Why Evergreen Chose Confido Over Everyone Else

The first automated financial operations software built for CPG

Startups and category leading CPG brands are simplifying their workflows and scaling their brick-and-mortar business with Confido.

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ABOUT EVERGREEN

Frozen breakfast at national scale:

You will find Evergreen all throughout the frozen breakfast aisle: mini waffles, thick-and-fluffy waffles, protein waffles, protein pancakes, and thick-and-fluffy pancakes, all of the frozen breakfast favorites under one brand. Today it’s in roughly 8,500 stores, and across that footprint, trade is the single biggest line item in the business. As VP Finance Joe Martin puts it, “That trade line, as it impacts our fully loaded gross margin, is the number one item that you can either mess up or get right.”

THE CHALLENGE

Getting sales and finance on the same plan:

Trade only works when the whole team is pulling in one direction. Getting it right takes more than a budget: it takes sales and finance building, and living by the same plan. As Evergreen scaled and brought on a new go-to-market team, including a head of sales who believed trade planning should happen with finance rather than in a silo, the company wanted a single system where both sides could plan, budget, and execute together.

That is a tall order for any growing brand. Two of Evergreen’s three sales reps came from the distributor and retail-buyer side of the industry, so building brand-side trade plans was new terrain. Evergreen needed a platform that made that work simpler and kept everyone on the same numbers, not one that added complexity or handed the hardest parts off to an outside services team.

WHY CONFIDO

Built for the brand, not the middleman:

Joe knew the category cold, having worked with Vividly and demoed most of the market before landing at Evergreen. What set Confido apart was how it was built. “Confido wasn’t first to the game,” he says. “They took a look at the legacy players, figured out where they got it right and where they got it wrong, and asked: if these companies could start over from scratch, what would they build? Then they put together an all-star team, got the proper funding, and did it right from the start, a really tight package instead of scattered ideas built over time.”

A big part of that, for Joe, was ownership. Legacy tools like Vividly and Promomash lean on their own service teams to do the deduction matching, an arrangement he had lived through before. “That’s a nightmare, because I’ve done that,” he says. “When you own it all yourself, you really understand it and can do the best job.” He weighed newer entrants too, including Modus, but found Confido “a little ahead, more comprehensive in scope, and better positioned for continued improvement.”

An intuitive workflow that keeps the team aligned:

Where it counts day to day is the workflow. Evergreen runs trade promotion management, cash application, and deductions as one connected system, so sales and finance plan on the same numbers, whether someone is building an opportunity or matching a deduction. “The whole workflow is just so much more intuitive and logical than what I saw on other platforms,” Joe says, “all the way from opportunities through deduction matching. It’s built with the brand using it themselves in mind.”

SPINS insight, built right in:

Confido also pulls SPINS syndicated data straight into promotion planning, so the team never has to wrestle with SPINS’ own reporting tools or pay extra for a separate dashboard. “For every promotion you’re planning, you care a lot about what happened last time and the time before, and it’s right there in a clean, easy-to-read graph,” Joe says.

That built-in visibility recently reshaped a live retailer conversation. Heading into a 2027 trade discussion, one of Evergreen’s retailers flagged a buy-one-get-one 50%-off promotion as a poor performer. Joe pulled it up in Confido in seconds and saw the real story: no lift at all, with only ~7% of shoppers buying two units, the same as a normal week, a sign that the event was likely not tagged on the shelf. “Customers didn’t know it was happening, so nobody bought two, and we were paying a ~40-cent scan on every unit anyway,” he says. It was easy to see at a glance, broken out by customer.

“Dedicing to go with Confido was one of the easiest software decisions I’ve ever made, if not number one. It was a slam dunk in every way, and since we implemented it, we’ve never looked back.”

THE RESULTS

Trade on plan, and a lean team with even higher output:

Trade landed on plan: In its first year on Confido, with the team aligned around one plan, Evergreen brought trade to within half a point of budget. “Without Confido, we would have had no chance to get this close,” Joe says.
More output from a leaner team: A two-person finance team now runs trade across 8,500 stores. “We’re more efficient with two people on Confido than we were with three at my last company,” Joe says, a larger business, and he expects to hold that headcount for years while keeping reporting accurate and on time.
Sales and finance, in sync: Reps new to brand-side planning build their trade plans in the same system finance works in, a shift Joe estimates would have been about ten times harder without Confido.
Sharper retailer conversations: Built-in SPINS insight lets Evergreen catch execution misses, like the untagged promotions, and walk into retailer meetings with the data in hand.
Room to grow: Evergreen runs TPM, cash application, and deductions today, with demand and supply planning on the roadmap for the year ahead.

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