idahoan’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations ERP. By streamlining daily cash application, deductions, and TPM work while centralizing trade planning and sales forecasting in one tool, Confido finally made trade measurable.

• Cash application and deductions on autopilot: Confido pulls the backup for every payment from Idahoan’s retailer and distributor portals and centralized email inboxes, validates each deduction against the trade plan behind it, and posts to Dynamics 365 in one click. What used to mean logging into portals, hand-coding backup, and passing it between accounting, trade, and brokers is now one consolidated queue with approval routing built in.
• Trade as a strategic lever: Every promotion, allowance, and spend program lives in one trade calendar, so Idahoan can finally see promotion performance the way an operator needs to: lift, ROI, on-shelf compliance, and cost per incremental case. Because it is genuinely usable for sales (promotions in plain language, contracts dropped in, events duplicated in a click), the team keeps it current, which is what makes the numbers trustworthy.
• Trade and forecasting, centralized: Trade planning and a consumption-driven sales forecast sit in the same system as the spend behind them. Idahoan uses Confido to inform sales forecasting intelligence, with POS and shipments together, promo lift layered in, and flags that point to the few accounts worth a second look.
• Knowledge in the system, not siloed: The custom reports and workarounds that lived as institutional knowledge within teams now lives as logic in a platform, driving scalability and giving the next team a system they can actually learn.

“The biggest benefit wasn't simply replacing software. It was creating a single source of truth that gave us confidence in our trade decisions, improved visibility across the business, and enabled our team to spend more time driving growth instead of managing spreadsheets."

– Jon Murray, SVP Retail Sales, Idahoan Foods

Results

Faster operations and measurable trade

• Cash application and deductions dramatically faster: The manual portal logins, hand-coding, and broker back-and-forth are replaced by a one-click flow to Dynamics 365, freeing the accounting and trade teams to spend their time on the business instead of clearing a queue, with a cleaner month-end close as accruals and postings stop piling up. With Confido, Idahoan has processed over 750+ customer payments. 
• Trade run as a lever: Idahoan can now see promotion ROI, compliance, and cost per incremental case in one place, and reallocate spend toward what actually drives volume, turning its second-largest lever into a measurable source of growth.   
• One tool instead of four: Cash application, deductions, trade, and forecasting now run in a single platform integrated with the ERP, replacing the band-aids-and-duct-tape stack and the disconnected point tools around it.
• The same team, aimed at growth: Idahoan is scaling the sophistication of its trade and finance operations without scaling headcount, turning hours saved into capacity the team can put toward strategy and toward winning new distribution across its retail and food service footprint.